At code garden this year Alex, Shannon and I
talked about some of the hidden gems which are being included in
version 5 of Umbraco.
Well not every feature was able to be given the credit it deserved
in the talk (also after the fact we realized we missed some too!)
so we said that we'd produce a series of blog posts which will look
at some of the features in more depth. Over this series of posts
we're going to look at Umbraco 5 Gems from the perspective of
difference kinds of people who use Umbraco because there are lots
of different kinds of Umbraco users and not everything will be
logical for them. Also to include everything in a single post would
make for a really huge post!
First up we're going to look at some Umbraco 5 Gems for
Content Editors.
It looks the same
Although not really a Gem in itself this is something that we
really want to stress about Umbraco 5, that we're keeping the same
Umbraco look and feel from a user point of view for
Umbraco 5. That's not to say it'll be a 100% skin copy of Umbraco
4, expect some improvements and more polish (because after all the
web has evolved a lot since the first Umbraco back office UI was
done) but the concepts that editors have grown to know and love
will still be retained. This means that it's not a case of
re-skilling Content Editors upon the release of Umbraco 5.
Drag and drop DocType properties and tabs
This is a feature you won't know about until you come across it
and once you find it you'll wonder how you lived without it. Simply
put, Shannon realized that it was a pain to move a property between
tabs when editing a DocType and that there should be a simpler way.
Well now there is, you can just drag it to a different tab!
Additionally to this you can also drag tabs around, rather than
relying on the numerical index.
Simple improvements to save bundles of time :).
No more popups
A lot of the workflow in Umbraco is done through the use of
popup windows, things such as creating, moving and managing
permissions of a document. With the change into MVC we were able to
revisit this idea, and from that we've decided that when possible
we'll just use the main editor pane rather than a popup. This gives
a lot more visible space to provide users information during the
process of creating a new node, or moving one around the CMS.
Media is content
In Umbraco 4 there is a reasonable distinction between the idea
of media and content, although they share a lot of the same root
concepts. Thanks to the changes in the way data is treated (aka the
Hive) we've been able to bring these concepts even closer, making
the API for working with media identical to working with content.
It also means that customizing the media types should be exactly
the same as document types.
Localization improvements
We're not language gurus, we're CMS gurus, but thanks to the
awesome work of Niels Kurnel localization is going to be even more
powerful in Umbraco 5 than ever before. There's more to it than can
be summed up in a paragraph so I recommend you go check out
Niels' CodeGarden presentation on the new localization features
of Umbraco 5. It's also available for you to use separately from
Umbraco, but more on that in a future post!
Sprite framework
Umbraco 5 will make it easier to use CSS sprites for DocType
icons, etc. This works by looking for a CSS file with the same name
as the sprite image file. Umbraco will then parse the CSS file and
find all the CSS sprite rules to produce a list of images which are
all located within the sprite itself.
This makes it easier to utilize sprites within the Umbraco back
office for content editors to work with.
That wraps up the first in this series about Umbraco 5 gems, and
our look at what's going to be awesome for Content Editors. Stay
tuned for more Umbraco 5 gems!