Why umbraco rocks

09 April 2008 by Niels Hartvig
Ok, maybe a bit pompous but I just had an eureka moment this morning about umbraco.

As some of you know there's a pretty heavy debate going on in one of my previous posts regarding a Danish company who "stole" umbraco and marked it as their own (Per made an English summary). Unfortunately the debate has begun to suffer from anonymous posts and that's just something I can't stand.

But as a blog owner what do you do with anonymous posts, do you delete them and suddenly start being the "god" of the debate, do you just let them stay and indirectly encourage other people to by anynomous?

No, you hide them with the option of showing them and that's where my eureka moment with umbraco came. In less than five minutes I had modified my umbraco installation to support this. I added a tab on the "Comment" document type called moderation with two properties:
1) Hide comment (true/false)
2) Reason for hiding (multiline textfield)

Then I added a simple choose (switch) statement in the XSLT drawing the comments and voila.

You can see the solution in action here.

Now, there might be some Wordpress fans outthere saying that this is probably already default in Wordpress (which rocks for blogging btw). But my point is not about blogging software - it's about the agile perspective with umbraco. That the flexibility of umbraco makes it so easy to do things like this without turning them into projects.

And that's why I took the freedom to be a bit pompous ;-)

5 comment(s) for “Why umbraco rocks”

  1. Ismail Mayat Says:
    Ill give you another reason why it rocks.

    I had very tight deadline this morning for umbraco 217 site. I did control with ajax control toolkit. Created my macro and it went boom. Oops v2 doesnt have head tag run at server. Got onto forums sjors pointed me in the right direction in the source code.

    Did another search for 217 source pulled it down took a method from v3 source put into 2 and BOH SELECTAH.

    End of a stressful day!
  2. Christian Foged Says:
    I saw it in the other thread that you linked to, and I instantly thought that you had done a nice little hack in your installation.

    ...btw nice to rule out peeps who are afraid to say who they are.

    Kudos to you and Umbraco :)
  3. Tim Geyssens Says:
    Flexibility is definitelythe the number one "why umbraco rocks" feature for me !

    I got inspired by your post, hope you don't mind, check it out here: www.nibble.be
  4. Andreas Ek Says:
    Ja, Umbraco verkar flexibelt och vi är sugna på att testa det i projekt.
  5. Sheri Says:
    Sorry to leave this here, but I couldn't find a better spot...

    I've been reviewing Umbraco and I have to suggest updating the vastly outdated info on the CMS Matrix (cmsmatrix.org) site to reflect all the changes you've made! The matrix is how I found you, but it no longer does your product justice. For starters, it looks like you haven't done a release in 4 years!

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