Umbraco

The current, editable version of this book is available in Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection, at
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Umbraco

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Installation

Requirements

Current system requirements can be seen on the Umbraco website.

Existing installation tutorials

An installation guide is available at the Umbraco website.

A hosted cloud version is also available from Umbraco, which eliminates the need for local installation.

Post install

You may wish to employ a method to disable the output of Debugging information when you install a production instance of Umbraco. See the Reference section for more details.

Templating

Templates

Templating/Templates

Templates in Umbraco defines the general layout of the public website, the template combined with a document, outputs a webpage – by ensuring that content and presentation is separated in different layers of the application, it’s guaranteed that you can change one layer without compromising the other. Umbraco itself does not generate any HTML, the webpages of the public website, are 100% generated from the HTML in the templates and data from the documents (for some webpages, a subset of the HTML comes from macros – more on that subject later).

This means that the web developer is 100% in charge of what kind of the HTML output that is served when a user visits the website.

FAQ

This is a list of frequently asked questions.

Hosting

Where can I host Umbraco?

Umbraco offers an official cloud hosting service

Many webhosts also offer Umbraco hosting.

If you have your own datacenter or server, it's possible to host Umbraco yourself.

Installation

While the installation process, a 'invalid object name umbracoUser' error occures

This error may appear, if the web.config-key "umbracoEnableStat" is changed from false to true prior the installation. The key must not be changed to anything else than false until the installation procedure using the wizard is completed.

It seems it is possible that the installation is ready to continue but for some reason does not do so. Try browsing to http://localhost/install and setup might continue (if your installation is in http://localhost)

This error may also appear when umbraco is installed in a virtual directory. When your virtual directory is named myvirtualdir, change the web.config in a way that the keys umbracoReservedPaths and umbracoPath contain the name of the virtual directory, like <add key="umbracoReservedPaths" value="/myvirtualdir/umbraco,/myvirtualdir/install/" /> and <add key="umbracoPath" value="/myvirtualdir/umbraco" />

The above is perhaps misleading, Umbraco does not support being installed in a virtual directory.

After successful installation a 'No node found' error occures

After successful installation the following error occures:

No node found (http://localhost/default.aspx?umbPage=/default.aspx, '/root/node [@urlName = ""] | /root/node')

This is because there aren't any pages yet. Go to your administration area (http://foo.bar/umbraco), login and create some content first.

Getting Started

I've installed Umbraco, now what?

There are three screencasts here which will introduce you to the Umbraco UI and how to get started creating Document types and templates.

Configuration

Email Configuration

Where can I configure my SMTP server?

The SMTP server is set in the web.config file which is in the root folder of your Umbraco installation.

You need to set the following key:

<add key="umbracoSmtpServer" value="127.0.0.1"/>

How can I change the email address that notifications are sent from?

The sender of notifications is set in the umbracoSettings.xml which is in the config folder under the root of your Umbraco installation.

You need to modify the following section to contain the e-mail address you wish to use as the sender:

<notifications>
	<!-- the email that should be used as from mail when umbraco sends a notification -->
	<email>darren@xxxx.com</email>
</notifications>

You might also need to change the settings in formHandlers.xml located in the same directory

	<parameter alias="sender">robot@umbraco.dk</parameter>

How can I change the text in the Umbraco notifications Email?

The notification Email message is set in the appropriate localised xml file for he language that you are using in the directory umbraco\config\lang under your Umbraco installation directory.

You will need to modify the following section:

<area alias="notifications" version="2.1">
	<key alias="notifications" version="2.1">Notifications</key>
	<key alias="editNotifications" version="2.1">Edit your notification for %0%</key>
	<key alias="mailSubject" version="2.1">[%0%] Notification about %1% performed on %2%</key>
	<key alias="mailBody" version="2.1">
Hello %0%

This is an automated mail to inform you that the task '%1%'
has been performed on the page '%2%'
by the user '%3%'
		
Go to http://%4%/umbraco/default.aspx?section=content&id=%5% to edit.
			
	</key>
</area>

Umbraco settings

How could I set a default 404 error page?

Open /config/umbracoSettings.xml Find the line that says <error404>1</error404> and replace 1 with the id of the page you want to show.

<errors>
   <!--  the id of the page that should be shown if the page is not found --> 
   <error404>1</error404> 
</errors>

If you are using IIS7 you have to add the following to web.config;

<system.webServer>
  <httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />
</system.webServer>

How could I Use DirectoryUrls?

Why should you enable this? This changes the links to the pages from example http://www.mydomain.com/news.aspx to http://www.mydomain.com/news

Open /config/umbracoSettings.xml Find the line that says <umbracoUseDirectoryUrls>false</umbracoUseDirectoryUrls> and replace false with true. It should then be like this

   <umbracoUseDirectoryUrls>true</umbracoUseDirectoryUrls>

Then you have to let IIS handle all requests.

IIS 6.0 2003 server

Follow these instructions [1]

Templating

How could I display a page with an alternative template?

Just set the 'altTemplate' parameter in the query string to the alias of your desired template. For example

http://foo.bar/page.aspx?altTemplate=MyAltTemplateAlias

Rich-Text Editor

How do I change the stylesheet that is used in the built-in editor?

You can change the behavior by adding some editor css to the first stylesheet in the list.

#holderBody {
	background: #fff;
}

#holder {
	border: 1px solid #ccc;
	padding: 10px;
	margin: 5px;
	text-align: left;
}

Where can I get help?

Help is available from

Umbraco Forum: https://our.umbraco.com/forum

Reference

umbraco.library v4.0.1: Most methods are currently missing documentation, but are listed.

Umbraco XML Format the format in which Umbraco exposes its content repository for manipulation via XSLT or programatically.

Debugging

Generating images with TextGen.aspx

Authentication using Umbraco Members

Plugins And Extensions

Plugins and Extensions

Samples and Articles

Help Out

How to help out with Umbraco.

Report Bugs

Information on reporting bugs and defects in Umbraco can be found at http://www.umbraco.org/frontpage/documentation/bugs.aspx

The bugreporting page at umbraco.org is not working so here is a link to http://bugs.umbraco.org/Issues.aspx?m=1

Make a Donation

Information on donating to the Umbraco project can be found here http://www.umbraco.org/frontpage/about/donate.aspx

Donations are needed to finish Umbraco V3 - http://umbraco.org/frontpage/sponsorumbracov3.aspx

Contribute to the Wiki

Need I explain?

Typical errors

Links

Blogs and pages about umbraco - a free open source .NET content management system.

Contribution guidelines

General Wiki Information

Help on contributing to this Wikibook is available at Help:Editing

Spell Checking

Please try and spell check contributions before adding them to the Wiki.

Requests for content

If there are any information you feel that the Wiki is missing then please add them as sub-sections of this section.

If you decide to create a requested page then please remove the request from this section after you are done.

Current Requests

Setting up an online store with the E-Commerce plugin
Creating a contact us form

Improving this article sections

If you feel that something that you contribute to the Wiki is incomplete, or could be improved, please add a section entitled Improving this article to the end of your contribution detailing the enhancements that you would like to see.

This should allow others to pick up and polish off work that you don't have time to do.

Empty sections

Please don't create empty or placeholder sections. Only create sections if you have content to contribute.

If you have an idea for a new section please post it in the discussion section of this page.

Images and screenshots

An example of a UI screenshot of Umbraco.

Wherever possible, use UI screenshots to illustrate examples of using Umbraco.

Code snippets and examples

Code snippets and samples should be surrounded by code tags.