Alternative to / Migrate from Umbraco 5 - umbraco

what other CMS would be the best option if I want to migrate from umbraco 5?
I want to use the code from umbraco as much as possible.

I migrated an Umbraco v5 website back to Umbraco 4.7.2 and all-in-all it was a rather painless process - lots of my razor scripts were easily ported back. After struggling to get things working acceptably with v5 for weeks, it was actually quite refreshing to use a proven CMS again and the performance improvement was outstanding.
Personally I am rather disappointed with the way the whole v5 debacle played out, but all-in-all it was probably the best and only way forward given the challenges they were facing with the new codebase.

sudhirk why do you want to leave umbraco?
I wouldn't be put off by what umbraco hq have decided to do with V5 in face its does nothing but strengthen my love of umbraco, umbraco is a brilliant (FREE!!!) cms but what is really great about it, is the forum community. Any questions you have, pop them in there, they will get answered.
Thanks,
Will

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Need advice on E commerce development in MVC

I have to create a eCommerce store in ASP.NET MVC having some custom features.
After through R&D I have sort listed three major eCommerce frameworks available-
nopcommerce
smartstoreNet ( SSNet)
MVC Music Store
Later after more R&D I have selected smartstoreNet as a base for further customization.
After R&D for weeks still I have many doubts & confusion about smartstoreNet (SSNet), would be more than happy if some one guide me in right direction.
Please take a look at my questionnaires:-
I did not found many review of SSNet on web & on Stack overflow, Please share your experience if you have work with the SSNet. How fast & flexible it is?
2.custom Theme creation or Updation document is not in detail, so how to integrate custom or designer's html/css in its theme
suppose I have added some custom functionality in the framework how it would be affected when I update the SSNet framework to newer versions, should I use custom plugins or keep track of my custom development & re -implement everything after version updation.
How efficient the system to handle medium load eCommerce shop having 500-1000 products, speed can't be compromised.
There is a ongoing legal battle between NopCommerce Vs SSNET, how it could affect SSNET users in future in case they lose the case.
I don't expect you to answer all questions :) still pointing me to right direction would be a great help.
I would also select an e-commerce framework/store that is based on the ASP.NET MVC framework.
I have worked through the MVC music store code a while back while learning ASP.NET MVC. I do not know where you stand with ASP.NET MVC but if you are looking to go e-commerce and looking to up your programming skills by using this framework then MVC music store might be a route for you to take. It will put you well on the path of learning this framework. It is really a basic e-commerce store.
If you already have some basic ASP.NET MVC knowledge and looking for something more advanced then I would look at nopCommerce. It is a well thought out e-commerce store and it can easily be customised and extended. You can create your own modules or have them developed for you. It is also easy to setup even if you don't have ASP.NET MVC knowledge - just follow the on screen instructions. It sounds easy right?
I don't have any experience regarding smartstoreNet. If I were to choose one out of the three that you have listed then it would be nopCommerce.
I wouldn't worry to much about any legal battles at the moment - don't let it affect your decision.
Don't know much about SSNet but here's my take on the other two (that i can remember on top of my head :)
nopcommerce - this is very easy to setup. it's extensible bec of support for adding pluggable components/features.
MVC music store - might be too basic for your needs.
Again these are just my thoughts as well based on what you describe for your requirements. Hope it helps. Good luck!
Use MVC, reasons are :
1- Easy to develop, optimize, maintain and make modifications.
2- its scalable and provide everything that a website needs. Dont just look at mvc music store, MVC is highly scalble
3- You can find support while developing mvc on many websites and stakeoverflow also.
Good luck :)
ASP.NET MVC based site is a good choice if you want to control the logic and behavior of the site at a low level. It will take a lot of time/skill/experience to do your own customizations though.
A couple of other out of the box solutions you may want to look at are Magento and Prestashop. These are fully functional ecommerce systems that you can extend with plugins, so quite different to the approach of coding the site yourself. But you may save a lot of time by going with an out of the box solution.
I'm not familiar with SmartStore.Net other than when previously researching this topic myself I was leaning more towards Magento and Prestashop since they had better ease of use.

Integrating existing Umbraco website design in ublogsy blogs

I'm developing a site in umbraco, and integrating uBlogsy (blog) in it.
But the problem is, uBlogsy offers its own look n feel. However i want to have my existing website design in Blogging part as well.
here is the link for the same :
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/ublogsy
I've done that manually. but its a time taking process.
Does any one knows, how can i do that? is there any automation available for the same?
Or if there exists any better blog than uBlogsy offering same feature and functionality?
Thanks in advance.
uBlogsy is the de-facto blog package for umbraco so i'd be surprised if you find anything better (the community is encouraged to build upon the best instead of spin up many sub-par competitors, but i digress).
I've done that manually. but its a time taking process.
^^This sounds like you have modified the cshtml markup and css from the package. This is indeed the way to go.
There isn't really any plug-in theming that i'm aware of and it sounds like this is what you're looking for, right?
I've used uBlogsy many times on past projects and usually don't keep anthonys files for template views but rather start with fresh markup to match my wire-comps. Since his files are included - they make a great example for how-to access the data.
Sorry it's probably not what you're looking to hear. But i think it ultimately gives greater control and better result to get hands-on.

Umbraco v5.x learning resources

Umbraco has lately made a move from ASP.NET Web forms to ASP.NET MVC 3. I have tried to find good resources which would help me to get started, but since it is so new I am out of luck. I would not like to go through old material prior v4 era since I don't want to confuse myself more than necessary. Umbraco.tv site does not seem to have many v5 videos if any at all.
Are there any tutorials with Umbraco v5 specific information? I have just started to learn Umbraco so any help is needed, but I need to get started as quickly as possible. I am MVC 3 developer so good examples on how to extend Umbraco with own controllers, models, views etc. would help a lot.
If you have any experience with MVC and razor, you could start from the github documentation. It will later be available on the official doc channel
In Umbraco the controller is a surfacecontroller, and is basically only used you need to do more then show some simple content. How to use
That is the documentation there are available right now, but the community is working on getting more documentation ready as soon as possible
I have found some links and will keep posting them here:
http://h4rdboiledegg.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/adventures-with-umbraco-5/
How to use partial macros: http://shazwazza.com/post/Partial-View-macros-in-Umbraco-v5.aspx
Umbrazo Razor cheat sheet: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/razor-dynamicnode-cheat-sheet

Plans for Sharepoint to support MVC?

Has Microsoft said anything in the past year about Sharepoint supporting MVC (in a nice, non-hacky way)?
I know Scott Gu said something on the subject, but that was just shy of 3 years ago (Feb 2008).
Are they still "looking at it" for the future? (3 years seems a long time to be "looking")
Did they decide against it? (the whole MVC thing is just a fad, it will die out...?)
Or have they been mute on the subject?
(We are about to embark on an enterprise level implementation of Sharepoint and I am worried that we are investing a lot of time and money into an old way of doing things.)
Note: I know that there are questions like this out there, but they seem to be about a year old, so I thought I would ask again.
Don't hold your breath for SharePoint to go MVC. SharePoint contains a lot of custom controls that would have to be rewritten completely, if they changed the underlying model. Changing from ASP.NET Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC would probably result in a whole different branch of SharePoint - think SharePoint MVC. And if Microsoft was to go that way, they would probably choose a different path for that solution, perhaps even backing the open source CMS Umbraco.
I personally believe that MVC is not a fad. It you care about what your html ends up looking like, then ASP.NET MVC is a great platform. And with the popularity of HTML 5 rising, I see the same thing happening for ASP.NET MVC.
It's a huge breaking change, so I'm ruling it out for SharePoint 2010, also because newer MVC Versions are .net 4.0 only and SharePoint 2010 is .net 3.5 and will highly unlikely go to 4.0, again because it's a huge breaking change.
I saw some hackish attempts, but getting even Routing to work with the Virtual Path Provider of Sharepoint...
I'd say: Wait for SharePoint 2014 or whatver the next Version will be.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Treat it as a platform that you plug in to, so the way it works doesn't have a huge impact on your implementation apart from around web parts. If it goes MVC then everyone will have the same pain of moving their web parts from the current model to an MVC type rendering one so MS will have to provide some help in making the transition.
This link is about a year old but I thought the author's perspective on the choice between SharePoint (a platform) and ASP.NET MVC (a framework) was refreshing at the time. I've had experience with both and I've gotta say that I'd be hesitant to mix the two technologies right now.
The only thing I think is safe to say right now is that SharePoint is here to stay and ASP.NET MVC is gaining tremendous popularity / support and is unlikely to go away.
EDIT: There are also a number of comments in that link that might relate to your question.

Why have or haven't you moved to ASP.NET MVC yet? [closed]

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I find myself on the edge of trying out ASP.NET MVC but there is still "something" holding me back. Are you still waiting to try it, and if so, why? If you finally decided to use it, what helped you get over your hesitation?
I'm not worried about it from a technical point of view; I know the pros and cons of web forms vs ASP.NET MVC. My concerns are more on the practical side.
Will Microsoft continue to support ASP.NET MVC if they don't reach some critical threshold of developers/customers using it?
Are customers willing to try ASP.NET MVC? Have you had to convince a customer to use it? How did that go?
Are there major sites using ASP.NET MVC (besides SO)? Could you provide links if you have them?
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
If you have any other concerns preventing you from using ASP.NET MVC, what are they?
If you had concerns but felt they were addressed and now use ASP.NET MVC, could you list them as well?
Will Microsoft continue to support ASP.NET MVC if they don't reach some critical threshold of developers/customers using it?
They will for sure.
Are customers willing to try ASP.NET MVC? Have you had to convince a customer to use it? How did that go?
Customers care about high quality products and price. Just convince them that Mvc will help to raise quality and lower price. Shouldn't be hard.
Are there major sites using ASP.NET MVC (besides SO)? Could you provide links if you have them?
Isn't it enough with SO? :)
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
I did try and didn't regret it at all. It kills me being forced to work on web forms project again.
Go for it!
I believe ASP.NET MVC has reached that critical threshold, as evident by VS 2010 tooling, ASP.NET, MS employee blog and the extensive effort Microsoft put into the framework thus far. I don't see this framework perishing in the next decade (or two).
By customers, I assume you mean people that I build websites for? The only issue I find with ASP.NET is the hosting solutions. However, this issue is becoming moot as more affordable hosting solutions are found. But usually, if I believe in the technology and that it will work for my customer, my customer trusts me and agrees on it. The customer is also usually comforted by the fact that ASP.NET-MVC is a Microsoft product. Having a big company behind a technology is always a nice thing to have, since you can rest assured it will be supported for quite awhile with frequent updates.
ASP.NET MVC is a relatively new framework, and slow adoption of new technology is expected. But this is what I found: http://weblogs.asp.net/mikebosch/archive/2008/05/05/gallery-of-live-asp-net-mvc-sites.aspx . I think you'll see a big influx of websites using ASP.NET-MVC this year when VS 2010/.NET 4 are released with built-in support for ASP.NET MVC.
I never enjoyed developing with C#/ASP.NET more than when I started using ASP.NET-MVC. To a certain extent, ASP.NET-MVC forces you to write good code more so than WebForms due to ASP.NET-MVC inherit separation of concerns and easy customization. And the ability to control HTML output is essential, a feature that was difficult with ASP.NET-WebForms (pre 4.0).
I use MVC and hate it, especially, the front end, web form are far more better in the front end... With loads of javacript on the page, that means it is hard to maintain and take a longer time to develop and debug..
To do a very complicated page, the flexibility of MVC is limited, you will end up with using a lot of javascript control, and you know what? Different controls use different version of jquery, and they have conflict..
It is actually the javascript, and lack of UI flexibility that pulls me off, especially you are NOT working on your code
and we have more issues of browser compatability, with the new browsers coming, you are going to shoot yourself with MVC
MVC front end is very fast if your web site is not too big.. The backend of MVC is very good, it is the front end that blows it over
Why not? The rest of my team doesn't want to.
I have not yet actually tried coding up some ASP.Net MVC(looked at a few examples though) but the main thing holding us back from using it is that all of our code is currently written using Webforms.
Regarding Microsoft support ASP.Net. First Scott Guthrie, the VP of Development at MS is behind it, so that's one feather in its cap. Second its open source now so even if for some strange reason MS decides not to support it going forward you can still tweak it on your own if you need to. In addtion the MVC pattern is somethign that more and more web development platforms are using. It is a great pattern for web development and as a result I can't think of any reason MS wouldn't continue to support it.
If by customers you mean end users, honestly they shouldn't care how you implement the site. If by customers you mean consulting clients, if you can develop faster and they have the servers that can host it, I would think they would be open to it. On top of that youre MVC sites should use less bandwidth than a typical Web Forms web site (IMHO) mainly because there is a lot of additional stuff put into a Web Forms page (for example extra attributes in the HTML htat are tailored for web forms, ViewState) so that should be seen as a positive by them. Now if by customers you mean people integrating with you, then its also a plus since MVC makes it very easy to implement REST based web services (not that WFC doesn't but MVC works very nicely as well).
Hmm major sites using MVC, so far I've found a list here I also know of a number of apps at different companies where large scale MVC apps are in development. I wish I could give more detail, but unfortuantely I can't at the moment.
When I first started out with ASP.Net MVC I thought I was going to hate it. I wasn't a huge fan of Web Forms either, but MVC just felt like a step back to ASP development back before .Net came out. Then I started really getting into it and really finding the pattern is clean, concise, extensible, maintainable, and easy to pick up. Honestly I don't want to ever go back to Web Forms, and anytime I find myself doing a .Net web app I make a point of making it an MVC project.
You need to choose what's more appropriate to your product. Webforms has a few things to recommend it over mvc in some situations.
The big one is a developer working on in-house tools at small to medium shops. In these circumstances:
Large viewstates are not likely to be a problem, because your users typically have 100Mbit upload to your web server rather than a measly 128Kbit or less.
Javascript is likley to be supported by everyone
Development time matters more than widespread cross-browser compatibility or even nice design.
You're likely stuck working with inherited devs who used to do desktop/forms style development, or have a lot of churn among junior devs who don't really know web development.
All of those things together mean that webforms is still a very good fit. And let's be honest: a lot more programmers work at these small to medium in-house shops than do public internet work. So webforms isn't going anywhere.
That said, one of the big things coming up among these small shops is likely to be taking their internal tools and making them available offsite for telecommuters. In that situation, you need to start worrying more about WAN performance odd browser issues where MVC might be a better fit.
Dell is hiring masses of ASP.NET MVC developers in Texas and India for major work on many of their websites.
According to The Gu, ASP.NET MVC will have it's own product and development cycle. It is now 100% detached from ASP.NET WebForms and it's not going away.
Did you try ASP.NET MVC and found yourself regretting it? If so, what do you regret?
I do not regret trying out MVC in fact I love it. When I started it out I hated it I kept looking for the code behind file and was unsure at first how to get values out textboxes and stuff without going textbox1.Text;
Now I cringe every time I go back to webforms and wish I could write it in ASP.NET MVC because I just love how your working with html instead of using drag and drop controls that usually make your life alot harder if you got to customize them to much. I love how ASP.NET MVC likes to focus on good code like design patterns such as the Repository pattern and how to do unit test using TDD.
I have not picked up a book yet in MVC where they talked about how to make good code. I am not saying you can't write good code in Webforms but in the books and classes that I seen teach ASP.NET this never seems to be a main focus.
Like for instance I hate the datasource controls I am tutoring some people in WebForms and they love to drag a datasource in and then write their SQL statements in that datasource. Then in the code behind they use these datasorces to insert their records.
So every time they need to make a new SQL query a new datsource is dragged on and made. So now you all your logic is all mixed together. It makes it so much harder to find out whats going on, switch to different things if needed then of course it is limiting.
Something that revolves around the name "controller" can only mean problems.
I tried following the Nerddinner http://www.asp.net/mVC/ tutorial this morning. I'm comfortable in webforms, but nothing in that nerddinner tutorial made sense, just an outdated, hardcoded recipe from mvc1.0 that dosent even compile with the current mvc2.0, probably Wrox made this tutorial, only they can come up with only formating and no content.
I didn't see anything in there that was good; a bunch of hardcoded conventions I didn't need.
I certainly didn't see anything in there that would make me say I'd want to move from webforms, although this seems to be all the propaganda I read.
They put this tutorial based around wizards, on http://www.asp.net/mVC/ main page, while claiming the model is lean, all of it is generated code they don't explain, the default mvc template project has something like 15 references.
This 2 page website managed to be slow to build and to load.
Was 30 minutes in it until I realized my data model didn't match the one from the tutorial and many things that had been generated using the create controller and create view wizards were now failing.
With what I was provided in the rushed tutorial, I wasn't able to recover the project. I'll just pass until I find better documentation.

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