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.
Written by: Darren Ferguson
I also only work with Umbraco about 5% of my time, and would love to increase it.
And I think a way of creating commercial packages on top of Umbraco is definately the way to go to increase its popularity. So much more can be done, if developers have some way of earning a living developing "shit" (to use Tor's term).
I'm looking forward to see what stuff you guys come up with in terms of a common store/repository.
27 June 2009 at 12:44