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I have deliberately used “and” in the title to avoid “Umbraco vs DotnetNuke”. This is not technical comparison between the two nor overview of either one of those CMSes. It’s simply a short story why we started using Umbraco, in parallel to DNN, after many years of DNN development. Being of technical background but economics and management education, I like to think I can serve as a bridge between those two worlds. Most of my working time I organize and manage people within company, but development is my passion which I don’t let go. So, this is a view from my perspective.
DotNetNuke was a great .NET based open source CMS. We started using it for our clients with version 2. Quickly we started building powerful websites in no time. Clients loved WYSWYG approach to editing content. This love lasted for years, and still is. We have built huge portals in DNN, running on dedicated servers and also miniature portals on shared DNN hosts and shared hosting.
Umbraco? Umbraco was love at first sight. I installed version 2 and after initial confusion (which required certain mind shift to completely different concept), I was blown away by flexibility of this CMS. First thing that I loved are document types and datatypes, where you could easily “describe” content types like you add columns to a table. Text here, image upload there, rich text editor here… and you have a document type used to describe content of your site. It reminded me of Xmod module for DotNetNuke. Back office to edit that document type is ready auto-magically. Fields can be referenced in templates easily and everything is editable in back office (templates, macros, content). Read more
As a company that builds web portals and corporate sites we noticed a spam problem with web forms. Our clients complained about spam coming through their contact forms (or they receive blank forms) and requested that we solves it.
Why CAPTCHA is not the solution?
Captcha is not always a good option. Visitors hate to fill it in and if those visitors are your potential customers you do not want them to feel frustrated as it is going to kill your conversion. Here is just one of many articles on this (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/captchas-affect-on-conversion-rates)
Akismet (www.akismet.com) is better choice but it is commercial product which starts from 50$ per month (unless for personal use). Even then, or you have only personal site, note that Akismet is designed mostly for blog *comments*. Connecting it to contact forms or similar web forms is not so efficient as those forms usually consist of quite a few inputs and not just long comments.
Introduction to law: There has been a lot of talks about EU Cookie legislation on websites. Everybody that does websites probably got at least few call from clients with questions and requests to make their websites comply. Cookie legislation also changed in the meantime which confused some. In short, what we have been getting from our client (UK client!) and their lawyers is:
There are 4 cookie categories, in broad terms:
The first does not require an opt-in and no’s 2 & 3 do not require a proper opt-in according to the ICC guide, with only the targeting/advertising cookies requiring the ‘tick-box’ option or similar.
One thing remains interpreted differently among our clients and that is if “Implied consent” is acceptable (for 2 & 3 at least). This means that after displaying opt-in popup message to visitors, if they ignore it and click any other link on website, this is interpreted as “implied consent” to accept cookies (and opt-in popup states that!).
