After I wrote the newbie's guide to Umbraco, its been kind of
hard to come up with anything as half decent as that - In fact
looking at my last posts, its been hard to come up with anything
decent full stop lol! As still the Umbraco community is
thriving with literally 100's of excellent blogs on more advanced
topics, I thought I would take a step back into the newbie world
and create a post that I 'hope' will help more people jump into
Umbraco as their first choice CMS and ASP.NET.
**DISCLAIMER**: I'd just like to say that I did
each video in one take, no script, completely adlib… So please
forgive some of the shite waffle I come out with and how many times
I say Urrrrrm ;)
About Umbraco
Luckily instead of me waffling on about how great Umbraco is,
the guys at HQ have come up with some new videos to go along side
the new branding which will explain pretty much everything you need
to know about Umbraco.
Or you can also check out my Newbie's
Guide To Umbraco [more]
Installing Umbraco
Two ways for installing Umbraco, there is the easy way using the
web platform installer
or the other easy way, is to follow this excellent video
provided by Sebastiaan
below
Remember for this tutorial DON'T install CWS OR RUNWAY
at the end… We are going to build a simple brochure site
from scratch.
So Where Do I Start?
So by now you should definitely have a blank install of Umbraco
installed and ready to go - And if you browse to the home page you
will get this screen.
But what do you do now? In this video I show you how I
would start a blank build. In the video I have already
created a simple standard HTML front page template and style sheet,
so get your template ready before you watch this video. Before we
jump into the build part I thought I would quickly run over some of
the folders and files that make up the Umbraco install, and give
you some tips to increase your build time
Our sitemap for the brochure site we are going to build will
be
- Home
- About Us
- Products
- Contact Us (Using Contour)
Getting In The HTML Template & CSS
DocTypes / Building Pages / Displaying Data
We have our style sheet ready, HTML in and we have setup our
Master MasterPage ready to build the site out - See how easy it is
so far. Now in this video we are going to concentrate on
building the pages in the admin section, we are going to add the
textboxes and elements to the pages we need for the user to add
their content - And also create the structure of the site.
*HOLD YOUR BREATH THIS IS A LONG VIDEO - It was supposed to
be two videos, but I screwed up*
When the backend is done enough we start pulling the contact
out, and displaying it to the users in nothing but pure
un-adulterated HTML. To do this we are going to use XSLT…
WAIT... STOP… Don't stop reading just because I said that
dirty XSLT word, trust me… If there is anyone who hated it more
than anything to begin with it was me! But now, I have to
admit I am starting to like the verbose language and for simple
sites like this its an absolute breeze to use.
Specific DocTypes / Listing Products
If you have managed to watch the video above and not fallen
asleep, you will know we have created a VERY simple content managed
site already - Now we are going to use a different DocType to
display the products
Creating A Contact Form Using Contour
Almost lastly we are going to create a simple contact form, and
run through some of the options available in Contour - Contour is
Umbraco's amazing form building package which you can
purchase separately from this page. Its stupidly simple to use,
and requires no coding knowledge to create simple to pretty complex
multi-step forms!
Packages
I wanted to run through all the great packages on Umbraco that
you can install and use, but I ran out of time, patience, voice and
willing :) But its that simple, once you have a site up and
running like above, I'm pretty certain you will be able to go
to:
Download the packaged, then go to Developer > Packages >
Install Local Package … Voila…
Again I really hope this tutorial really does help someone new
looking to create their first site in Umbraco, but doesn't where to
start.