Why We Love Umbraco

Welcome to the Bonsai Blog, where we will be talking about why we love Umbraco, specifically focusing on features best supporting Content Administrators on sites.

 

Bonsai x Umbraco

Bonsai Media Group has been a Gold Certified Partner since 2011. Umbraco has enabled us to build amazing experiences for our clients and help companies grow their business. We’ve won several awards because of it, working with companies large and small. We built Amazon's internal HR site, as well as Primeline, iSupport, Seattle's Union Gospel Mission and many others.

 

For those who are unfamiliar, Umbraco is an enterprise CMS built on the .NET framework and is open source. It's used by Microsoft, Amazon, Bank of America, Mercedes and countless other fortune 100 companies because of its rich set of content publishing capabilities and its bank level security. There are over 500,000 active installs, a community of over 220,000 developers and over 1,200 free Umbraco packages. Their packages include SEO, Google Map integration, and just about anything else you’d need. In addition, Umbraco hosts apps so you can easily connect your existing systems, such as newsletter integration, forms, e-commerce, and many more.

 

Umbraco’s support training and community is unmatched. As a gold level partner, we’re able to speak directly with the core development team at HQ. Their training also includes Umbraco TV, documentation, and free webinars. The Umbraco community has forums, guides and as well as meetups happening all around the world, including right here in the great Northwest!

 

Now that we've got a good idea of what Umbraco is, let's get into the back end and see how it works. We’ll be going through some examples of version 7 and version 8. To follow along with our YouTube video, click here.

 

Features

Images: Umbraco does the work for you when converting image sizes. For example, when uploading a 2.3MB image, it converts it to 51KB automatically. Umbraco optimizes the image for the web without having to do any fancy tricks. It also gives you multiple crop sizes based on the focal point you’ve selected. This ensures that the site is fast loading whether it’s on a mobile device or HD retina screen.

 

Video: Adding video is also a very easy process. Add the link to the video you wish to use, and Umbraco automatically pulls the embed code. You also have the option to resize the video if needed.

 

Google Maps: You can also easily embed Google Maps into your site. By grabbing the code from your “embed a map” tab on your business's location on Google, you simply paste it into the source code in Umbraco. Now you have an interactive Google Map on your page!

 

Rollback: Content administrators especially love this feature because it allows you to revert the page back to an earlier version if something is accidently deleted and published. Umbraco keeps version files handy in case of emergency. No need to recreate any sections of the page that you decide you actually want to keep.

 

Scheduled publishing: Another content administrator favorite, is the ability to schedule out when a page is going to be published down to the date and time. Similarly, you can schedule out a page to be unpublished at a certain date and time if a special has ended and is no longer available. 

 

Content publishing workflow: This allows more people in your organization to get involved with creating content, whether that’s blogs, thought leadership, or creating landing pages. If you are logged in as a ‘writer,’ your work will be saved and sent for approval and won’t actually be published. The content admin will get a notification and will be able to publish the work once reviewed.

 

Up Next

Next week our blog will review features that designers and developers love about Umbraco. Stay tuned!

You can also watch our full youtube video on Why We Love Umbraco.

 

Interested in how we can use Umbraco to build your business's website? Have more questions about how to use Umbraco? Drop us a line here

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