Umbraco CMS: A Beginner's Guide
Content Management System or simply CMS lets you create, modify and manage content on your website with limited technical knowledge.
In simple words, CMS can help you build a website without having to code from scratch. It offers flexibility, tremendous user experience, and useful content production tools to empower the users.
Most of you would have heard about WordPress which is a well-known CMS. However, it is not the only one in town. With popular CMSs like WordPress being vulnerable to increased security attacks, the need for a highly secure and powerful CMS arose.
Enter - Umbraco CMS, a robust CMS that possesses advanced features and capabilities vis-a-vis its competitors. With a huge community following, you are bound to get regular updates and help if you are a Umbraco user.
Let us understand more about Umbraco CMS in this post.
Table of Contents
- What is Umbraco CMS?
- Umbraco Architecture
- Features of Umbraco CMS
- When to use Umbraco CMS
- Bottomline
What is Umbraco CMS?
Umbraco is an open-source content management system that is capable of creating aesthetic and responsive websites. It can be viewed from any device or browser. Built using the .NET framework and C# as its source language, Umbraco was launched for general availability in 2004. It is currently reigning as one of the best .NET-based CMS in the market. Also, it boasts of being one of the most deployed web CMSs to the Microsoft Stack with a staggering 500000 installations all around the world.
Umbraco Architecture
Umbraco is configured to scale up and handle high traffic rates. It is also designed to handle multiple requests at once. For instance, it uses one web app at the front end and another one at the backend, such that it constitutes two web apps and five components. They are:
1. Web app: As mentioned above, Umbraco uses two web apps; one at the frontend and another at the backend(admin).
2. SQL: The SQL DB is used to store your website’s content and is used by both your frontend and backend(admin) web apps.
3. Storage: To store all your media files in Azure cloud storage and make retrieval and pushing easy.
4. Cache: It stores your session state and renders results on the frontend seamlessly. It improves performance and lessens load time for your customers.
5. Application insights: Provides valuable insights such as performance issues, crashes, time customers spent, and their history in your web app.
Features of Umbraco CMS
- Umbraco clouds
Umbraco clouds provide easy hosting options from small to big websites. Backed up by Microsoft Azure, it provides scalable infrastructure for your websites to handle large traffic requests and manage multiple environments without any fuss. You can deploy the website with a single click.
- User-friendly editing experience
Integrated workflows provide an editing experience that is seamless and smooth - one which is termed ‘infinite editing’ in Umbraco. Multi-device preview allows the editor to add content to one device and preview it on other devices. It also allows the editor to preview the content from the visitors’ eyes. This will allow you to understand how your content will look for different users using different devices.
- Templates
To build your websites with ease, Umbraco offers customizable templates that you can use to give your website the required aesthetic appeal. You can add, update or even delete these customizable templates. These templates are sets of predefined HTML pages.
- Razor support
One reason why Umbraco has such a huge .NET community following is that it provides support for Razor, which is the programming syntax for ASP.NET. It helps to build dynamic and responsive web pages using C#.
- Headless CMS
Umbraco has adopted the latest headless CMS features. The term headless means that the frontend and backend are decoupled and are independent. The content delivery part is usually API-driven and yet it is displayed in the frontend.
When to use Umbraco CMS?
Umbraco CMS can be used to build any type of internet application, be it small personal websites or large enterprise applications, or even massive eCommerce stores. In summary, Umbraco can be a good fit for:
- Enterprise portals that serve as a communication medium between its partners and users.
- Websites with a large number of pages. For instance, an online news website
- Ecommerce stores selling clothing accessories or sports goods
- Personal sites and blogs
- Local community portals
- Landing pages for enterprises that talk about the company’s products, vision, and partners
- Any app or website with lots of integrations and plugins.
Umbraco can also be extended to any package or project. For instance, marketing automation tools like Hubspot can be a great asset to your marketing team in managing content.
Bottomline
Umbraco is a mature CMS that is built on .NET Core. Many businesses using ASP.NET are migrating to Umbraco today. So, if you are planning to replace your old CMS or use a new one, Umbraco is something you should definitely consider. Thousands of designers, developers, and companies favor this CMS due to its flexibility and efficiency.