Blog

On Codegarden '10 I entered the package competition on a whim, after installing the shiny new Umbraco 4.5 on my laptop there. I was inspired to try and see if the package that I had not completely completed would work on 4.5 and when it did, I just added my name to the list. I ended up winning the third prize with it (a brand new Xbox 360 Elite)!

I've since polished the code a little bit and it is now available to download from the projects section at our.umbraco.org.

Of course I expect to get as many votes on Our Umbraco as during the package contest (you rock)!

The PhotoMetaData package will extract meta data from images that you upload in your media section. This works in both Umbraco 4.0.x and 4.5.

When you create a property with the correct name it will be filled as soon as you upload an image in the media section.

Here a video with a quick overview of the package.

Photo by the wonderful Douglas Robar

Recently, I've been working on a site that presents 30 to a 120 items from Umbraco's media section in the frontend of the website.

In the past few weeks, I've been tweaking the site for performance and noticed that there were an aweful lot of SQL queries being performed in the database. As it turns out, calls to the umbraco.library:GetMedia() method are being sent directly to the database. This meant that for each media item, three queries are being performed. Times a 120... That starts to hurt a little.

Also, it is impossible for us to turn on caching on this macro completely because updating the media item with a new image would not expire the cache.

I had to come up with something else that would cache calls to the media library. So today, I'm presenting you the Cultiv MediaCache package.
This package provides an XSLT extension that provides a caching mechanism for calls to the "GetMedia" method.

It's very easy to use:
In your XSLT files, instead of doing calls to umbraco.library:GetMedia(), you do them to Cultiv.MediaCache:GetMedia().
That's it! Told you it was easy.

Read all about it on the project page, download it, use it, vote it up. Okay, thanks! :-)

Tiny update dec 20, 2009 - 17:28: Now compatible with .net 2.0 installs of Umbraco (previously only worked on .net 3.5).

I've just released a simple Umbraco package that will create a sitemap XML for submitting to Google and other search engines.

The resulting XML is 100% compatible with the sitemap.org specifications (which should be supported by all the major search engines).

Of course this generator will take into account the umbNaviHide property. Also, if there is no template attached to a content item, then the resulting output would be a blank page. So these pages are not included in the sitemap either.
I ran into this problem because Tim's excellent blog package that I'm using generates some date folders that should not be in the sitemap.

I would've liked to do everything in the XSLT, but the <urlset> node absolutely had to be on the second line of the resulting XML before Google would accept it. So I had to put that part in the template.

Have fun with it and don't forget to use the thumbs up if you like it, thanks!

While building a website last week, I was looking for a way to make a simple contact form. Unfortunately, there was nothing available on our.umbraco.org. So I made my own package and it is now available for download. I've also added a tip to the forum to show how you can relay mail through Gmail if you don't have (or want) a mail server on your hosting machine.

Here's a few screenshots to show that it is highly configurable:

Of course you can just enter some content and add the bodyText field to your template to make it show up on the contact page. Here you can see I added a "Thank you" page. After the website visitor submits the form, they will be redirected here. You can configure any other page that you want.

Here again a reference to the thank you page. The form is completely empty by default so it might be a good idea to fill in the label names here.

The error messages are also empty by default, add whatever text you need here.

And finally you can set up some properties for the mail that will be sent.

Every time you start a new Umbraco project, there is one thing that you will do first: Set-up a home page.
As this takes a few minutes, I've created a simple package that will help you out by installing the home page.

CleanHome will give you a ContentPage document type linked to a master page that sets you up with an XHTML 1.0 strict document type.

The document type includes these new fields:

• body (richtext editor)
• meta keywords
• meta description
• alternate title (to use in <title> tag for example)
• alternate navigation title
• hide in navigation checkbox (alias: umbracoNaviHide, to use with default XSLT templates)

There's also a stylesheet reference and a favicon reference in the master page.

The stylesheet contains Eric Meyer's reset-styles to start you off with the cleanest possible page.

Your new "home page" validates as XHTML strict and the CSS file is also completely valid.

Warning: This will create a document type and Master/Childpage with the name "ContentPage", a content item named "Home" and a CSS files called styles.css. If any of these already exist in your site, you WILL get errors.

This package is specifically meant for new, empty websites. You can view it as a bare-bones version of the Runway package.

Download CleanHome here.