Umbraco has been on the open source .net CMS market for a bit over 15 years (first open source v was out in feb 2005). Personaly I found out about ...
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Tim, some very valid points here for sure. It's so important to keep Umbraco in open source mode, but I also know from a business standpoint that you have to keep the money coming in too. I feel that HQ is struggling here a bit. I hope that your post is read by HQ ... and absorbed.
In a time of increasing competition in the CMS marketplace I feel that Umbraco needs to be removing barriers to entry and not adding in more. Umbraco is heavily advanced-developer focused as we all know. This means that new Umbraco uptake is developer (not client) driven - and it's a hard sell to a client in North America. Very few clients will say "I want this built on Umbraco", a lot will say "What is Umbraco - I want this built on WordPress". It's up to the dev to educate them why Umbraco is a better choice. My point is that it's one of the best solutions out there IMHO, but it's hard to sell to clients in a WordPress world without a stronger developer advocate community. That community can only grow with more accessibility - read easier access to knowledge, better documentation and strong QA/bulletproof releases (especially expensive PRO products like Courier, Forms, etc.)
I agree that it's important to keep the positive vibe of Umbraco going as it's the foundation of progress, but agree that there needs to be a little less monetization and a little more focus on the people that are bringing them the business - after all we are not just developers, we are advocates and sales people all rolled into one.
Thanks for the reply, have you seen my follow up post? dev.to/timgeyssens/why-i-would-kee... There I outline a couple of things that I would feel benefit the global Umbraco market...
It is good to see the Umbraco vets commenting on this post.
I really like Umbraco CMS. I would have jumped on the cloud bandwagon, but given the cost and the customers not seeing it as a viable option because of this, I did bring this up on the forums. In the US, Wordpress (and to some extent Wix and Squarespace) has the lion's share of the market.
Given that their prices are insanely competitive leaves me holding the "hey here is the CMS called Umbraco" and the reaction is "what's an Umbraco?". Umbraco is so flexible to any designer's wishes, me included, because of the flexibility. And knowing that most WP sites get rewritten within a year or two because of plugin bloat makes Umbraco such a huge advantage. But the cloud costs can't compete with someone who wants a quick site on a budget.
I do wish the company would pair down a bit. It is like when sports players go pro and get paid too much money. They lose that passion. I know somewhere in there, the passion is still there, but I know the stress of running a successful business is weighing on them too. Especially now in Covid and every business who never thought of having a website wants one right away.
It is such a good platform, but has the company, in my humble small opinion, Umbraco has grown too big to let it's community step in an help. In UWestFest 2017 they had a similar slogan when 8 was being pushed "you need to change to stay the same". We all have businesses to run and so do they, I get it, but we also have also are always looking at what works for our businesses and adapt but also look at what our customers are saying, because without them, the businesses don't exist.
-Carlos (aka ClosDesign, AKA CreateItCarlos)
thanks for you thoughts on this Carlos!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Tim. I generally disagree with Umbraco becoming a Tourist Trap, but you raise several points that are painfully true, (and along with an undercurrent that I've noticed others have been sharing on the Slack/Twitter DM back channels).
I'd need more time to unpack each of your exhibits. My positive take is that each one has the potential to be resolved... I think our frustrations come from a place where we are not seeing that potential realised.
re: CG12 Keynote. I regularly remind myself of this. Definitely something more folk should be aware of. (Maybe ignoring my uComponents demo fails and awkwardness in the mid-section interlude 😆)
thanks Lee, it's perfectly fine to disagree... I just want to start the convo!
The Umbraco-sphere certainly isn't perfect.
I worry that you seemed to be spending a lot of effort shining a light in to the dark corners. I hope this comes from a place of wanting to see Umbraco fulfill its full potential, and not something more negative. Sometimes provocative articles can be the source of change, and sometimes they can just be trolling.
of course! I agree this is an aggresive approach, but I feel this is the final roll of the dice before leaving a sinking ship (which I do hope doeesn't need to happen)... I mean, my whole career is based on Umbraco (as a freelance Umbraco dev) so I want to see Umbraco do good, if umbraco is loved that means I"ll get more work! If it isn't...
My gripe is the control Umbraco A/S has over Umbraco CMS, in a way that Facebook doesn't control React and Google doesn't control Angular (sorry if I'm wrong).
I'd like to see Umbraco CMS as a separate entity like wordpressfoundation.org/. Hopefully Umbraco A/S would contribute man power, but ultimate the foundation would be democratic. That said, I know exactly where the Fork button in Github is. There is no reason that this is the responsibility of Umbraco A/S to setup.
As far as there commercial practices go. Some things aren't as I'd prefer but it's their company and they will live or die by their commercial decisions. I don't feel they've done anything to be ashamed of.
yup agreed, also mentoined the wp foundation a while back but didn't really get a response ... thanks for your input!
I think this rings true Tim. You commented on our recent-ish CacheDependency memory leak bug which was validated relatively quickly, but it took a lot of pushing and a long wait to get released into 7.15.5.
We upgraded and immediately noticed a huge CPU issue when we were being crawled. 7.14 handled that traffic without issue, but clearly 7.15.5 hadn't been load tested. The whole process of upgrading, testing, then downgrading has cost us so much time I haven't been able to get anyone on this to investigate further, but it does seem someone else has noted the same issue:
our.umbraco.com/forum/using-umbrac...
Clearly while fixing bugs the team have introduced a new, and major, issue. We were seeing our CPU rapidly ramp up to 100% during the crawl, but then NOT RECOVER for hours after the traffic had subsided. Somehow the site stayed operational but that was something of a miracle.
I'll try and get this raised, but again I don't have high hopes for a fix (that actually works), and our client is not ready to upgrade to v8 yet so we're caught between a memory leak and CPU overload!
Tim,
I think its great that you are voicing your concerns and I hope that this gets people talking and engaged.
I do think there are some good things happening with how they are moving the product forward with the community teams that have been organized around challenging features and topics. This like .NET Core, Accessibility, Documentation, PRs, etc.
The albatross for Umbraco has been the paid packages that don't seem to get any love. Its really frustrating because there isn't really a good way for the community to help with those products, even if we want to.
-Jason
That is my hope, we'll see how it turns out!
But what's the alternative? Sitecore did a demo the other week, and I was shocked to see how crude it was. They were still using icons from over 12 years ago, when I first came across the CMS.
no doubt it's a great CMS, but it has drifted away from the initial core values...