Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

Hello all,
It’s been a while since I have last made a blog on this site. Well I have literally got back from CodeGaren07 just now which I blog about in another post about my experiences.

For those of you who attended CodeGarden07 you may have been aware that I was due to release a NEW website package to the community and some of you may have seen glimpses of it during sessions here and there.

When I first started using Umbraco about a year and half ago now, I struggled to use Umbraco at first as there was no real documentation (but this due to change - HURRAY for Umbraco Books). So I taught myself anyway possible and one of the best ways I learnt was downloading and installing the website package and looking how documents, templates and XSLTs and so on was all used together to build the website. So this package is aimed more for new people to the umbraco platform to learn and understand how to build common elements of a website.

The aim for this package is to release it to the community and see what needs to be improved/fixed/tweaked by feedback I receive from you guys & girls, but where I would like to see this package going is that people release new CSS for the website package so that the design and layout can be changed easily. If you do not know what I mean an excellent exmaple of this is CSSZenGarden which uses the same HTML structure but a different CSS file to change the look and feel of the site.

Well rather than “doing a Niels” and trying to reach perfection, I am going to let it loose into the wild TODAY and continue to work on it and improve it from all of your feedback. OK now this introduction is over - lets get to the nitty gritty !

The site features

• News & Events area (Change listing by sortOrder, createDate, updateDate and autodiscovery RSS feed)
• Contact form (Customise message, SMTP details, Subject etcc & logs records to a text file)
• HCard Microformat (HCard to VCard via Technorati)
• Gallery area (List mutiple galleries)
• Email a Friend (Customise email message sent, SMTP details etc)
• XSLT Search (Doug Robar’s XSLT search)
• Opensearch that uses Doug Robars XSLT Search
• Sematnic XHTML
• Design & layout run entirely from CSS

The only requirment is that the umbraco is running .NET 2 as I have used usercontrols that use the validation from .NET2

Whilst I am away in New York for a holiday I would appreciate that if you could look over and evalutate this package and give me any feedback where possible please. So drop me a comment and I look forward to all your responses, good or bad - but don’t break my heart