24 Days In Umbraco

📰 Creating GitHub Actions to Simplify Umbraco Development

In this post, Matthew Heart discusses leveraging GitHub Actions to automate Umbraco development tasks, comparing custom actions to Umbraco packages. He outlines the differences between workflows and actions, provides examples of custom actions, and details the creation process, specifically focusing on a wrapper for the uSync CLI to enhance deployment efficiency.

📰 Decoding the puzzle

Emma Garland explores how developers can find joy in coding amidst the rise of AI. While AI automates many tasks, potentially diminishing the thrill of problem-solving, Garland advocates for embracing AI as a creative partner. By focusing on collaboration and the art of prompting, developers can maintain a sense of fulfillment and playfulness in their work.

📰 Reconnecting a Fragmented Community Through Automation: aka The Story of UMB.FYI

In "Reconnecting a Fragmented Community Through Automation," Matt Brailsford describes the creation of UMB.FYI, a newsletter aimed at uniting the Umbraco community amidst fragmentation caused by social media changes. Utilizing automation for content collection, curation, and distribution, UMB.FYI has successfully engaged over 500 subscribers, fostering community collaboration and knowledge sharing.

📰 Doing Great SEO With Umbraco: Can We Toast Yoast?

Joe Kepley discusses the transition from WordPress to Umbraco, emphasizing the importance of SEO. He highlights Umbraco's superior content modeling capabilities, which facilitate automatic SEO enhancements like structured data markup. Kepley suggests practical tools and strategies, such as using SEOChecker and ensuring proper heading hierarchy, to empower editors in optimizing their sites effectively.

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📰 Building Umbraco UI EFfortlessly

Jesper Mayntzhusen discusses how to import external data with EF Core and work with it in Umbraco Backoffice using Umbraco UI Builder. He covers setting up the database tables, EF Core database models and context, generating migrations, importing content, and setting up UI Builder. He also demonstrates configuring list view, editor fields, and saving/deleting movies. The code is available in the provided GitHub repository.

📰 Making your website more sustainable

Jeroen Visschers discusses the impact of digital development on the environment and shares tips for making web projects more sustainable. He emphasizes the importance of small changes, such as optimizing images, using native HTML elements, and adopting efficient design principles, to reduce carbon footprint and contribute to a greener web.

📰 Astro-nomically Performant Websites using the Content Delivery API

Astro, a JavaScript static site generator, and Umbraco's Content Delivery API (CDA) can be combined for a performant website. Astro's flexibility, extensibility, and performance, along with CDA's OpenAPI Specification, enable easy data retrieval and URL generation. Building an Umbraco client in TypeScript for Astro pages and components is demonstrated, showcasing the power of this combination for a performant and flexible website.

📰 CI/CD Process Umbraco on AWS

Erik-Jan Westendorp discusses hosting Umbraco within AWS, covering setup, service connection, S3 bucket configuration, connection string setup, containerization pipeline, and release pipeline for AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).

📰 Umbraco & Docker Containers. What, why, and how?

Containerization can simplify development, testing, and deployment processes for Umbraco applications, potentially reducing carbon emissions. It allows replicating production environments, unifying development and production, and reducing hosting costs. Docker is a popular container management framework, and containerization can also reduce embodied carbon emissions and provide cloud-agnostic architecture. However, it requires training and may pose security and support challenges. Liam Laverty provides a detailed hands-on guide for implementing a containerized Umbraco application using Docker.

📰 ’Tis The Season for Merrymaking and Friend-Making

The holiday season prompts reflection on the Umbraco community's significance and the comfort it brings. Making friends as adults can be challenging, but the Umbraco community fosters meaningful connections and support beyond the holidays. Cultivating this spirit of community year-round is essential.

📰 Umbraco Modular Monolith. The Untold Story.

Adrian Ochmann discusses the benefits of modular monolith architecture, particularly in the context of Umbraco. He explains how it offers a balance between simplicity and scalability, and its integration with vertical slices. He provides examples of folder structures and module integration in Umbraco, and highlights the adaptability and future-proofing of this approach. Adrian encourages further exploration of modular monoliths and vertical slices in software architecture.

📰 Create an Umbraco package test environment using PowerShell

Richard Soeteman discusses automating the creation of test sites for Umbraco packages using a PowerShell script, dotnet CLI, and Umbraco unattended install option. The process includes setting variables, creating a solution file, building and running the site, and modifying the Umbraco StarterKit to test package functionality.

📰 Create an Umbraco package test environment using PowerShell

Richard discusses automating the creation of test sites for Umbraco packages using PowerShell, dotnet CLI, and Umbraco unattended install. He demonstrates creating a test site, adding package code, creating a solution file, and modifying the Umbraco StarterKit for testing.

📰 How to build and release an Umbraco starter kit as a .NET Project Template

Dean Leigh & Aaron Sadler discuss creating a custom dotnet project template from an Umbraco Starter kit, utilizing uSync and GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and sharing it on Nuget and Umbraco Marketplace. They detail the process, including GitHub Actions workflow, uSync import, and packaging for distribution.

📰 Custom Icons with an Enum-Based Data Picker

Contentment is a customizable package for Umbraco's backoffice, offering features like icon picker and data list. Using C# Enum, custom icons can be added and rendered in a user-friendly picker for the editor.

📰 Enhancing the Content Editor Experience

Content editors often express frustration with Umbraco, but the issue is usually with the implementation. Improving the content editing experience with rich text editor stylesheets and macros can greatly enhance efficiency and satisfaction.

📰 Equitable digital products and services for People and Planet!

In 2023, the focus was on creating sustainable digital products and services, with a new Sustainability Community Team at Umbraco and a growing awareness of the intersection between accessibility and sustainability. Looking ahead to 2024, there is an expected increase in demand for accessible and sustainable digital products, driven by client demand and upcoming legislative changes, such as the European Accessibility Act and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Prioritizing accessibility and usability improves the overall user experience and supports long-term sustainability.

📰 Do once, use twice with the Delivery API

Kenn discusses building two blogs, headless and traditional, using the Umbraco Delivery API. He covers data model, CORS setup, React and Razor implementations, property expansion and limiting, querying, and use cases for the Delivery API.

📰 Eco-Friendly Web Development: Harnessing SSG and Prerendering for a Sustainable Tomorrow

The cloud's rapid growth raises environmental concerns due to its carbon footprint. Sustainable system design, like Static Site Generation and JAMstack, reduces energy consumption, carbon emissions, and operating costs, promoting a greener digital ecosystem.