Setting up a new Umbraco project

Sunday May 24, 2009, by Paul Blair

When setting up a new project I have the following requirements:

  • I want the project to sit in a project folder on my D drive. I don't want to work on projects in the inetpub folders.
  • I want to use flat/directory URL's.
  • be able to run multiple sites on one instillation.
  • Running on Vista with IIS7 locally. Deployed to server running IIS7.
  • If the site is to include a blog then I want it set up as a subdomain (e.g. blog.fairlieagile.co.nz)
  • Using .NET 3.5

This is a little bit more manual the default installtion procedure. These are the steps I go though (Takes about 10 minutes):

1. Get the latest version of Umbraco and copy to a folder <projectname>/web

2. Create a new database and setup in <projectname>/DB. Add my development umbraco user to the DB

3. Setup IIS:

 -  Add entries to the hosts file for URL's i am using during development e.g:

127.0.0.1 fairlieagile
127.0.0.1 blog.fairlieagile

 - In IIS I have an application pool setup that uses .NET 2.0 and integrated pipelines

 - Right click on Sites and add a new website. In the hostname give it the hostname you have entered into the hosts file

 - Save and start the website

 - if you are using additional host names e.g. for a blog subdomain then click on your site, go to bindings and add the details

4. Go to http://umbraco.codeplex.com/ and get the web.config file to use with .NET 3.5 (It's also woth havign a read of "Install guide for Umbraco on asp.net 3.5 and integrated pipeline".)

5. Edit web.config

enter in the connection string details for your DB

<add key="umbracoUseDirectoryUrls" value="true" />

under <system.webserver> all umbaco's httpmodules are listed. Due to the way IIS process extensionless urls, you need to add: runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True" to the modules element, so it looks like this: <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True">

6. Edit Config/UmbracoSettings.config

<useDomainPrefixes>true</useDomainPrefixes>

7. Browse to your site and run throught he isntallation process

8. Install the excellent multiple file upload package from Noerd.dk

  • Download package from http://noerd.dk. Latest version is 1.1
  • Do to developer -> packages -> Install local package
  • Follow the steps in the installer
  • Add the following to your web.config:
    <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
    <add verb="*" name="MultipleFileUploadHandler" path="MultipleFileUploadHandler.axd" type="noerd.Umb.DataTypes.multipleFileUpload.MultipleFileUploadHandler, noerd.Umb.DataTypes.multipleFileUpload" />
  • Apply the quick fix discussed  here and  here

 

Other things you might like to do:

Increase the uplaod size:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="10240" />

For umbraco 4.1.1 there was an encoding problem. This might help:

Edit Config/UmbracoSettings

<TidyCharEncoding>UTF8</TidyCharEncoding>

Edit Config/tinyMceConfig.config

Change enity encoding to "named". This resolves a problem with a strange hex value (FFFD) being inserted into empty paragraphs since moving to 4.1.1.

<customConfig>
<config key="entity_encoding">named</config>
</customConfig>