Orcare in the news

The Orcare move to the Hub at IQ Farnborough has made it into the news. Scary!

• Bracknell Standard
• Radio Bracknell
• Swansea University Almuni News
  

Free Design Templates for Umbraco 4 Released

Today we published three new design templates for Umbraco, the Open Source Content Management System based on Microsoft technologies. We've offered them as free to download under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

The design templates are based on designs produced by styleshout.com, and we've packaged the to work with the new Runway feature in Umbraco version 4. For those not in the know Runway is a bare bones website structure which can be used to build a best-practice Umbraco website.

There's still a good amount to do to improve the templates -- we intend to add in support for more document types, and also add in some package actions to make it easier to install the templates.

The new design templates can be previewed and downloaded for free on the freeumbracotemplates.co.uk website.

Orcare moves to a stunning new home

It's now official Orcare has moved to The Hub at IQ Farnborough. We moved into the offices just after christmas, but it's taken a while for the paperwork to go through and the registered office to change. The space gives us an opportunity to work together more collaboratively and also some space to expand the workforce.

A great side effect is that the place feels like a real incubator for new businesses, it's refreshing doing good work with good people, and the boys next door at Ouno are doing just that. They've even taken some great shots for our press release... Thanks Simon.

More info about Orcare's new home on our news pages.

Umbraco 4 Production Release Published -- Woo Hoo

The guys over at the Umbraco Core Team have released the first production edition of Version 4, and by golly it's a belter. There are many great enhancements in this release which appeal to designers, developers and administrators. There are a couple of big changes which affect my site freeumbracotemplates.co.uk, Master Pages and Runway.

Niels and the team have undertaken open heart surgery on the templating engine in version 4. Umbraco now uses ASP.Net Master Pages, rather than the template engine that was found in Umbraco 2 and 3. This has necessitated changes to our existing templates to be compatible.

The second major v4 feature is the new Runway Package. Runway is a real barebones website package, which makes it easy to develop a best-practice Umbraco site. There are also several Runway Packages which can be installed to extend the base Runway package. We've made sure our templates work with the Runway Standard Top Navigation package, but expect to see us incorporate templates for some of the other Runway Packages.

I'm working on getting the new version of freeumbracotemplates ready, and actually the upgrade seems to be pretty pain free. I'll let you know when I'm done.

I Love Wordl

I've just created a wordle of my del.icio.us tags...



..how cool is that.

Free Umbraco Templates for all

I'm still putting the finishing touches on, but I've just published a new meta-Umbraco website (a site about Umbraco using Umbraco). This one's a site containing free design templates for loading into Umbraco, you'll find it at freeumbracotemplates.co.uk.

All of the templates will be released under an open source license of some sort, in fact the first three templates are released under Creative Commons Attribution License v2.5.

Thanks must go to Erwin over at StyleShout.com for releasing these designs in the first place. Also thanks to Warren Buckley on who's Creative Website Package my templates overlay.

Google Checkout Package for Umbraco

I've just created my very first Umbraco Package and my very first OpenSource bit of software. It's designed to be a simple Product Catalogue which integrates with Google Checkout which provides shopping cart and payment fulfillment services. Thus it provides e-Commerce functionality to Umbraco.

The package is available on Codeplex for downloading and installing into an Umbraco installation.

The package is still very much Alpha software, as I've developed it for a number of customer sites that are still in development. However, the site has been tested with the Google Checkout Sandbox in both USD and GBP using a number of different shipping options. A demo site can be found at orcarepilotshop.capbuild.com. This posts sites to the Sandbox, so if you want to test the package out you'll need to create a checkout sandbox Google Buyer Account.

Once I've gone live with a couple of sites the package will have been thoroughly tested with some real world scenarios so I'd consider it a proper release.

You'll find install instructions available on my Company's website.