Site refresh, now with more dog food

Monday, Jan 12, 2009 2 minute read Tags: umbraco
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

Any astute visitors to my website will have noticed a few changes today. And for those who didn't I don't really blame you, they aren't that obvious.

First off, I've upgraded my site to be running Umbraco 4 RC 1. It's been out for a while so I thought it was time I joined the hip crowd and started running it. I have been using it since Beta 2 on another site, but now I have my own running it as well.

Secondly I have refreshed the home page, no longer does it have a pointless blurb, now it shows the latest blog post.

Thirdly I have removed most of the AJAX loading from the blog component. I wrote it originally as a bit of a trial-and-error to see if I could do it, but it was really quite pointless, and ultimetly a real bitch to deal with. Plus it rendered the site useless when you had JavaScript turned off!
I've kept it for the comment submission because I was simply too lazy to re-write the whole thing last weekend, as odd as it may seem I do leave my computer sometimes!
Additionally I have changed the URLs to actually work with the standard Umbraco URLs. Now the post perm-links are the URL's generated from Umbraco, and you can navigate to months via the folder URL. Categories still work off a query-string parameter, but getting around that is more effort than I could be bothered with!

Forthly I am finally Dog Fooding with the UIL on this site. I wrote the blog engine with custom classes to represent my doc types originally, but now I have started using the UIL to provide it all.
I'm really happy at the way it did work as well and am preparing for a new release of the UIL, but I have also found some limitations with it which I will be addressing when looking at the v-Next of the UIL.

So I'm quite happy with the way it came together, even if it did take a hell of a lot longer to do this refresh than I had originally hoped (good thing the better half was busy for most of the weekend so I'm not in too much trouble!).