developer build my site in Umbraco,now a struggling backend user!
Hello,
My developer had decided to build my website using Umbraco. He has assured me it is a very easy CMS to use. I had previously used other CMS and am comfortable using them with no problem. But I now realised Umbraco is not as easy as I imagined! I am a back-end user and needs the CMS to be as easy as possible, almost like word interface or similar. When I want to edit the text, be it font types or colours and spacing, I can't seem to do it. They don't have the usual icons/buttons to alter the spacing between paragraphs, change font colours or types and sizes.
Can anyone help? Or at least tell me if there are some user guides or manuals which back-end users can use (not for developers please, I don't code or know how to tag in HTML etc). Thanks everyone!
As far as content-editing and front-end templating is concerned Umbraco follows good practices in that it tries to keep content (text, images etc) separate from templates (which control your layout) and separate from formatting/styling (colours, fonts, spacing etc).
Although you can have WYSIWYG ('what you see is what you get') editors to edit your content in Umbraco, the formatting options you have in these editors are limited according to the style sheets which have been generated for your site. If your Umbraco installation has been set up with very limited (or no) style sheets then you'll have very limited or no style options in the editor for your content. So to add more formatting options into the WYSIWYG editor you really need the developer (or anyone who knows CSS) to set up more style rules in the style sheets. Generally a website will have a finite number of style rules in order to maintain a clear aesthetic.
Some CMSs will give you the full gamut of formatting and even layout options in your content editors but this almost always leads to poor quality code under the hood, which can cause layout issues and browser inconsistencies, accessibility problems, increased page load times, user interface and aesthetic issues as well as difficulties in maintainability. The way Umbraco does things (and it's not just an 'umbraco thing' it's general good website practice) it keeps your styles separate in one central location from where they can be updated cleanly and easily.
I hope this helps to explain a little. By the sound of it you really need to establish a set of style guidelines for the site and have the developer set these up in the style sheet so you can use them in the editor.
Thanks all! I am going to contribute my two pennies' worth of feedback as an end-user. Now the issue is this - my site is a fashion site and very often, I may want to change font styles, or colours etc and I don't think my developer is too keen to make all the changes for me each time. Don't forget, a developer charges for his time to build the site and potentially any changes. At some point, a developer may say I don't want to make any further changes. As you may know, a fashion site has to constantly evolve and look different quite often. So I want to be able to do a fair bit of editing myself as the owner and end-user of the site. And by changing colours, font types etc, it could help a lot think of of look and feel. But I feel I have to rely on the developer to manage the style sheets.
So for the end-users, they have to constantly rely on their developers to do the style sheets if they are not tech-savvy or familiar enough with umbraco. At the end of the day, it could end up costing the end-user more in terms of time spent by the developer who may charge for extra time for establishing style sheets etc, if the end user can't do it themselves.
So a super user-friendly how-to guide for non tech-savvy end users will be very useful. I had a quick look at the editors' manual. At first glance, it feels like it is for someone who are quite tech-savvy and has built the site using Umbraco. Any simpler guides? Thank you! I am hoping to get any help I can get.
Umbraco uses a third-party component (http://www.tinymce.com/) to power the content editor. TinyMCE offers much more functionality and editing control than Umbraco uses, intentionally for the reasons stated above. However, it is possible to enable aspects of this functionality, such as font-selection, font size and colour pickers etc by editing the configuration file that powers the editor. It's something your developer will need to enable, but there are posts here which document the required changes e.g. http://our.umbraco.org/forum/using/ui-questions/4917-RichTextEditor-features-font-color, which would only be required once. It's not the recommended approach, but without knowing CSS I think it's the only option, short of running the content outside of Umbraco and using something like CushyCMS to handle the formatting or doing it offline through a third party editor and pasting the HTML into Umbraco.
I hope this helps anyhow. If your developer has any questions I'm sure people here would be able to answer more specifically, but I think it's possible to do what you need with a bit of hacking.
Would it be possible to identify which parts of the design you'd like to be able to update on a frequent basis ? and how those updates can be managed in the cms ?
For example I'm wondering if you could ask your developer to implement things like colour pickers / creating drop down lists of available fonts / and other controls for positioning of page elements etc... ?
developer build my site in Umbraco,now a struggling backend user!
Hello,
My developer had decided to build my website using Umbraco. He has assured me it is a very easy CMS to use. I had previously used other CMS and am comfortable using them with no problem. But I now realised Umbraco is not as easy as I imagined! I am a back-end user and needs the CMS to be as easy as possible, almost like word interface or similar. When I want to edit the text, be it font types or colours and spacing, I can't seem to do it. They don't have the usual icons/buttons to alter the spacing between paragraphs, change font colours or types and sizes.
Can anyone help? Or at least tell me if there are some user guides or manuals which back-end users can use (not for developers please, I don't code or know how to tag in HTML etc). Thanks everyone!
Hi Valerie,
As far as content-editing and front-end templating is concerned Umbraco follows good practices in that it tries to keep content (text, images etc) separate from templates (which control your layout) and separate from formatting/styling (colours, fonts, spacing etc).
Although you can have WYSIWYG ('what you see is what you get') editors to edit your content in Umbraco, the formatting options you have in these editors are limited according to the style sheets which have been generated for your site. If your Umbraco installation has been set up with very limited (or no) style sheets then you'll have very limited or no style options in the editor for your content. So to add more formatting options into the WYSIWYG editor you really need the developer (or anyone who knows CSS) to set up more style rules in the style sheets. Generally a website will have a finite number of style rules in order to maintain a clear aesthetic.
Some CMSs will give you the full gamut of formatting and even layout options in your content editors but this almost always leads to poor quality code under the hood, which can cause layout issues and browser inconsistencies, accessibility problems, increased page load times, user interface and aesthetic issues as well as difficulties in maintainability. The way Umbraco does things (and it's not just an 'umbraco thing' it's general good website practice) it keeps your styles separate in one central location from where they can be updated cleanly and easily.
I hope this helps to explain a little. By the sound of it you really need to establish a set of style guidelines for the site and have the developer set these up in the style sheet so you can use them in the editor.
Dan
Here's the editors' manual: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/editors-manual
There's also a great book about Umbraco http://www.amazon.com/Umbraco-Users-Guide-Nik-Wahlberg/dp/0470560827
but I think what you need is the editors' manual ; )
Bye.
Thanks all! I am going to contribute my two pennies' worth of feedback as an end-user. Now the issue is this - my site is a fashion site and very often, I may want to change font styles, or colours etc and I don't think my developer is too keen to make all the changes for me each time. Don't forget, a developer charges for his time to build the site and potentially any changes. At some point, a developer may say I don't want to make any further changes. As you may know, a fashion site has to constantly evolve and look different quite often. So I want to be able to do a fair bit of editing myself as the owner and end-user of the site. And by changing colours, font types etc, it could help a lot think of of look and feel. But I feel I have to rely on the developer to manage the style sheets.
So for the end-users, they have to constantly rely on their developers to do the style sheets if they are not tech-savvy or familiar enough with umbraco. At the end of the day, it could end up costing the end-user more in terms of time spent by the developer who may charge for extra time for establishing style sheets etc, if the end user can't do it themselves.
So a super user-friendly how-to guide for non tech-savvy end users will be very useful. I had a quick look at the editors' manual. At first glance, it feels like it is for someone who are quite tech-savvy and has built the site using Umbraco. Any simpler guides? Thank you! I am hoping to get any help I can get.
Hi Valerie,
Umbraco uses a third-party component (http://www.tinymce.com/) to power the content editor. TinyMCE offers much more functionality and editing control than Umbraco uses, intentionally for the reasons stated above. However, it is possible to enable aspects of this functionality, such as font-selection, font size and colour pickers etc by editing the configuration file that powers the editor. It's something your developer will need to enable, but there are posts here which document the required changes e.g. http://our.umbraco.org/forum/using/ui-questions/4917-RichTextEditor-features-font-color, which would only be required once. It's not the recommended approach, but without knowing CSS I think it's the only option, short of running the content outside of Umbraco and using something like CushyCMS to handle the formatting or doing it offline through a third party editor and pasting the HTML into Umbraco.
I hope this helps anyhow. If your developer has any questions I'm sure people here would be able to answer more specifically, but I think it's possible to do what you need with a bit of hacking.
Hi Valerie,
Would it be possible to identify which parts of the design you'd like to be able to update on a frequent basis ? and how those updates can be managed in the cms ?
For example I'm wondering if you could ask your developer to implement things like colour pickers / creating drop down lists of available fonts / and other controls for positioning of page elements etc... ?
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