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How often do you log into an Umbraco site and see the speech bubble telling you a new version of Umbraco?  In this article we’ll look at what’s involved in an upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco and what are business benefits? The effort involved in upgrading Umbraco often depends on a number of factors – the size and complexity of your site as well as which version of Umbraco you’re going from and to.  The biggest factor that affects the cost of an upgrade is the differences between two versions.   If your site is currently on Umbraco 4.7…

You’ve looking to buy a website built using Umbraco, but your existing site is built on a different platform.  How do you safely and effectively migrate to Umbraco?  In this post we’ll look at some of the issues you will face.  Potential Issues when Migrating from One CMS to Another  For many legacy websites migrating to Umbraco, the biggest issue is with their existing content.  Any successful website which has a reasonable Google ranking will likely have lots of quality content which you’ll want to move this across to Umbraco.  As with all things Umbraco there is rarely a single…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Performance is so important for the success of your site, and with Umbraco you have a number of levers to pull to optimise the performance of your site. Over the last 2 weeks we’ve written about how to squeeze better performance out of your Umbraco site, covering in Part 1 image and css/javascript optimisation and in Part 2 caching and database tracing and tuning. In this final part we look at stress testing tools and tuning infrastructure performance. Use a…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Last week we started a series of posts about performance tuning Umbraco sites, where we discussed Image Optimisation, Client Dependency Framework, Mini-Profiler and implementing caching.  In this article we’ll look at the relative performance of @Html.RenderTemplate and @Html.Partial, and also look at database profiling and tuning. Consider using @Html.Partial() rather than @Html.RenderTemplate In a previous Umbraco project we had a scenario where we had a shop page and needed to iterate over a collection of products, data of which were…

This article is part of a series on Performance Tuning Umbraco -- Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Site performance is always a critical factor when building a new web project. Site speed has, for a long time, been a critical ranking factor for Google. So how do you go about tuning performance of an Umbraco site? In this series of blog posts we look at different ways of optimising Umbraco site performance. Image optimisation Many sites fail to effectively use images.  Fat bloaty images that are resized on the fly by the browser or which haven’t been…

We’ve been working on a project over the last few months migrating a website from an older version of Umbraco up to the latest Umbraco 7.  Our work with PostgreSQL has been in two areas: firstly creating a customer Management Information System which provides real time reports of sales from the company’s PostgreSQL ERP database; and secondly integrating Umbraco Membership with data from the Customer Accounts data in PostgreSQL. This has been somewhat of a challenge as the tooling on .NET for PostgresSQL isn’t great.  Throughout the rest of the project we’ve been working on home turf using Entity Framework…

When was the last time you tested every single form on your site to see if it works from a users perspective. Tonight when I was filling in a form on the Eurotunnel site it seems to me that even a big travel firm such as these guys haven’t spared the time to actually used their form. They’re using a really common form control - the JQuery UI date picker for a date of birth field.  On the face of it, that seems like a perfectly reasonable plan - date pickers can make certain that users don’t enter invalid date…

A couple of weeks ago we pushed live a new site for our customers Acadustri. These guys are medical writers, helping large pharmaceutical companies produce all the vital reports and documentation needed to get new drugs approved. Our brief was to produce a bespoke designed responsive website with email marketing and ongoing digital marketing support - a wide brief, but we feel we’ve done a great job. From our initial engagement we undertook detailed research and ideation.  I pitched the concept of a beautifully simple site, where the written word guided the reader and very little use of photography other…

Or planning for when your Development Lead goes under a bus. We’ve been working for the last six months on our biggest project to date which involves the redevelopment of a gym fitness application from a legacy client server app based on Windows Forms & MySql to an Amazon Cloud hosted distributed application with Mobile App, WebApp and WebAPI.   We’re midway through the first gym implementation at the moment, the database is migrated to SQL Server and live on Amazon RDS, the WebApi is live and the MobileApp is with Apple for approval.   Everything is going swimmingly at the moment,…

Last year we worked on an Umbraco project for a FTSE100 pharmaceutical company. The project was to build and implement a personalised training portal, accessible from laptops on their corporate network as well as tablets on the open internet.Unsurprisingly information security was a big issue to them, and part of our brief was to ensure that all user logins were authenticated using their corporate identity provider. After working with their Information Security team and Corporate Head of Technical Standards we designed a system to integrate the Umbraco Membership system with the client's Identity Provider, Ping Federate, using SAML (Security Assertion…