Umbraco CMS Free CMS Software

Highly Flexible Open Source Web Content Management System

A web based CMS software with an intuitive user interface and rich features i.e., multilingual support, activity log views, global search, and post scheduling.

Overview

Umbraco CMS provides the quickest ways to set up a website for business by offering ready-made design templates. An intuitive dashboard is in place to let users build, update, and publish content efficiently. Further, this self hosted CMS offers a complete echo system according to which the system auto-updates itself with the latest features and bug fixes.

This digital content management system provides an enterprise-level user interface. In addition, this tree structure is completely searchable with a search field. The user can search any component by its name. Therefore, a pool of extensions is available to use. This multilingual CMS offers complete documentation regarding the development and deployment of the new extensions.

Umbraco CMS is written in ASP.NET. There is some input of some other languages like Javascript, HTML, and TypeScript. After that, the coolest feature of this self hosted CMS is the global search. Users can search anything regardless of the scope. This open source content management system also provides complete hosting infrastructure along with deployment utilities, However, their hosting services are not free.

System Requirements

IIS 7+ or IIS Remote Manager
SQL CE, SQL Server 2008 and higher or MySQL (must support case insensitive queries)
ASP.NET 4.5 Full-Trust
WebMatrix
Web Deployment Tool 1.0

Features

Following are the key features of Umbraco CMS

Open Source
Easy Development
Multilingual
Powerful Plugins
Support For Media Files
Secure
Pre-Built Templates
Smart Search Feature
Complete Documentation
Alive Community
Microsoft Word Support
User-Friendly UI
Activity Log View

Installation

Please follow the instructions to setup Umbraco CMS Software.

The First Step is to install this self hosted CMS in an IIS test environment using WebMatrix.

Launch WebMatrix
Once the WebMatrix home page appears, click Site from Web Gallery.
The Site from Web Gallery page appears, click Umbraco CMS, and then click Next.
Once the Accept EULA page appears, click I Accept to agree to the end-user license agreement.
Now, enter information appropriate to your environment, and click Next and click OK once Deployment Details dialog box appears.
Once the Publishing Settings page appears, add your hosting provider and domain-specific information, and click Validate Connection.
Click Apply, then click Publish, and click Continue.
Then, Umbraco Configuration Wizard will appear and you can configure the Umbraco application.

The Second Step is to build the application package from the IIS site using IIS Manager:

Run the following command to backup an IIS 7.0 %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd add backup "PreMsDeploy"
Open the IIS Manager by clicking Start > Run and typing inetmgr.
In IIS Manager, expand the Server node and the Sites node, then select the Default Web Site/MyApplication.
After that, in the right-hand Actions pane under Manage Packages, click the Export Application… link to launch the wizard.
By default, the package will contain the site or application you have selected (in this case the Default Web Site/MyApplication) and its content folders. Click on the Manage Components button.
The first row is your iisapp provider entry, which is your application. In the second row, choose the dbFullSql provider from the Provider Name drop-down. If you hover over a provider, you will see a description and example path.
Enter the path to your database or script file in the Path column.
(Example: “Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Database=MyApplicationDb;User id=MyAppUser;Password=SomePassWord;” without the quotes.)
After that, you’ll notice that the database now shows up in the package contents tree view. Click Next to continue the wizard.
Next, you will see parameters that are generated based on the two providers that you added in the previous step. We’re going to give them names and descriptions. Select the second parameter in the list, Parameter 2, and click on the Add Parameter Entry button.
After that, create a parameter entry that points to the connection string inside the application’s Web.config file. You will notice that the parameter entry has 3 fields to fill out.
Choose the type of parameter you want. In this case, we’ll choose XmlFile because we want to point to the Web.config file.
Enter the scope for the parameter entry. The scope is a regular expression that tells us what file to locate in the package. In this case, we’ll choose the Web.config file but we’ll add \ to indicate the start of the file and $ to indicate the end of the file name so that Web.config.bak wouldn’t also be updated.
Then we’ll add a match. For an XmlFile parameter entry, the match is an xpath query that indicates a particular element or attribute in the XML file. We’ll add an xpath pointing to the connection string attribute. Click OK to accept the entry.
You now have parameters that will allow a user installing this package to set the application path (site and app name where they want this app to be installed) and change the connection string (which will be updated in 2 places, first when running the SQL script and second inside the Web.config file). Click Next to continue.
Finally, choose a location to save your package. For this example, we chose C:\MyApplication.zip.
The wizard will now complete the packaging process and save the package to disk. When it is complete, you will see a Summary page that gives you an overview of what actions were performed.

The Third Step is to install this self hosted CMS on the target server using IIS Manager:

Run the following command to backup IIS 7.0 server %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd add backup "PreMsDeploy"
Open the IIS Manager by clicking Start > Run and typing inetmgr.
In IIS Manager, expand the Server node and the Sites node, then select the Default Web Site.
In the right-hand Actions pane, click the Import Application… link to launch the packaging wizard.
However, select the package that you created in the previous quick guide, MyApplication.zip, or any other package.
Then, in the Install an Application Package dialog, you will see the application and the database.
On the Parameters page, enter a new application name if desired and enter a SQL connection string and then click Next to install the package.
Finaly, the Summary page will provide a high-level overview of some items that were installed from the package.