For those of you not on twitter or our.umbraco.org - here's a Chrome Extension for Umbraco Developers. This extension will let you switch between different debug modes and the Umbraco UI. It also sports two search boxes for directly searching the Umbraco custom Google search and our.umbraco.org.

If you have ideas for improvements, please let me know! 

Just a small update with some minor bugfixes:

• New datatypes defaults to the last one created and because of a bug in the initialization process of this component you couldn’t change rendertype. This has now been fixed. Thanks to Bob Baty-Barr for extensive testing and useful feedback.
• Refactoring

I’ve also implemented functionality to generate crops for all content nodes using any given datatype with this rendercontrol. However, I’ve disabled this until It’s been tested a bit more ;-)

Things I’d like to implement in the next version:

• Add support for the Box Sizing feature in jCrop for easier handling of larger images. (Thanks to Thomas Höhler for tips).
• Add some visual candy config options such as animation, change outer-image, etc.
• Allow Media Picker as source (Thanks Daniel L)
• Enable the generate-crops-for-all-content-using-this-datatype ;-)

I’d also like to thank Douglas Robar for giving me a pro license so I can play with the Image Cropper together with ImageGen, the excellent and de-facto component in every Umbraco developers toolbox. Blog post coming up!

This datatype will be part of Umbraco v4.1.

Download Image Cropper v0.95 for Umbraco

I’ve just updated the Image Cropper datatype with some adjustments, bugfixes and new features:

• Ability to configure what quality you want the crops in
• Default positioning of crops (Left/Center/Right and Top/Middle/Bottom)
• Fixed an interpolation issue when resizing that would produce a soft border around the crop
• Fixed an issue when saving/publishing after a postback

I’ve changed the location where crops are stored from an underlying /crops folder to the original image location as well as changed the name of the generated crops to /media/(propertyid)/filename_(cropname).jpg. I did this because it will let you override the default image thumbnail in the Media section by naming at least one of the crop presets ‘thumb’.

PS! Insert image dialog in RTE will still show a rectangular vertically centered view of the thumb, so you are warned ;-). I’ll add a configuration option for this in the next version.

Thanks to all for your feedback on the first release. Lots of great ideas that I’ll try to implement at some point such as max viewsize (Thanks Thomas) and more.

Download Image Cropper v0.9 for Umbraco

Here’s a new datatype for Umbraco that lets you crop images. Available crops are configured in the datatype prevalue editor. The datatype can be used on both Media and Content nodes and stores data in plain XML format. You can also configure it to create physical crops for you. The cropping UI is based on jCrop from Deep Liquid. I’ve recorded a short screencast that shows the datatype in action.

<\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" alt="">

Example of stored XML:

 
 

XSLT to render a generated image:

Please let me know what you think and if you got ideas for additional features or tweaks.

Download Image Cropper Package

Umbraco v4 is on track and here are some dates from twitter.com/umbraco:

• RC2: Jan 16th
• RC3: Jan 23rd
• Release: 30th

I highly recommend subscribing to the Umbraco RSS feed at Codeplex to get an insight of what gets implemented / fixed:

• All Project Updates (recommended)
• Issue Tracker
• Releases
• Source Control
• Wiki

The core team usually add a comment describing the work that is checked in. As an example, here are some updates made yesterday:

• 45581: New section icons, UI tweaks, translations, sort dialog bug fixes. Reverts the "page shouldn't save if validation fails" feature..
  
  
  Here’s a screenshot of the new icons =)
• 45549: Improves en.xml ui translation, improved sorting, content picker overflow,fixed: regex form, fixed: tree padding/margins, fixed: content editor validators doesn't stop it from saving. Deletes old V2 ui graphic files.
  
  
  Click name to sort all nodes.
• 44976: Fixes 20223, Adds full Safari support for tinymce

Now, go subscribe and get involved by testing and report issues you encounter!

I was just part of a marketing action by Twitter that I find rather cool. Here’s the story:

1. Someone I follow asks for help picking the best Mind Map software (Wikipedia: mind map).
2. I recommend MindManager from MindJet based on own experience.
3. MindJet picks up my tweet and adds me to their Twitter network (follow) and express gratitude for the nice words about their product.

For some reason they have tweaked the CSS to hide network counters and direct message links. Not 100% sure why, ideas?