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Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a

Am I in the minority where I hope that this creates a larger ecosystem of open-source content management systems? I use Umbraco because I am effectively given a blank slate to create any type of website I wish, and it doesn't come with any templates or document/content types by default. I've put an enormous amount of work into customizing the software, prior to there being decent documentation (yet the best documentation is the actual code, which I've studied for over a decade). My sales people still have to regularly fight the "why not Wordpress?" question from business leaders, even though I can run on less than the minimum requirements, and am able to provide security fixes quickly while keeping everything in Git. I would hazard that my solution is more custom tailored to individual clients, without needing to jump through hoops, and can break down individual parts of a page into easier to reason about properties (textbox for page title, RTE for general page content, custom sidebar content pickers for reusable sidebar content). Back in 2013 when I got started with Umbraco, it was more about trying to emulate what users wanted from Wordpress, but over the years it became more about a custom tailored experience for each type of "content" one might want to create in a website. "Posts" that allow categorization, tagging, and listing in date/time order. Company directories that list individual company profiles, which have a profile thumbnail and full-size image, fields that can be labeled on an index page for things like phone, email, fax, etc. while also providing a full profile page for further details. Photo and video galleries, that make it easy for an end user to paste in YouTube videos, or link to a photo thumbnail and full-sized image with a lightbox effect, but also a full page for SEO purposes.

btown 2y ago
Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence. (Nice username, btw!)
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  I agree, and thank you for the username shout-out! In the past I would agree with you about Umbraco, and I guess I still partially agree because Wordpress is in PHP which is easier to learn, modern Umbraco should be very easy to learn. Part of that is probably that I favor making things very explicit and easy to read, over performance benefits. For a CMS, there aren't a TON of performance benefits other than not pulling all your data from the CMS in your view templates. This is very common in Umbraco code, but often the same code works in services called by one-liner controllers. I still write mostly MVC code, but have written my own "to-disk" caching layer, as well as built APIs to make use of Cloudflare to do per-page or global cache-breaking. I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations). I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).

btown 2y ago

Part of the value proposition of Wordpress is that it doesn't depend on a single developer or team having decades of deep knowledge of a system like Umbraco; any number of contractors can be parachuted in, at least in theory, to take over a site design if the content is in Wordpress. I would venture to say that many companies opting for Wordpress know that they don't have a culture that can retain devs with decades of experience, and value the popularity of a platform like Wordpress... even if the assumptions it's based on, in regards to rendering Images and Words in specific ways, are far from ideal and indeed introduce varying degrees of inner turbulence. (Nice username, btw!)

progmetaldev 2y ago
I agree, and thank you for the username shout-out! In the past I would agree with you about Umbraco, and I guess I still partially agree because Wordpress is in PHP which is easier to learn, modern Umbraco should be very easy to learn. Part of that is probably that I favor making things very explicit and easy to read, over performance benefits. For a CMS, there aren't a TON of performance benefits other than not pulling all your data from the CMS in your view templates. This is very common in Umbraco code, but often the same code works in services called by one-liner controllers. I still write mostly MVC code, but have written my own "to-disk" caching layer, as well as built APIs to make use of Cloudflare to do per-page or global cache-breaking. I went from learning .NET/ASP.NET, to my current employer in 2007 using PHP and some esoteric languages/runtimes (HTML/OS from Aestiva was what I started using, as my boss knew it well). I learned design patterns and was able to make an ass out of all the code fitting in design patterns anywhere I could, because these initial sites got very little traffic. Over time, I moved to other languages, and searched out the easiest to read way to perform anything only rewriting for very critical pieces of code that needed high-performance. 98% of sites roughly, do not need that (but I work on mostly commercial informational websites for corporations). I know that doesn't totally dismiss the usage of Wordpress, but my usage of .NET is intentionally very minimal unless there is a major performance impact with more esoteric parts of the language (which a normal .NET dev would not consider esoteric, BTW, just confusing for a beginner dev). Most of the code I write is just mapping the field names from content items to objects of the document type that's being accessed/I need to render. Being strongly typed is a nice benefit, and I've done a lot of work with working through garbage collection. I can usually run a large website at approximately 200MB, with the application consistently running. Throwing the solution at a junior would be bad, but I could give a high-level overview in 15 minutes, with an hour telling juniors where to look for further information (plus being happy to mentor for those that want to dig deeper).