The Mentor Digital Managing Director, Holland Risley, presented our unique Mentor Web Blocks package at the UK Umbraco Festival to great fanfare.
The Mentor Umbraco Development team made the annual pilgrimage to the Umbraco UK festival in London on Friday 8th November, in order to present our open source package Mentor Web Blocks.
Umbraco has a great community, and the London events always have a great atmosphere with loads of inspiration for developers and content editors alike. Organised again by Cogworks, the event was in a large plush cinema which made for a comfortable way to view the presentations in comfort.
Umbraco founder and big daddy Neils Hartvig kicked off proceedings with a quick introduction to the background of Umbraco and quickly moved into this years developments for the system. Neils introduced the latest developments of Umbraco 7 (Belle) and updated us on the current status of the new version, which at the time of writing has now been released. Neils also presented the new Umbraco as a service offering which looks like a fantastic way for less technical web design teams to quickly fire up Umbraco CMS instances, manage their staging and deployment processes and also automatically apply updates to the CMS. Umbraco 7 is very much making use of Angular JS for back office views and Neils is quoted as saying:
““If you’re a developer and you’re not doing JavaScript, you’re screwed!””
Per Plough - Umbraco lead developer presented the new version 7’s use of Angular JS and ways to implement custom tree menus using the Angular JS views and controllers. An amazingly inspiring presentation demonstrating how fast the new version of Umbraco responds in the back office and how flexible the use of Angular is for back end and interface developers to work together. After this presentation our team is thoroughly convinced that our move to Umbraco 7 will happen very quickly as the improvements look immense in terms of speed and flexibility of the back office.
Peter Bacon Darwin from Angular JS further impressed our team as to the awesomeness of Angular as he talked through the use of the scope in the front end views and the ways that back end and front end developers can work together in a clear way. Again really inspiring stuff.
One of the other key highlights of the festival was the community presentations section where developers presented their work to a packed theatre. Hotly following Optimus Prime, Mentor’s team used a presentation slot at the festival to launch the new V3 of the Mentor Web Blocks package. This version is for Umbraco 6 and is fully MVC based. The Beta release was launched at the festival and the full package will be released shortly. Feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive around the Mentor Web Blocks package.
You can download the new version of Web Blocks from the Git page here.
There were also many other excellent presentations. The full Umbraco festival speaker line up is available here.
