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.

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.