GLUUG 21/02/2013
Umbraco MVC – Chris Koiak:
Chris Koiak delivered a fantastic talk on Umbraco MVC using
his standard website MVC package, which can be downloaded from http://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/standard-website-mvc
He quickly built some additional functionality on top of the
package to talk us through Models, Views and Controllers in Umbraco.
It was very nice to see that MVC is now a real thing in
Umbraco as there were some doubts and concerns around the time of V5
Chris’ slides will be made available ASAP.
uSiteBuilder / Ways of working
I’m a big fan of uSiteBuilder as everybody knows but I
recently moved from an agency where it was very back-end development driven to
an agency where there are more “front end developers” than us “back-end
developers” and in this environment it has shown that uSiteBuilder isn't the
best tool for us.
When I started, my first job was to rebuild the company
website in Umbraco and I naturally, not knowing how we work, defaulted to my
uSiteBuilder/User Controls way of working but towards the end of the project it
became apparent that the front end guys were changing properties in document
types or template names and when uSiteBuilder synchronised, it was overwriting
their changes.(Even with Stephen Rogers’ uSiteBuilder Admin package, this would
still be a hassle) In the case of changing template names this gave the yellow
screen of death because the document type was no longer able to locate the
template associated with it as it was renamed.
Eventually I exported all the document types and rewrote the
site without uSiteBuilder and replaced all user controls with razor scripts.
Last night it was interesting to see how other agencies
approach this:
We all seem to agree that having a standard approach to all
Umbraco projects in the team is the correct thing to do, but we had varying
opinions on what is probably an age old question about “front end” and “back
end”.
Rob (@restlesslake) feels that development in general has
become a lot more complex than it was 5 or 10 years ago, and with things
changing so much and so quickly, it’s more important than ever for agencies to
have defined ways of working in place.
Jon(@billywizz) agrees with this, but his agency have a much
larger back-end development team and less front-end developers therefore a tool
like uSiteBuilder is excellent for them as they can work in Visual Studio, have
source control and this is tightly controlled by the back-end team.
James(@james_m_south) feels very strongly about the
importance of distinction between front and back end. He feels that there
should be no grey area and instead clearly defined roles and areas of
responsibility
David(@dconlisk) agrees with Rob and said particularly with
the ongoing changes to Umbraco core, it’s next to impossible to maintain a
level of expertise in all technologies front and back-end. David feels that in
order to deliver the highest quality to the customer/client, he prefers to
outsource front-end work so that he can concentrate on back-end
Caroline(@cazkirhope) Feels that her time would better
utilised if the capable front end team were to take ownership of document types
and razor scripts, leaving her to concentrate on other back end work, or even
custom Umbraco work. She feels that a lot of her time would be unnecessarily
spent adding properties to a document type when a front end developer could
manage this change themselves.
I’m sure the uSiteBuilder / Ways of working debate will
continue for a while but feel free to add your own comments and experience
