Darren Ferguson - Blog
27 June 2009 at 12:29
A brief summary of Umbraco codegarden 2009
I'm back from Umbraco codegarden 2009 in Copenhagen with the obligatory sunburn. I'm a lot lighter in the wallet but enriched and nourished in terms of ideas and inspiration for web CMS.
As the title says, this is a brief summary. I just sat down and wrote up all of my mental notes from the conference and I realise that I have more to do than I honestly have time for. I've prioritised everything so that the commitments I made in open space sessions are top of the list.
Unfortunately for me Umbraco makes less than 5% of my professional commitments so time is very precious but I've left codegarden this year vowing to increase that 5% because I've realised that I want to work with Umbraco a lot more.
One of the ways to achieve this increase in Umbraco time is commercial packages. I attended an open space session on integrating the three current package repositories - store, our.umbraco and the original package repository - and out of this the minutes show that I have a few actions. First I aim to document some best practices for creating commercial packages and secondly I'll release my framework application that allows you to quickly write some license providers that work with the Umbraco store by implementing some .net interfaces.
Some may argue that by promoting commercial packages I'm not really entering the spirit of the whole Umbraco and open source movement but my answer is simple. If I had an employer subsidising my Umbraco development then everything that I created would be free. Unfortunately that is just not the case. I'll still continue to release free Umbraco packages alongside my commercial offerings.
Continuing my focus on working more with Umbraco I attended open space sessions on Umbraco support and Team development and at other sessions I got the answers from the core team that I needed in order to try and present Umbraco as a viable option for my larger financial services clients.
I've made a commitment to work more with Umbraco this year. I've set myself certain personal goals that I will asses on a regular basis to see if what I am trying to achieve is working.
So that was my personal codegarden experience. Some other highlights for me were:
- Launch of our.umbraco.org proving that Umbraco love their community
- Putting faces to the names of all of those people (let's do a UK meet soon).
- Discovering that I love open space. It isn't just for conference organisers who can't be bothered!
- Great organic lunches and a fantastic venue that encouraged creativity.
A couple of other points from the keynote that I can't really leave out:
- Umbraco 4.1 will be a native .net 3.5 application, with a few interesting new features.
- Umbraco 5 will be a rewrite using asp.net MVC and not backwards compatible with previous releases.
- Umbraco 4.1 will be stable and supported post release of Umbraco 5.
So that was it codegarden. Thanks guys. See you all again next year I hope.
I'm going to get on to my to do list now. Watch this space.
21 June 2009 at 22:58
Extracting document metadata in Umbraco
The screencast below shows some work I've been doing in automatically extracting metadata from documents when they are uploaded to the Umbraco media section.
HINT: You can make the screencast full screen.
17 June 2009 at 07:14
Things to do in Copenhagen when not attending Codegarden 09
As I'm bringing the family to Codegarden '09 I lazily "crowd sourced" some things for them to do while I am busy geeking it up.
The suggestions that Tommy and Hanako came up with look great so I thought I'd repost them here in case anyone else is spending a couple of extra days in Copenhagen.
First up some suggestions from Tommy:
Guide sites:
http://www.visitcopenhagen.com/tourist (main tourist site when visiting Cph)
http://www.aok.dk/ (unfortunately mostly in Danish - but a main site for testing restaurant, café's etc. The have all sorts of rankings like best value-for-money, best brunch, best gourmet etc. - look in this page for an overview on danish). "AOK anbefaler" means "Recommended by AOK"
Tourist sites:
Canal Tours (nice boat trips in the Copenhagen canals)
Strøget (shopping street, pedestrians only)
Tivoli Gardens (nice and quite old amusement park, also nice at night)
Nyhavn (old houses, restaurants, pubs, old harbor)
Amalienborg (Royal palace)
A lot of the public museums are free, as far as I remember.
Travel Info:
Copenhagen is not really big, so walking around is easy.
Busses/ferry-busses, S-trains and metro is also convenient within
Copenhagen - the same tickets goes for all public transportation.
Consider buying a 10-ticket card or special tourist tickets if you
plan do travel a lot.
Rejseplanen
(travelling I Denmark, including S-train, trains, busses, metro
etc.)
Shopping:
Strøget (great shopping streets, pedestrians only, shopping. Check out the neightboring streets also)
Fields (indoor mall)
Fisketorvet (indoor mall)
Dining:
Generally there is a lot of restaurants around Strøget, Kgs.
Nytorv, St.Kongensgade, Bredgade, Nyhavn.Here's a few
(top-restaurants not included, but I can give a few advices here
also if you are interested). I'm working close to Kgs. Nytorv, so
that's mainly where I use restaurants:
L'Altro (great Italian restaurant, loads of small dishes, a bit
corny interior but great food, reasonable prices)
Oubæk (close to Kgs. Nytorv, great French food, mid-price)
Le Sommelier (well known cph restaurant and wine bar - mid/upper prices)
Zeleste (at Kgs.Nytorv, nice lunch, reasonable prices, small carte)
Wok Shop (at Kgs. Nytorv, great thai food, nice prices)
Perchs Tea Room (tea house)
Nørrebro Bryghus (nice homebrewed beer, food, mid-price)
Next, some suggestions from Hanako:
Some antique shops:
http://www.trianglenantik.dk/index.php?page=1
They have lots of 50s-70s interior and kitchen stuff.
They have very cute toys, cups, furniture etc for kids as well
as stuff for grown ups.
Kids boutique:
http://www.cremedelacremealaedgar.dk/index.php This shop is very famous and popular. The owner buys old textiles from France mainly and remake clothes and accessories with new materials and design. very cute.
Cafes and restaurants:
Riccos is very popular among local people and they do very good
coffee.
http://copenhagen.unlike.net/locations/303344-Ricco-s
Your wife might really like this place: http://www.tea-time.dk/
Very popular restaurant in Vesterbro. http://89.221.175.146/cofoco.php
Their Italian restaurant brunch called Vespa seems also good.
Cafe Hovedtelegrafen . I don't have website link for this cafe. This is at the top of the Post museum? The open sandwiches are very reasonable and you can also enjoy good view.
http://www.madklubben.info/
I found this also in official tourism website.
They say "At Madklubben a three course menu is offered at DKK 200. In July 2008 the people behind the popular restaurant Madklubben opened their second restaurant and named it quite naturally, Den Anden (The Second One). A modern rendition of a Parisian bistro deluxe. "
Restaurant Olsen. One of the most famous restaurants in Copenhagen
apparently.
Ved Stranden 18, 1061 Kobenhavn K
better to book a table at least a day before
tel: 3314-6400
Lunch is from 115dk
3 course dinner is from 295dk
15 June 2009 at 19:33
Latest Umbraco version added to my Umbraco trials
I've added Umbraco 4.0.2.1 to my Umbraco trials site. There are 2 distributions, a clean install and one with the latest version of Warren Buckley's CWS website starter package. In the next day or two I'll add a pimped distribution containing all packages from the Umbraco package repository. You can of course Install the packages into the clean distribution should you wish.
For those of you who haven't used my Umbraco trials site, it allows you to create a hosted installation of Umbraco in a single click. There are no limitations on the install, you have full admin access and can install packages as you wish. The trials expire after a short period and are useful for showing someone Umbraco for the first time or evaluating a package that you don't wish to install into your production environment without testing.
The Umbraco trials site has been relatively successful to date serving up more than 300 trials to more than 200 users.
Now, back to trying to prepare some stuff for codegarden. See you all next week.