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What's so good about Umbraco v5?

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by David Conlisk

I am preparing to give a talk on Umbraco v5 at the Umbraco Glasgow meetup on Monday December 5th. I want to try and get people excited about the new version by telling them about the best new bits. But apart from some hacking around with the beta and pre-beta versions, I'm no expert.

So I need your help! Let me know in the comments what you think are the best new features of v5, the ones that you'd tell your programmer mate over a pint in the pub. I'll list mine here:

  • Hive, obviously. The ability to consume any (and I mean any) external datasource and have it treated like any other data in the Umbraco back-end.
  • Hive providers. You don't need to write your own provider if one exists already - just take the existing one, do a bit of configuration and hey presto, your external data is available in Hive.
  • Custom Trees. Custom trees are easy in v5. In its simplest form, you implement the GetTreeData method (which uses a provider to retrieve the data to display in the tree), mark your code as being a tree and do a little configuration, and you're done. Hey presto your data appears in its own tree (or even as a branch of an existing tree) in the Umbraco back-end.
  • Umbraco 5 Contrib. The umbraco5contrib project on codeplex is a central resource for people to share the good work that they've done with v5. It's already got some good stuff in there and it's only going to get better as more and more people start using v5 and sharing their work.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list - what would you have in there?

David

UPDATE: If you are coming along to the Umbraco meetup in Glasgow on December 5th, then follow Chris' lead and let me know what you'd like to learn about v5 and I'll do my best to integrate that into my talk!

 

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9 comment(s) for “What's so good about Umbraco v5?”

  1. Gravatar of Stefan Kip
    30 November 2011 at 15:57:43

    Stefan Kip says:

    Definetely MVC and built from scratch :-)
  1. Gravatar of Chris Koiak
    30 November 2011 at 16:12:20

    Chris Koiak says:

    What does v5 give that v4 doesn't?

    This could be answered from both a developer perspective, an editor perspective but maybe more importantly from a client perspective.
  1. Gravatar of Stefan Kip
    30 November 2011 at 16:28:33

    Stefan Kip says:

    From developer: clean code, awesome flexible code base and MVC
    Editor: nothing, back-end stays the same (although cleaner and more stable)
    Client: I hope faster and more stable
  1. Gravatar of David Conlisk
    30 November 2011 at 16:30:27

    David Conlisk says:

    Thanks for the comments guys.
    A big plus for larger integration projects is that from an editor's point of view, the external data will be indistinguishable from their Umbraco data. For the developer, this will be easy and elegant to achieve.
    Also very important for the client is that the architecture is better, faster, more stable and (most importantly) more scalable than v4 was.
  1. Gravatar of Jeroen Breuer
    01 December 2011 at 05:17:43

    Jeroen Breuer says:

    What might also be good to know it that hive isn't only used for external data. In v5 the complete website can run from an examine hive provider. Have a look at this topic: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/umbraco-5-general-discussion/26002-Hive-provider-for-Examine-questions
  1. Gravatar of Anthony Candaele
    01 December 2011 at 07:58:11

    Anthony Candaele says:

    from a client perspective: choosing the Umbraco v5 platform he chooses a platform that has been rebuild from scratch incorporating all the latest technologies and practices.

    This will make his solution from a architectural and technological perspective up to the job for at least the next 5 years or so.
  1. Gravatar of David Conlisk
    01 December 2011 at 08:56:22

    David Conlisk says:

    Thanks @Jeroen - some very interesting stuff in that forum thread.
    @Anthony - thanks for your feedback.
  1. Gravatar of Tim Payne
    01 December 2011 at 09:43:24

    Tim Payne says:

    Security, hands down. In v4 the back office security is a bit basic (have had several full security tests done on v4 sites and its the main thing that comes up). Most of the pages don't check if you have permissions to use them, as the permissions in v4 related to whether or not you get to see menu items in the context menus. This means that if you know the URL structure of Umbraco (and page ids, although as they're numeric, so its not hard to guess some), it's possible to edit content, even if your user account doesn't have the content editing permissions.

    In v5 the permissions are far more robust. You can have CMS users be members of multiple groups, it supports inherited permissions, and you can have permissions that can secure anything (menu items, trees, pages, whatever). Matt did a great post about in on his blog!

    I think having the code rewritten from the ground up is good as well, as the v4 codebase has a lot of legacy methods in there, and unless you know the code quite well, it can be hard to work out which are the right API calls to use! The new code base is a lot better structured, which should make working with the API more consistent!
  1. Gravatar of David Conlisk
    04 December 2011 at 13:17:57

    David Conlisk says:

    Thanks Tim I'll definitely add security to the list.

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