Umbraco V3 finally released!
UPDATE: This post was updated using Word 2007 and a little built in image effect on the screen capture of the text editor below
On the 21st of June Umbraco V3 was released !!
This is the release I've been waiting for a looong time.
Why?
Well to start with the former Internet Explorer based Rich Text Editor has been replaced with the superior and cross-browser editor TinyMCE from Swedish Moxiecode Systems AB .
That in itself is a huge update since any CMS tends to be no better than the editor it uses, after all it's in the editor people spends most of their time (while working on their website, that is...).
With this new release I'm finally able to use all of Umbraco's features with my preferred browser, Firefox ;).
For long it was the editor that kept me waiting, and waiting, and waiting... The truth is that it has been ages since the first release date was postponed again and again... Well, why has it taken so long for this update to be released? My guess is that the V3 release has grown far beyond the initial intentions, the project switched repository from SVN to Codeplex (Microsoft's Open Source Portal based on Team Foundation Server), expanded the core developer group and the number of features included in V3 are so much more than the initial plan...
With Umbraco V3 web publishing has absolutely reached higher grounds when it comes to flexibility and user experience...
For a full feature list please visit the Umbraco Projects website, the many forum post or the Umbraco site over at CodePlex ,
To mention some highlights I've picked these:
- Valid xhtml - TinyMCE generated standard compliant html code and "nags" the editor to use accessible attributes.
- MetaBlogAPI support - Enables off-line editing of pages/blog posts from within any application that support this standard. What do you think about writing/updating your pages from within Word 2007? Yes, Word 2007 generates somehow ugly html, but at least it validates and that's a huge update from the tag-soup we've learn to hate under the name "Word HTML".
(I played a bit with Word as a webpage editor a few days ago, and it's such a huge boost in productivity that I'll have to come back to that later). - Integrated translation logic - It's now possible to import/export all page data as XML files for translation.
- Updated CSS/XSLT editor - A new editor for text based files has been added, this enables some intellisense but primary code high lightning.
- ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 - Umbraco can make full use of ASP.NET AJAX technology.
I've just update this site to Umbraco V3 and will start to clean up my web templates to get a site that validates, now that the editor at least gives me a decent chance to keep some code quality here ; )
P.S. Since I haven't worked on this web site since November 2005, you're currently unable to make any comments here, but I hope to get thing going now that V3 finally is out ;) // ; ) Kalle
