***.... or how a blog is supposed to be built on Umbraco***
So when i started working at Umbraco HQ i really wanted to learn to develop a site in Umbraco CMS. For that purpose
I simply decided to convert my existing blog, done in BlogEnigne.NET into a simple Umbraco website. This was a great learning experience, but as i started on the work at the HQ, found that I really didnt want to use my time, maintaining a blog engine, when many great ones already existed. For that reason i decided to try out Articulate
##Articulate##
https://our.umbraco.org/projects/starter-kits/articulate/
So the Articulate is built from the bottom up, being a blogging platform, built on top of Umbraco. Running through its features, it really does have all the ones i seek in a blog engine, and only a few needed to be added/developed. For that purpose, Articulate is also perfect, as it is Open Source, and taking Pull Requests on GitHub( https://github.com/Shazwazza/Articulate ). This means that if I at some point gets irritated at some feature in the system, I'm free to change it, but further, if I find a bug, or decides to develop a new feature, it can be pulled back into the source, making it available to all others who is using the module.
I really find that the Articulate module is how a blog is supposed to be made. If you are in the search of a blogging module for Umbraco, you should try it out.
###So current blog setup is now:###
- Umbraco 7.3.4 (Shiny and new)
- Umbraco as a Service project
- Articulate 2.0.1 - Custom theme(Phantom theme modified)
For customization there were really only one. I had to create a custom 404 handler in order to preserve SEO kept from the old blog. Reason is that Articulate by default stores blog posts in the URL /archive, weather as my old blog kept them in the URL /blog. So the 404 handler is written to search for requests for /blog, and redirect them to the new /archive.
Biggest trouble with the content on this blog, and the Tag Cloud in the left is that it is a port of my old blog, when i was working in another CMS. That will shine through in the Tag Cloud, but hopefully, with some new content on the blog, this will be sorted out soon :-)
I do hope this setup lasts for a while, as I would like to use my time to get more content into the blog, instead of trying out new technical solutions for a blog engine.
