Umbraco

Umbraco is an open source content management system (CMS) platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It is written in C# and deployed on Microsoft based infrastructure. The open source backend is released under an MIT License while the UI is released under the Umbraco license.

Umbraco was developed by Niels Hartvig in 2000 and released as open source software in 2004. In 2009, CMS Wire described it as one of the leading .NET-based open source CMS systems. In 2010, with 1000 downloads a day, Umbraco was in the Top 5 most popular downloads via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, two places below its main rival DotNetNuke and was the 12th most downloaded application from Codeplex, six places below DotNetNuke and 13 places higher than mojoPortal.

Technology

Umbraco is primarily written in C#, stores data in a number of relational databases (commonly Microsoft SQL Server) and works on Microsoft IIS.

Deployment

The standard release of Umbraco is typically deployed on IIS in an environment which supports Full Trust. While a Full Trust environment is mandatory to install and operate the standard release, the codebase has been branched and modified to produce a version of the framework and backend UI which supports Medium Trust.

Research has also been undertaken on running an Umbraco website on Mono on Linux.

Umbraco can be deployed on a single physical server running the database and web tier, and this deployment model can be appropriate for small low-cost sites. Umbraco sites which serve content under higher load can also be deployed on a load balanced cluster. Load balanced Umbraco installations can use software or hardware load balancers, and load balanced network files can be shared using a SAN, NAS or a cluster file system or using a file replication service between nodes in the cluster.

Releases

Version 4.1 Beta II was released on 16 February 2010 which refactors a number of key components of the framework, including the UI tree control to improve performance and the user experience and parts of the data access layer to reduce the number of database calls.

Version 5 (codenamed "Jupiter") is a rewrite of the framework planned to be released in Q2 2011 built using ASP.NET MVC.