Adam K Dean

First time actually using uShowcase

Published on 13 May 2013 at 15:10 by Adam

So today is the first time I've actually used my own project, uShowcase, to make a photo gallery. I have a few photo gallery websites to make in the coming months, and it gave me a great excuse to dive into Umbraco more. I learnt some things, chief among them: always use your own projects.

Back when I was making this website, I needed an easy to use authentication system as Microsoft's sucks and is bulky. I came up with EasyAuth, a simple and easy to use ASP.NET/MVC authentication library. When I designed it, it looked great, the idea was good, all the tests passed. But when I came to use it, I spotted features it lacked, things I wished it could do, stuff it needed to have. You don't see these until you use your product, oft times it's too late then.

Using uShowcase -- my first Umbraco project, a simple photo gallery starter pack -- I learned first and foremost that the default template sucks. It's not really a photography style website. It requires you to modify it and make it into a photography looking website, which isn't really fair when it's supposed to be a starter pack.

I also learnt that Umbraco rocks. I've used more content management systems than I can even recall. I've made more websites than I can even list. But using Umbraco has to be one of the best experiences I've had. While I do love the control you get from making a website from scratch using PHP/LAMP or C#/ASP.NET, that all just takes so long compared to using Umbraco. I don't think I'll ever have to write a backend management portal ever again! (Yeah, right...)

So thanks Umbraco, you make me happy and less rushed. And thank you past-me, for saving me time by creating uShowcase. I'll be sure to update it over the next few weeks a push a better version to the Umbraco package system.

First photo gallery using uShowcase

(I do wish you could capture your cursor with print screen, it's over the wildlife thumbnail by the way!)



This post was first published on 13 May 2013 at 15:10. It was filed under archive with tags ushowcase, umbraco.