Umbraco meetup in Oslo

Introduction
On Friday, 29. august Xeed arranged the first Umbraco meetup in Norway. Inspired by the recent meetups in Belgium and the UK, we wanted to achieve something similar in Norway. Our goal was to gather Umbraco interested and start a national network for the exchange of experiences and more.

We had participants from both Trondheim, Bergen, Hamar and Kristiansand. They were:

• Nicolas Van Etten
• Siw Ørnhaug Nylund
• Terje Dahl
• Ståle Engen
• Christian Melbye
• Fredrik Kvivesen
• Jørgen Tonvang
• Fredrik Skarderud
• Kenneth Solberg
• Andre Brynhildsen
• Frederik Vig

We started out by having each participant answer four questions: Who are you? What are you doing? Why Umbraco? Goals for the evening? The participants were roughly divided 50/50 between the relatively new and the experienced so the goals for the evening were many.

Presentation
The first hour we highlighted the core concepts of Umbraco as well as the advantages of the different user roles. Download presentation.

Demos
v3 was used to demonstrate basic concept. In the other half we demonstrated v4 and covered Database Provider, Membership Provider, Master Pages, Umbraco and Visual Studio, Package Repository with Boosts and Nitro, and more. The use of Windows Live Writer was also demonstrated. At the end Umbraco based sites were presented.

Discussions and QA
  The participants were encouraged to ask questions along the way:

• How multilingual sites are handle in Umbraco. It's common practise to use separate structures and map host headers to root nodes and link to a language so that the culture settings follow each site. There are other ways as well, but this is what we recommend. Translator role was also discussed and explained with reference to the umbraco.tv service coming 15th September with among other things, a video that explains the translation process in detail.
• Umbraco does not use Windows Workflow Foundation. It has a pragmatic implementation of admin, editor and translator roles. Backend workflow where Umbraco acts as a participant in a workflow can be implemented in many ways, but we recommend looking into Base and ActionHandlers.
• Umbraco has no GUI for a scheduler services such as in EpiServer. However, you can configure scheduled tasks in UmbracoSettings.Config.
• Cross publishing is possible in Umbraco. We recommend taking a closer look at Christian Palms MultiplePagePicker and Tim Geyssens Ultimate Picker.
• Experiences with several editors. Not much experience with several simultaneous editors, but is expected to work like charm :-) Training of editors was really easy compared to other systems due to Umbraco's very simple user interface and the ability to set a starting content/media node, and removing access to sections.
• There is no whitepaper on Umbraco and security. But a good selling point is that anyone can look into Umbraco source code as it is Open Source. A good infrastructure and routines for security patch installation is also really important.

We also discussed the benefits of establishing a national network of Umbraco expertise:

• Give confidence to potential customers by referencing national players using Umbraco.
• Exchange knowledge and experience.
• Recruitment to the Umbraco community.

Tips and Tricks
We ended the session with Umbraco tips and tricks:

• Tabs pr. section
• Empty tags in XSLT, best practice
• Debugging bookmarklet
• HTTP compression
• umbracoNaviHide gives 404
• Firebug og Yslow extensions i FF
• mm.

Summary
First and foremost, it was very fun to say hello to the other Umbraco interested in Norway and I hope we can arrange more sessions in the future. Niels also made a video from Belgium where he along with Tim and Ruben worked with Live Edit feature. The video wasn't available during the meetup, but it is. So for those of you who participated (and others if curious), you can see the video by clicking the link below.