Umbraco CMS Hosting Bundle

For the first time on the Microsoft platform a user-friendly and developer-friendly CMS that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco has award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls out of the box. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too. Used by more than 57,000 active websites including Heinz.com, Peugeot.com, and NAIAS.com, you can be sure that the technology is proven, stable and scalable.

Umbraco: Simple, obvious, friendly

Umbraco's UI was designed to be easy to use by following conventions from existing desktop applications. Users will appreciate that working in the Umbraco back office is obvious and appealing.

Umbraco simplifies editing experience by removing anything that isn't essential to the task of creating and editing content. Even with very large and advanced websites, end-users are presented with a UI that's tailored specifically for them, with no time-consuming workflows or over-complicated wizards to interfere with their work.

With a non-intrusive permission model and convenient notification system, users can collaborate and create without wasting time on or being distracted by things unrelated to creating and maintaining content.

From Developers to you

Umbraco makes it quick, easy and fun to develop web applications. You can create a blog post in a User Control using the Umbraco API and Visual Studio.

First, Umbraco supports both Custom and Web User Controls, which means that you can work exactly as you're used to, using any .NET Language. Then there's the creation of a blog post using the Umbraco API. It's one line of code. And notice the intellisense - the API is fully documented offering inline help when you need it.

Fully Integrated with .NET

Umbraco lets you work with .NET right out-of-the-box. You can use .NET Custom Controls and .NET User Controls without having to implement interfaces or jump through hoops.

Just copy your controls to your Umbraco installation, create an Umbraco macro using the slick web UI and your controls are instantly available. You can insert your controls in templates or even place them anywhere in the rich text editor. Umbraco can even send data to your controls via Public Properties, all with a full UI for the end user.

AJAX Compatible

Umbraco supports Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax right out of the box so you don't have to worry about ScriptManagers and all the other minutea. Enjoy the magical power of UpdatePanels, etc. And if jQuery, Prototype, MooTools or another Ajax toolkit is the hype flavour of the day, it'll work too. Umbraco features an easy to use framework for working with dynamic content and javascript called Umbraco Base. The Umbraco Base framework enables developers to create simple urls to Umbraco content and .NET resources, making it much easier to work with .NET-based data directly from any javascript framework, like jQuery, YUI, Prototype or whatever library you prefer to use.

Umbraco obeys your markup commands

With Umbraco there's finally a CMS that gives you complete control over the markup, with no limits to your design. With a strong focus on web-standards and with a completely open templating system, Umbraco provides a strong foundation for designing your website just the way you want.

Powerful Skinning

With Umbraco you can forget about skinning headaches. We think a CMS should adjust to the designer, not the other way around. That's why you can use whatever ajax, flash or any other web technology in your design. You'll never worry that Umbraco will interfere with or modify your markup, because it won't. What you design is what you get.

Umbraco also lets you add design guidelines for your editors to follow. You specify which css rules editors should use in the built-in wysiwyg editor, giving them user-friendly names like "Headline" or "pull quote" or "Paragraph Text". No arbitrary selection of fonts, sizes or background colors that might destroy your carefully crafted design.

Standards Support

With Umbraco you have complete freedom to craft your html any way you want, and with any tool you choose. A CMS should provide a strong foundation but stay out of your way. Umbraco lets you specify how the system should treat your design, rather than the other way around.

Do you want a content managed web site that validates as XHTML Strict? No problem. Want to use Frontpage 97 or build a table-based layout with bloated and invalid html? If you really fancy that, Umbraco can handle whatever you throw at it.

No Limits on Design

You can build your website using your own html markup, your own css, and all the conventions and techniques you're familiar with. Never again will your websites all look vaguely similar because you're limited to skinning a fixed design. Umbraco gives you the flexibility, and power to set your designs free.

Use Any Language You Want

Even though Umbraco is written in C#, you can use any .NET-compatible language you like. So whether you prefer VB.NET, C#, IronPython or even the upcoming IronRuby, Umbraco will treat you well.

Documented API

Umbraco comes with an extensive and well-documented API, extracted from almost two million lines of raw XML comments. That makes it possible to harness all the power from the APIs and make it possible to programmatically replicate all the exciting functionality from the UI.

So whether you need to import content from a legacy application or website, create and edit advanced user profiles or run scheduled maintenance, the documented Umbraco API ensures that the sky is the limit.

Event Model

Umbraco exposes the events in the content engine, making it possible to automate tasks based on actions that content editors make within the Umbraco UI.

Populate a 3rd party search index, generate an RSS feed or even create static html files automatically. You can easily create actions to respond to Umbraco events such as Create, Publish, Delete, UnPublish, Move, Copy and more than twenty other events.

Hooking into these events is simply a matter of creating a .NET class that implements an interface with two properties and an execute method. Once the assembly is copied into your Umbraco installation, it's automatically registered and begins working immediately without even needing to modify any configuration files.