A First Look at umbraco Setup

My knowledge of CMS frameworks is very limited. I definitely understand their role and see the need for them, but outside of Sharepoint I don’t have much experience. This gives me a unique viewpoint that I hope to exploit for a few blogs! I have just started work for a client and we will be using umbraco. After a long period of research and comparison umbraco has been selected because of its light weight and open sourcedness Since I am just starting with it, I am going to chronicle the setup and configuration process, as well as try to discover some of the features that make working with umbraco and .NET very appealing.

My first stop along this journey is at the umbraco website. My first impression is definitely framed by the MMA video that is on the front of their site. According to the video, they like things that just get the job done. A funny way to make a point and an awesome reference to the movie Never Back Down.

After reading through the site I found the link to download umbraco off CodePlex. I am going to run through a setup of the free version, although I believe the client that I will be working with will be buying a supported version. I download the 4.5.1 version from the codeplex site. I did not opt for the web based installer version. It should be noted that I am working on a new Windows 7 VM with SQL Server Express R2 and VS 2010 installed.

Steps to configure Umbraco:
1.) Unzip the folder that was downloaded from the CodePlex site. Place the files in a folder that can be made a virtual directory in IIS. I am placing the files on my installation in C:\Projects\umbraco

2.) Configure the directory as an application in IIS. (This is a brand new VM. I had to do some installing of IIS and .NET 4. Hopefully you won’t have to do that. Nothing to do with umbraco)

3.) Load the website. Hopefully you see this screen.

4.) Accept the License.

5.) Create a database with the name that you would like your umbraco instance to use. I am calling the database name ‘Umbraco’

6.) Fill in the database information for your setup. You can select from 3 different database types. I will be using the SQL Server Driver.

7.) Click ‘Install’ to install the database tables.

8.) Validate the permissions. On my install I got the following message and didn’t have to do anything else.

9.) Set a new admin password.

10.) For this run through I am going to install ‘Runway’ so that I can hopefully see some of the cool features of umbraco. I am sure that in production that isn’t something that is installed.

11.) Launch umbraco and login!

*Note that when I first attempted to install Runway I got the error below. After some research I found this thread on the umbraco forum. The advice was to hit the back button and attempt the install again. Sure enough I hit the back button, made no changes to the page, clicked install and it worked.

Overall I found the installation process to be pretty easy to follow and bar the one exception thrown when installing ‘Runway’. I am looking forward to getting into umbraco and playing with some features. More blogs to come!