The Promise of Umbraco

Monday, July 27, 2009

Last year I began hearing about Umbraco, the content management system built on ASP.Net. And as this year has progressed, I've become more familiar with it in terms of its functionality and capabilities. I must say, this CMS holds a lot of promise for my firm for its Web development projects.

Amplus has always tried to give clients as much control over their software as possible. And where Web systems are concerned, the need for clients to be able to update content without involving the developer is even more pronounced.

This is where a content management system comes in.

The optimal project model I see for a CMS implementation goes something like this: we create the site structure based on the client's requirements and the client can add, modify, or delete the content as needed. They only call us back in when the site structure needs adjustment.

Umbraco offers a lot of flexibility in the way one can approach a Web system. Plus, being based on .Net lets developers leverage logic and controls they've already created. In addition, Umbraco doesn't limit what may be done from a layout and design standpoint. To the contrary, by keeping a strict separation of content, markup, and styling, we're able to be more creative without impacting the structure.
Finally, it's open source with no license fees. Some proprietary CMSs are very expensive and lack the active development community that Umbraco has that keeps innovations coming.