The history of Umbraco goes back more
than ten years, but really began on February 16th 2005 when the
open source version of Umbraco was released. That was Umbraco 2.0.
Today we're rapidly heading towards version 5 and while everything
surrounding the project has matured, the naïve passion for making
simple and awesome tools stays the same.
Milestones:
1997:
- Niels Hartvig learns about Content Management Systems in his
first job straight from High School at "Snabel & Co" where
Danish CMS pioneers Lars Buur and Thomas Christensen introduces him
to the first Danish Web CMS called Site in A Box.
1999:
- Niels Hartvig makes the first sketches and prototypes to a
simple framework for building and maintaining websites.
2003:
- Umbraco v1 is announced made in a combo of classic ASP, COM
objects written in VB.NET and .NET webservices written in C#. Let's
call it the caterpillar version that later transitioned into a
beautiful open source butterfly. Most of the concepts known today
were here including Document Types, Macros and XSLT. Performance
and scalability was definitely lacking though.
2004:
- Umbraco 2.0 which is 100% .NET based is taking shape. With help
from Kasper Bumbech and Anders Pollas the beta version sees
the light of day on October 2004.
2005:
- Umbraco 2.0 is released on February 16th 2005. This is the
official birthday of the open source version of Umbraco.
- The first Umbraco Developer conference sees the light of day.
It's called CodeGarden and a whopping 23 developers talks Umbraco
for two days (some would claim that they spend most of time trying
to install Umbraco).
2006:
- CodeGarden grows to 45 people in Islands Brygge,
Copenhagen.
- Umbraco 2.1 is released.
2007:
- Niels Hartvig decides to bet on Umbraco fulltime and stops
doing consulting. That was a tough and very bootstrapping
year.
- CodeGarden is held in London with 60 people attending.
- The first Umbraco MVPs - Most Valued People (in the community)
- are nominated. They are Casey Neehouse, Douglas Robar, Jesper
Ordrup, Per Ploug Hansen, Thomas Höhler and Warren Buckley.
- Umbraco 3.0 is released.
- The Umbraco PRO version which is a supported version of Umbraco
is announced.
2008:
- Per Ploug Hansen joins the Umbraco HQ.
- The first official Umbraco Training courses begin.
- CodeGarden returns to Islands Brygge and grows to 95 people
from 13 countries. Everybody can feel that this Umbraco thing is
real.
- This year the Umbraco MVPs are Casey Neehouse, Dirk De Grave,
Douglas Robar, Morten Bock, Paul Sterling, Tim Geyssens and Warren
Buckley
- Umbraco 4.0 is released.
- Umbraco Concierge - the monitoring tool for Umbraco is
released.
- Umbraco.tv opens with 25 videos.
2009:
- Umbraco Courier 1.0 - the tool to move content and media
between Umbraco environments is released.
- Contrary to all previous years, the now 140 people at
CodeGarden in the Kettle Hall in Copenhagen don't get a new Umbraco
release. Instead the focus has been on making an online platform to
strengthen the growing community - Our Umbraco is born.
- It's announced that Umbraco will switch to the ASP.NET MVC
framework from next major version. Expected in 2011.
- The Umbraco MVPs are Dirk De Grave, Douglas Robar, Morten Bock,
Paul Sterling, Tim Geyssens and Warren Buckley.
- Tim Geyssens joins the Umbraco HQ.
- Umbraco Contour - the form designer for Umbraco is
released.
- Umbraco.tv grows to 45 videos during this year.
2010:
- On February 16th, more than 300 people in seven places around
the world celebrates the five year birthday of Umbraco through
community events.
- Paul Sterling joins the Umbraco HQ and this opens our North
American activities.
- CodeGarden has grown to 250 people. They are spoiled with
Umbraco 4.5 release, version 2.0 of the Our Umbraco website and a
ton of packages developed by the community.
- The nomination of Umbraco MVPs is now based on karma and voting
on the twenty most active people on the Our Umbraco website. They
are Dirk De Grave, Douglas Robar, Lee Kelleher, Richard Soeteman
and Warren Buckley.
- Alex Norcliffe joins the Umbraco HQ as lead architect on
Umbraco 5.
- Umbraco.tv is now over 80 videos strong.
- Umbraco v4.6 (JUNO) alpha is released in October and introduces
a new starter kit and skinning format to make it faster to get
started with Umbraco.
- Umbraco v4.6 (JUNO) beta was released on Christmas day
- Lee Kelleher,
Matt Brailsford
and Sebastiaan
Janssen tops the list of people with most karma in the end of
the year
2011:
- The year has just begun in January when Alex Norcliffe jumps
from half time to fulltime and Peter Gregory starts in the HQ! Oh
my - that's a 33% increase in number of employees!
- Umbraco 4.6 is released on January 15th!
- Warren Buckley starts as a fulltime employee on February
1st
- Cherie Gregory joins the HQ partime in February.
- On its six year birthday - February 16th 2011 - the
project finally get hold of the 'umbraco.com' domain which is the
new home after been switching between umbraco.dk, umbraco.net and
umbraco.org for the past years
- Casey Neehouse & Shannon Deminick join the Umbraco HQ
as fulltime employees on April 1st. This is no April Fools.
- The 2011/2012 Umbraco MVPs for this year are: Darren Ferguson,
Douglas Robar, Jan Skovgaard, Lee Kelleher, Matt
Brailsford, Sebastiaan Janssen.