Søren Kottal

📰 Say Goodbye to Tedious Icon Imports in Umbraco with Icoover!

Icoover is a new Umbraco package that automates the import of SVG icons, streamlining the backoffice experience for content editors. By placing SVG files in a designated folder, users can easily integrate icons without manual uploads. Key features include automatic detection and best practices for optimal rendering and customization.

📰 Vibe coding a nifty Umbraco tool

In a productive coding session, Søren Kottal created a block thumbnail generator for Umbraco using Windsurf, an AI-powered IDE. The tool automates thumbnail creation, enhancing the editing experience. Key features include custom backgrounds, tinting, padding, and download options. Despite some challenges, the project was completed efficiently, showcasing the benefits of AI assistance.

📰 Easier Responsive Emails for Umbraco Forms with MJML

Søren Kottal highlights the challenges of styling HTML emails due to inconsistent rendering across email clients. They introduce MJML, a framework that simplifies email creation with a component-based syntax, reducing code complexity. Integrating MJML with Umbraco Forms enhances maintainability and compatibility, streamlining the email development process.

📰 Make your layouts dynamic with Quantity Queries

Søren Kottal discusses quantity queries in CSS, which allow styling based on the number of child elements within a container using the :has selector combined with :nth-child(). This technique enhances layout flexibility without JavaScript. Additionally, the tailwindcss-quantity-queries plugin facilitates these queries in Tailwind CSS, promoting dynamic design.

📰 Enhancing 404 Pages with Search in Umbraco

In his discussion, Søren Kottal emphasizes the importance of a well-designed 404 page that enhances user experience by providing helpful search results. By integrating Full Text Search with the 404 page, users are directed to relevant content instead of encountering dead ends. The implementation details and code examples are provided for practical application.

📰 Learnings from upgrading an existing Umbraco project to TailwindCSS 4

Søren Kottal discusses his experience upgrading to TailwindCSS v4, highlighting key features like CSS-configurable values, automated content scanning, and the deprecation of safelisting classes. He addresses challenges such as UTF-8 BOM encoding and emphasize new methods for custom utilities and simplified plugin integration, ultimately finding the upgrade process straightforward.

📰 How to Deploy Your Branches to Umbraco Cloud Without Triggering Site Deployment

Umbraco Cloud, hosted on Azure, offers quick project setup and automatic deployments for Git commits, primarily for the master branch. However, it triggers deployments for all branches, causing delays. Users can customize this behavior using Kudu by modifying the post-receive Git hook to deploy only from the master branch, enhancing efficiency.

📰 Quick fix for IPublishedSnapshotAccessor issues when upgrading to Umbraco 15

In upgrading to Umbraco 15, users of ModelsBuilder may encounter issues due to the removal of the IPublishedSnapshotAccessor interface, causing model build failures. Søren Kottal suggests reintroducing the interface by adding a specific code snippet to .generated.cs files, allowing for successful model rebuilding and compatibility with Umbraco 15.

📰 Make your own Umbraco Starter Kit without making a Starter Kit

In his article, Søren Kottal highlights the challenges of maintaining a Starter Kit for Umbraco projects, including cumbersome manual processes and conflicts with deployment tools. To address these issues, he introduces the Schemex Exporter and Importer packages, which automate schema generation and facilitate project setup, streamlining the development process.

📰 Server-side registering of Package Manifest in Umbraco 14

In Umbraco 14, package registration has shifted to a frontend-only approach, requiring a static umbraco-package.json file in the App_Plugins folder. For backend-only packages, developers can use the new IManifestReader interface to register packages in C#. Additionally, package manifests can now contribute to telemetry data for better insights.

📰 Remote Image Provider for ImageSharp

Søren Kottal discusses the challenge of integrating third-party images on websites and the lack of control over their dimensions, formats, and availability. They highlight their solution using Umbraco and ImageSharp to gain control over third-party images by creating a provider for ImageSharp to download and manipulate external images. They offer the provider on NuGet and the Umbraco Marketplace for easy use.

📰 4 notable new features in Full Text Search for Umbraco

Umbraco's Full Text Search version 4.0.0 brings bugfixes, performance improvements, and new languages. Notable features include appsettings.json configuration, HttpClient rendering, non-content search, and caching notifications.

🐘 Doc Type Grid Editor resurrected from the dead just for Halloween

💬 FullTextSearch 4.0.0 close to release