Blog

This post shows you how easy it is to use the default Umbraco search functionality in your site. It uses a basic form and then uses razor to display your search results.

This post teaches you how to set rewrite rules for your umbraco site. You may want to force your site to go to a secure url or force it to go to a url with www. at the start. To add these rules, you need to go to the file /config/UrlRewriting.config

This post gives you the code for creating members programmatically in Umbraco. When you use this code, you can pass in the member's username, name, email address and optionally you can pass in their password and optionally assign them to a role/group.

If, like me, you like to write lists to help you focus on what’s required to complete a certain job, and sometimes break the bullet points into mini lists themselves, then this online tool should help you. Workflowy allows you to do just that, it’s free, really easy to use, and it is available on web, iOS and Android.

If you enjoy writing code and solving puzzles, you will love Project Euler. It is filled with mathematical puzzles which require you to write some code to get the answer. You could use the problems as a chance to write out the solution in a different programming language.

I recently came across this fantastic resource. It is called LINQPad. You can use it to test any C#, F# or VB snippet or program. You can even use it to query databases in LINQ or SQL. It's ideal if you find some code on the internet that you want to quickly test, or if you want to play with the new features in C# 6 without having to set up a windows console/forms app or website.

This gives you real placeholder images to use in your site concepts or examples. It randomly picks an image each time the page loads.

This post shows you how to create an XML sitemap in your Umbraco website. I will share the code I have used to create my XML sitemap page http://www.codeshare.co.uk/xmlsitemap You will need an XML sitemap when you submit your site to search engines.

If you or your client needs to be able to create short urls or links to other sites without wanting to add it as a redirect in the web config, then this is the post for you. You can create them as umbraco pages that act as fast links or redirects.

I found this and thought it would be really useful, especially for designers or people mocking up sites. If you ever need a placeholder image, you don’t need to create one, you can just use this url with the size of placeholder image you want:

There is an annoying feature in Umbraco which, when not wanted, seems like a bug. If you want to view a page with a different template, you can enter the url/templateAliasName

If, like me, you find it very annoying that Umbraco seems to stop you from entering whatever markup you want to put in the editor, then this post should help you.