This is one of the most lonliest developer comunities I've ever been a part of. Sad but true. I had high hopes for Umbraco and I just love the interface; both from a user and a developer perspective, but let's face it: the true power of an open source platform lies in the help you can get from the combined user community and with Umbraco I'm not impressed.

From the first time I downloaded Umbraco and installed it on my developer machine to try it out I've felt abandoned and alone. Noone wants to respond to my posts on this forum regardless of the amount of effort I put into describing my problems and let's face it: Umbraco is a small platform compated to the big ones. Free - yes, but the key issue for me is not if it's free or not (I don't foot the bill) but rather if I can recommend it to my clients or not. After having evaluating it and tested the abilities of its abilities combined with it's poor user community today I'd be hesitant to recommend it to any of my clients.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to be able to contribute to this project but when I find "TO-DO" comments in essensial code (navigation redirect code) that create errors in my test websites, how can you can't expect me to sit in a meeting with my clients and recommend them to go with Umbraco? If I had to choose between that and and write a CMS of my own I'd go with the later alternative, just because the support is so poor. Yes, it wouldn't have as many features and it would take some time to write it but when (if) my client returns with a problem at least I'd be able to tell them what's wrong and correct the problem. With Umbraco I feel like it's all a big Black Box insufficient support to guide me.

---

Web Developer at Kärnhuset - http://www.karnhuset.net - Stockholm, Sweden

It's always sad to see people go from bad experiences.

However, the average response time in the forum is still around two hours, with more than 95% of posts getting replies. Others have had great experiences with this forum, a month back we even got a cms challenger award for our community. Despite I'm being extremely happy with the community, I still believe that the true power of an open source platform lies in not being bound to the "strategies" of a specific vendor with the community coming hot in the heels.

Regarding your experience, I looked through your posts and it doesn't looks like you were completely abandoned to me. As you mention in one of your post, your question regarding missing literals was a quite specific problem for you, thus not getting help from others. As Casey mentions this is where someone in the core group usually helps, but we've tied all resources to finishing v3 and helping people with support plans. Second there's the timing - it's my experience that November and December usually are the most busy periods for consultants leaving less time for volunteer support.


Remember that in your case, you've chosen to rely on volunteer support. We got paid support plans where you can get a reply within a guaranteed response time.


The TO-DO comment had nothing to do with your error - it was due to the extension you used that wasn't compatible with running umbraco in a subdir. It's recommended best-practice to use umbraco in the root of your website. umbraco will work fine as an application in a subdir, but some extensions might not work (just like umbraco works in medium trust, but giving limited possibilities for extensions).

We use todo comments to specify areas in the code that could be improved/beautified (as the one you're referring to) but works. Instead of spending the hours paying too much attention to trifling details, we use them where they make a difference to the end user/developers. We leave a todo note, so when/if we get the time we can make ourselves more happy with the code. As such there are no parts of the core umbraco code that has known critical issues when released. Sometimes this has delayed an umbraco version, but we've found it crucial not to release buggy software, rather than following the service-pack trend :o)

With all this in mind, you've still had a bad experience and that sucks. We're still an upcoming platform. We're not hundreds of thousand people in this forum, but that past years have proved to most people, that a dedicated group of around 250 volunteer helpers can still answer more than 10.000 questions.

In 2007 we'll be releasing v3, offer courses, improve the documentation radically and refine the ways to get professional support and software warranties.

I hope you'll give us another chance - I think it'll pay off!

Happy new year!
Niels...

---

Jeeeez, did I really start this :-)

Hi Kahn,

I havent checked your postings but I'm a bit surprised about your situation. I've been a part of this community for a long time and it's IMHO doing a great job. The best actually. Maybe your questions where very specific or in new areas or too timeconsuming. You always have the option of buying support from the core team or anyone else - that should give you all the attention you need.

Good luck with whatever you choose and happy newyear everyone! :cool:

Kindly

Jesper

---

webbureau jesper.com doing webdesign / development / umbraco implementations / 2007&2008 MVP

Hello all,
I am going to give my two cents to this discussion. Personally I found that sometimes my questions don't get answered either, but I find the majority of them do get answered and help me out. Without the forum I wouldn't have been able to get some great functionality that I have in some umbraco sites.

I have only personally got back into the office today from being off over Xmas and New Year and I am personally very busy with alot of work to do, so I am unable to look at the forum as much I would like to and I think this would be the same for alot of people, as paid work as has a much higher prioty.

Happy new year to you all.

Warren :)

---

Warren Buckley an Umbraco MVP 08-09 & level 1 certified developer

I think a message such as "I don't know, but.." is better than nothing at all, if only to reassure new Umbraco users that they are indeed part of a community. When I first started using Umbraco one of the developers I worked with had a few problems, so posted on this forum. After a few days I heard him say "I guess they don't like me or something, as I never get any replies"!

I personally have found that the forum is a decent mechanism for help. I have posted numerous questions that have gotten excellent replies, and I have posted questions which never got any reply. I imagine that most forums have a similar situation. Things that tend to cause a topic to go unreplied to:

1. Unclear or overly complex post (if it will take someone a substantial amount of time to even understand the question, the effort usually appears to be too much)
2. Poor subject line (can make it seem to readers that they have no knowledge of the problem, and they might not even read it)
3. An unusually busy day on the forum (your post can roll off the homepage before many people have a chance to see it)
4. No one who reads the post feels they can answer it (lack of experience with the issue)
5. A similar question has already been answered on the forum before and people don't want to answer it again (try to do a search before posting)

I think some forum improvements could go towards improving the experience of visitors (some of which have been addressed in the partial forum rewrite (http://forum.umbraco.org/new-forum/), which unfortunately has stalled):

1. More categories so posts can be better organized
2. Ability for the topic to be "solved" (via a check-mark or something), so that queries could be run to look for unsolved topics.
3. Perhaps an additional "Profile" option which we could each set for ourselves: umbraco Proficiency (newbie, confident, expert, developer), so we can keep newbies from getting lost, and everyone can get to know each other better.

In the meantime, my thoughts about this forum and getting the most out of it:

Being an open-source (and generally gratis) software product, expecting the core development team to spend oodles of time trolling around the forum to answer posts is asking a lot. I personally want to applaud and sincerely thank the core dev team who puts in mostly unpaid labor to create a better product for all of us. (And also to those intrepid package developers who keep us all working on new things, not reinventing the wheel!) With that said, I have often seen the most knowledgeable umbracians (and .Net programmers) frequently answering posts.

All of us should remember to do our part to contribute to the success of the project, the forum, and to personally welcoming new people to the fold. Every great team player was once a newbie themselves. Each of us who has posted questions on the forum in the past should also take a few minutes to answer the questions of others, to the best of our abilities. We all need to be mindful of our personal "Forum Karma" (and I feel that as far as I can see, there aren't many freeloaders here).

Thomas and John, I personally apologize for your poor experience here. All I can offer is an echo of Warren's thoughts - all of us here are developers for whom umbraco is only a part of our work lives. Speaking for myself (and probably at least a portion of others here), I am completely a "one-woman" operation, and don't have any paid time to spend online (I only get paid for delivered websites!). In other words ALL of us are volunteers to this cause, and with that in mind, I think we do a pretty good job here.

My general impression of this community is MORE favorable than others I have explored (Xoops, for instance). I have found it to be intimate, yes, but also friendly and genuinely helpful. Sure, sometimes my post goes unanswered, but I don't ever feel it is out of malice or snobbery. I have never witnessed flaming, insults, or other disrespectful behavior in this forum or otherwise in the community. My advice to any lonely newbie is that it might seem daunting at first - there is a lot to learn, but to become part of this group of caring people is a special thing.

Apologies for this long post, but I needed to chime in.

Blessings of the New Year to Everyone,

Heather

Hi Heather,

Thanks for your thoughts and notes on this. I don't want to sound unappreciative, as after all I have chosen Umbraco over all the other available CMS I have seen for good reasons - because I believe its the best package for what I am trying to do. So thanks to all the devs for that.

But what I am trying to say is just to bear in mind that Umbraco has a higher learning curve than some competitors because of the use of XSLT, and therefore there are a number of potential users who will dabble with an installation and immediately give up through lack of apparent support. These are the same potential users who will, with luck, eventually start answering questions on the forum themselves (hopefully including me!). But they are not likely to financially invest in support, at least until they have had a chance to evaluate the product properly and are certain they want to use Umbraco.

John

Hi Thomas,

I've had troubles getting the source to build in VS2005 as well, but I eventually got it sorted out. Here are two threads I started on the subject:

http://forum.umbraco.org/installing/creating-a-build-from-the-svn-using-vs2005

http://forum.umbraco.org/4106#post-4106

Tom

Thanks Tom and Casey!

I have downloaded IISAdmin and will try it out the next time i sit down with Umbraco. :)

I have also checked out the tread regarding compiling the source code in VS 2005 but I'm affraid I have nothing to contribute at the moment. Perhaps v3 will solve the problem. :)

---

Web Developer at Kärnhuset - http://www.karnhuset.net - Stockholm, Sweden

Doug, you are more than helpful as it is! I'm surprised you have time for your business and your software projects when I see the number of helful posts that you contribute with in this forum.

Looking back I think it's a bit more complex than just frustration over Umbraco, scanty documentation and a steep learning curve. I was going through some rough times in my personal life at the time and just like The Stones, if I saw a red door I wanted to paint it black. And in this case the red door just happened to be Umbraco and the forum. ;-)

But apart from that I think that the major fact that made me stick around and really put an effort into learning Umbraco was you and the other fequent posters that contributed with small helpful answers that cheered me on, bit by bit. I admire your patience!

Also, for me there was no alternative. Previously I hade built sites with CMS's that I had developed myself from scratch and knowing the amount of work I knew that eventhough learning Umbraco (and XML/XSLT) would take time, it would be nothing compared to building my own solution from the ground up.

In my opinion, what Umbraco would really need is a physical book. I saw that there are instruction films in the pipeline and it's cool, but I don't think that the film format suits everyone. I have two small kids so I don't have time to sit in front of the computer at home and at work I work. But I commute by train 2-3 hours every day and when I'm on the train I have time to sit down and read. Thick books read on the train has taught me ActionScript/Flash, XML/XSLT, Google Analytics/SEO and may other things, just in the last year. It's very effective! On the other hand I'm very much aware of the amount of time and effort writing a book requires. A book also needs a strong hand in the form of a firm editor/publisher (I would almost like to say enlightened despot) and since Umbraco is a very democratic project it might be difficult to pull off?

---

Web Developer at Kärnhuset - http://www.karnhuset.net - Stockholm, Sweden