Adding content to umbraco?

Question

I recently made the decision to develop our new company website (http://www.idealcode.net:8005/AboutUs.aspx) with Umbraco. I hired an Umbraco developer and we started work.

Please don't flame me or anything but I'm starting to worry about my decision.

The main reason why is because I seriously cannot find anything that explains in simple terms the workflow for creating a new page. As a web developer, it seems as much work to create a page in Umbraco than creating one outside of a CMS.

The workflow as we have it is:

1. Create a master page (probably not required for every page, but in practice seems to be on almost every page)
2. Create a document type with the PRECISE content areas that will be on the page
3. I guess at this point our end users can actually create a page...

We spent about 10 hours implementing the blog module and it STILL does not work and the dev needs to customize the template.

As a web developer, I honestly wonder how this is going to save us time? I'm not trying to diss Umbraco--I'm just worried about explaining this to my superiors. I could have created a site with some dynamic areas and blog in ASP.NET MVC in the roughly 20 hours we've spent on this so far...

Answer 1

The best way to get up to speed quickly on Umbraco is to look at the screencasts made from Umbraco corporate:

http://umbraco.tv/products/umbracotv

After that, the Umbraco community is quite good at answering questions and helping out:

http://our.umbraco.org/

As far as your specific question:

I could be wrong, but I think the thing that you aren't leveraging is inheritance. This makes things easier in Umbraco.

First, DocumentTypes can have parents and they inherit the data fields from those parents. For example, a Content Page DocumentType could have the meta information, main content area, and intro text.

Many pages within your site will likely go no further than that. Basically a rich text editor page (think "About Us")

Then when you add the News Item DocumentType, it can inherit all of those fields from Content Page and simply add a Date and Image field (as an example).

DocumentTypes can have many templates available to them. So if the data doesn't change, but the markup (design) does then you can set a new template in the Properties tab.

Templates can have parents as well. So you can build them up like this:

Main Template

|____One Column Layout

     |____Generic Content Page

     |____News Area

|____Two Column Layout

     |____Product Compare

This works just like master pages in ASP.NET.

So this is pretty long winded. Maybe I'll think about a blog post. Does this help at all?