Hi Umbracians! I’m Ruben and after the splendid Umbraco 4
announcement, I have a small milestone of my own I want to share. Today
is my first anniversary in the Umbraco community, an excellent occasion
for looking back on my experiences so far.
How it all started
December 2007, my home-brewed CMS required more customized than
standard code for new websites. Searching an off-the-shelf CMS was a
tough job: I wanted .Net, low-budget (= free) and most importantly:
total freedom over input and output.
Umbraco offered all of this features, combined with a functional and
user-centric backend I had never seen before. One exception: it
required SQL Server, not present at my low-budget server. My first post
on the Umbraco forum was a reckless one, but quite determined at the
same time: I knew I wanted Umbraco, and quickly.
How things changed
Umbraco enabled me to take both my web development skills and the
quality of my websites to a higher level. It combines the flexibility
of a custom site with the functionality and quality of any other major CMS.
I’m now a proud administrator of 15 small Umbraco websites, including
my own blog where I post Umbraco goodies from time to time. Be sure to
check it out!
I also witnessed an ongoing shift in the core team
towards better documentation and cleaner code. This approach has been
really visible in both the development process of Umbraco version 4 and
last week’s release candidate. An important example is Runway (formerly
Boost), which helps anyone getting started in no time.
How the community cares
Talking about Umbraco as a couple of software files is nonsense.
From day 1 onwards, I felt the support of a caring community and I was very
happy to meet many of these inspiring people at CodeGarden ’08. I came
to understand how free and invaluable go hand in hand. An stimulating
example for me are two fellow Belgians who started making a living out
of Umbraco this year.
Looking back at 2008, I had a great time
helping develop Umbraco. Open source is a hot topic nowadays, and being
part of this project made me understand why. It’s not about giving:
it’s a about sharing, which is a two-way thing.
A special memory is the
feeling I got when working together with Niels and Tim back in August:
just a crazy idea and far too less time. But the right spirit and the
we-can-do-it mentality resulted in Canvas (formerly Live Editing): a super cool new feature which I hope you
all are going to use from now on!
I hope the we-can-do-it
spreads again in 2009 over the Umbraco community.
And rest assured, we
have some neat stuff up our sleeves for you!