Watch out - this article gets very technical in places!

Supporting the Umbraco CMS product is the strength of its open source development community. The UK Festival is just one example of the networking which goes on by developers working together to make Umbraco one of the open source software greats.  

The festival was held at the Mayfair Conference Centre, London and was the second event of its type. Roughly 135 Umbraco enthusiasts attended the meeting and based on the amount of people on the waiting list, next year is set to be even bigger. Governor is an Umbraco Certified Partner and this puts us in frequent contact with the fantastic community of developers which help make this open source CMS platform so successful.

The 2011 Umbraco Festival featured a range of speakers from various backgrounds including: 



Niels Hartvig, Umbraco founder 

Alex Norcliffe, one of the leading technical experts involved in Umbraco 5 

Martin Beeby, HTML5 and web evangelist at Microsoft 

The day kicked off with a keynote session about the latest development in Umbraco 5. This version is a complete rewrite of the project and is being implemented in ASP.NET MVC and is currently in Beta.

What might have come as a shock to some is the fact that Umbraco 5 will officially drop support for XSLT - a style sheet language which has proved to be very popular in the past due to its ease of use and speed of content querying. However, this will be replaced by a ASP.NET view engine, Razor, which can be directly integrated into templates and is a definite improvement in terms of the amount of code required to do the same tasks. It is worth noting that Razor support has been available since Umbraco 4.6.

Another new introduction to Umbraco 5 is its new data layer called Hive. This replaces the in-memory XML data and can be queried directly with Razor to output dynamic HTML. The default content provider for Hive is NHibernate 3. Alternatively, you can make use of your own provider by specifying this is the new, friendlier configuration files. It also allows the developer to stack multiple providers together, including a Hive caching provider.

"This year's Umbraco Festival was packed with useful knowledge and new features - I can't wait to get my hands dirty trying them out." Rigardt Pheiffer,  Governor Technology

One personal highlight of the 2011 UK Umbraco festival was the mention of Knockout, a MVVM pure JavaScript library which is the chosen method for the Umbraco 5 backend. This allows you to maintain a clean and easy-to-follow UI interaction by making use of its key concepts namely: Declarative Bindings, Automatic UI Refresh, Dependency Tracking and HTML Templating. It was also made clear that this is not a replacement for jQuery but rather an alternative approach. Each method has its place and they can also be used in conjunction with each other.

Another informative session was presented on the topic of WebHooks. A WebHook is a HTTP POST that can be sent over the internet to notify some subscriber that a particular event has occurred. This binds in very nicely with the rich event model of Umbraco and it was shown that without much difficulty how external subscribers can be notified when certain events have been triggered in the Umbraco backend. One example might be to trigger auto content publication in one Umbraco site based on content being published in another Umbraco site. All data necessary for processing on the receiving side will be sent with the HTTP POST.

The day concluded with the last session presented by Martin Beeby on The Web As It Should Be with the main focus on HTML5. As part of this, he demonstrated the Movember HTML5 demonstration "Mobelly" that we at Governor Technology developed for uBelly as part of its Movember publicity. (Movember is a campaign during November each year; during which thousands of men grow moustaches in order to raise awareness and vital funds for cancers that affect men, specifically prostate cancer. Our Account Manager Richard Beaumont is growing his Movember moustache).

The Movember HTML5 piece we developed for uBelly makes use of a JavaScript facial recognition algorithm to superimpose a moustache on a team member video. It showcases a great example of combining HML5 Video, Canvas and Javascript. This clip is also great for women who can't grow a moustache but still are eager to participate.  

These were just some of the topics discussed, so head off to the official site for the video recordings and a more detailed coverage off all the speakers and their discussions. We look forward to seeing what's in store at the 2012 Umbraco Festival.