Umbraco Developer 's Christmas Office :)

This weekend my colleague and I decided it was a good idea to decorate our office for Christmas, it's quite difficult to actually photograph it to it's full effect, but you'll have to take our word for it, it looks pretty Christmasy :)

We have a 7' Tree covered in lights and decorations, lights around our PC's, tinsel everywhere we could fit it, and even large snow flakes hanging from the ceiling..

You'd think we have no work on, but if fact it's the opposite we're manically busy! But hey, it's a bit of fun and it seems to be cheering everyone up in this otherwise rather Dull Regus Serviced Office ;-)

We can definitely recommend doing something a bit different, as it's got us noticed and we've already won enough extra work from companies in the building to pay for our office for a year, not bad :)

So here's a photo of our office, has anyone else decorated their office? I'd be happy to update this post with any good Christmas office photos that you send me!

Happy Christmas all!

Chris

Add Intellisense when using the URL rewritingnet config file

I often use the URL re-writing engine that comes with Umbraco which is from urlrewriting.net and I have always found it very fiddly to edit the configuration file, I wish I have know it was possible to add Intellisense to Visual Studio, and I guessed that most people would also not realise this, after all, who reads the manual right?!

So, if you are someone who edits the urlrewriting.config without Intellisense, but would like to use it, this is how you do it :)

1) Download the URL rewriting source code files from urlrewriting.net
2) Unzip the source files and find the urlwritingnet.xsd file, put this file into your web project, or the directory where your urlredirect.config lives.
3) Open up the web project and then open your config file, and hey presto! You should find you now have intellisense!

So, the next question is, are there XSD files for the rest of the Umbraco config files, and more importantly for the Umbraco.xml file? If not, does anyone fancy creating them? I am sure intellisense for all these files would be very helpful :)

Twitter Feeds in Umbraco using XSLT

There are currently two packages tagged on the Umbraco forum that can be used to add a twitter feed to your website. I was playing around with "Twitter for Umbraco" by Warren Buckley and noticed a bug in the way it converted twitter @names to links, so I thought I would try and solve this using XSLT.

It may also be useful for those of you using Darren Ferguson's "Feed Cache" package as the demo on Darren's site does not add links to the tweets.

To use this XSLT you simple call the XSLT Template passing in your Twitter message:

<xsl:call-template name="formaturl">
 <xsl:with-param name="url" select="text"/>
</xsl:call-template>

Then add the XSLT template to your XSLT macro (outside of the main template)

<xsl:template name="formaturl">
     <xsl:param name="twitterfeed"/>
     <xsl:variable name="transform-http" select="Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions:replace($twitterfeed, '(http\:\/\/\S+)',ig,'<a href="$1">$1</a>')"/>
     <xsl:variable name="transform-https" select="Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions:replace($transform-http, '(HTTps\:\/\/\S+)',ig,'<a href="$1">$1</a>')"/>
     <xsl:variable name="transform-AT" select="Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions:replace($transform-https, '(^|\s)@(\w+)',ig,' <a href="http://www.twitter.com/$2">@$2</a>')"/>
     <xsl:variable name="transform-HASH" select="Exslt.ExsltRegularExpressions:replace($transform-AT, '(^|\s)#(\w+)',ig,' <a href="http://www.twitter.com/search?q=$2">#$2</a>')"/>
     <xsl:value-of select="$transform-HASH" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
   </xsl:template>

You should find that this now replaces all the @names, #names and URL's with links!

Survey about Umbraco Repositories

I am currently thinking about developing a hosted repository service for Umbraco Packages, this will allow free, private and commercial repositories to be available within the Umbraco interface for immediate installation.

I would be really interested to hear your views and opinions on this sort of service:

Please answer this survey!

Everyone who answers the survey and leaves their email address will be sent an invitation to beta test the service when it launches in the near future :)