Yesterday I had the pleasure of being together with 40 other Danish “Umbracians” thanks to the great effort of Morten Christensen (from Codehouse) and Christian Palm (from 1508). Inspired by the recent UK Festival initiative they had arranged a 100% community driven DK Festival. It’s impossible to explain what a thrill it is to attend these events. In my view, it’s the biggest testament to success when a community is making events around a project.
The event was held at the beautiful “Typobar” room at 1508 and had no expense sparred. There was drinks, food, badges and t-shirts but more than anything there was enthusiastic people who shared knowledge and passion for Umbraco. And on top of that there was speakers. I had the pleasure of starting with a “While we wait for CodeGarden ‘11 talk”. The purpose was to try to cover what we’re currently working on both in the Core Team and in the Umbraco HQ which is impossible in 45 minutes – but I did try:
- CodeGarden ‘11. In 2011 we expect 400 people at our wonderful CodeGarden venue at Kedelhallen in Frederiksberg (Copenhagen). It’ll be from June 15-17th and just EUR 500 for all three days. But on December 1st we have a special treat for all our active community members. If you have 40 karma point or more at the “Our Umbraco” site you can get your hands on the 100 special KarmaTickets that goes on sale for just EUR 300. That’s EUR 200 or 40% discount. We expect that these tickets will be gone in less than 48 hours so don’t hold your breath!
- Jupiter aka Umbraco 5. Jupiter is on track for a CodeGarden ‘11 release and while we’ve been working in stealth mode for the past months we’ll move to CodePlex during December. While you definitely shouldn’t expect a usable product by this early stage, this will be the first chance that the community can finally see the all new architecture that’ll ensure Umbraco stays on top of the Web CMS game. It’s fantastic – Alex Norcliffe, Aaron Powell and Shannon Deminick have all done a tremendous job and I know they can’t wait to share it. Alpha and Beta drops can be expected during Spring 2011.
- Juno aka Umbraco 4.6. The big project right now is obviously “Juno” which will be released by the end of the year. The focus on Juno is two fold. One is to make it easier to get started through our new Starter Kits and Skins and it was a big pleasure for me to show the beautiful skins that 1508 and DesignIT have been working on. The other focus is bug fixes. We’ve already done lots of them but we’re continuing to keep going through the most voted issues from our CodePlex tracker. I emphasized that bug fixing doesn’t happen by itself and that’s why we’re trying to convince more and more to buy our Confidence product for bigger projects. If we sold a Confidence license each week we could actually hire two people to work on bug fixing fulltime. Imagine what that’ll do, so please keep it in mind when talking with customers.
- Codename “Deli” aka the Umbraco Market Place. It was also with pleasure that we could finally publicly state that we are working on a Market Place for Umbraco and it’ll come in the end of Q1 2011. I wished that Paul Sterling could have made the announcement instead of me as this have really been he’s dream and vision. The “deli” will be 100% integrated with both Our Umbraco and the Umbraco Back Office and to make it easy and fast to get started selling, we’ll provide merchants with licensing, support and sales analytics tools. Despite that the norm is a 30% commission we’ll just do 25%.
- Courier 2.0. It’s real! The final thing was Courier 2.0, the deployment tool for Umbraco that we’ve been working on almost forever. We’ve made a brand new and super ambitious architecture to make a solid, transaction based transfer of all Umbraco objects between installations. Per Ploug Krogslund joined me to demo the core of Umbraco and luckily people got as excited as us when Per demoed how advanced the Dependency Graph was by showing a huge generated mindmap of what was going on in the engine and how he could edit a serialized Document Type in Visual Studio, commit it to Subversion (source control) and then check it out on the server and make Courier merge all the changes. It’s been my dream for more than three years so the fact that it’s finally real and super stable is amazing. We’ll ship Courier 2.0 by the end of this year and it’ll cost either EUR 449 per project. For Partners and Umbraco freelancers with many on going projects, we also announced “Courier as a Service” where you can use Courier on ten projects at the time for just EUR 99 / month.
The rest of the day was packed with great events that really showed the diversity of our stellar and friendly community. I’ll get back to those in another blog post, but once again I’d like to thank Morten Christensen, Christian Palm, Codehouse and 1508 to make this event happen. Kudos!