OUR BLOG

Over recent weeks we’ve heard a familiar story; several new clients issuing a cry for help with their Umbraco site. “We worked with an agency who seemed great at first, but it turns out they didn’t really know Umbraco. Now our site is broken / dangerously unstable / inaccessible (delete as applicable) and we need help so that we can make changes to our site without everything breaking”. Unfortunately we’ve heard this story before - many times, in fact. It’s the single biggest reason why we don’t try to be experts in WordPress or Drupal or Sitecore or Episerver. You…

I’m a keen listener to BBC Radio 4 - it puts me squarely into a pipe and slippers stereotype that doesn’t sit comfortably, but there it is. On this morning’s today program much was talked about the recent political upheaval, and hidden among all the doom and gloom of negotiating Brexit with a minority government was a panel discussion about what led young people out to vote. One of the hidden gems of positive news in the recent general election, are the reports that 72% of young people turned out to vote. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise - the…

Single Sign On (SSO) - where one set of credentials is shared across multiple applications - makes systems safer and easier to manage, and is often mandated in larger enterprise level IT departments. The SSO prototocol of choice in large corporate’s is the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and at Carbon Six Digital we’ve undertaken a number of projects that involved integrating SAML into Umbraco, which is our Content Management System of choice. In each case, our goal has been to provide a seamless integration for a core directory of users into Umbraco, while aiming to maintain the existing Umbraco…

If you’re tired of waiting for your dream Umbraco job, then Carbon Six Digital has the perfect solution - design your own. We’re a growing digital agency with big ambitions – and we’re looking for someone brimming with technical expertise to join us in a leadership role and help carry us forward. While most of the time will be spent on fee-earning .Net development, with a strong focus on Umbraco, we’re open to what else the role entails. We have a lot of spinning plates, and we’re looking for someone with passion to tell us what else they would like…

Those following events at Carbon Six Towers will know that last month we rebranded from Orcare to Carbon Six Digital. But I’ve been asked a few times – why Carbon Six? The name change has been an aspiration of mine for some time. I was unhappy with Orcare - we’d had the name since I dreamt it up circa 1999 when I was developing software and websites for care homes. But we’ve moved a long way since then. Now we are a specialist Umbraco development agency, building awesome .NET based websites for other agencies. We’re Umbraco Gold Partners, it is…

Orcare has changed a lot since it was founded. We’ve increased our skill base and the size and nature of the projects we undertake. We started off working for SME’s and still do, but much of our work is now for major agencies and multinational corporations. We’ve evolved into something different. So, to reflect this change, we are going to say goodbye to Orcare. Say hello to Carbon 6 We are changing our name to reflect the change in our business. We could give you some great rationalisation for why we have chosen to rename ourselves Carbon Six Digital but,…

The News Curator Plugin for Umbraco is a new plugin we've developed to enable Site Editors to curate news articles from across social media and news websites and convert these sources into Umbraco content.   …

Umbraco's Public Access feature enables developers with very little experience to build a membership site, with pages protected with usernames and passwords.  If you're logged in and have permissions you see the content, if you're not logged in you're challenged for login creds, and if you're logged in but don't have permission you see an error message. However, there are use cases where a site needs to show more fine grained options for password protected content.  In the learning portal we developed for Download Learning, a training module should show the video if you're logged in and have permission, if…

So with CodeGarden 2015 over and everyone beginning to get CodeGarden blues I thought I’d take a look back at the infamous Umbraco developer festival. As always the conference was jam-packed full of inspiring talks, great ideas and an awesome community. As well as the keynote with Niels I saw presentations by, among others, James South and Shannon Deminick. WebAPI 2 The announcement that Web API 2 will be incorporated into Umbraco at the keynote provoked excitement around the conference hall where the core team explained how the REST API for Content, Media, Members, and Relations using HAL format for…

There are lots of options for setting up and running the database behind Umbraco, and in this post we’ll look at some of the technologies Umbraco supports and the design constraints you should consider. Umbraco is a Microsoft stack CMS so it stands to reason that its database of choice is SQL Server.  It is possible to run Umbraco 7 on MySQL, but at Orcare we’ve never done this, and to be honest I’m a little skeptical – I never like running tiny minority configurations, bugs are more likely and often harder to resolve. You can run Umbraco on any…