RichardSoeteman.net

A few weeks back I’ve blogged about the new MemberExport package I was working on. Today I can tell you it’s released, both the free and the Pro (commercial) version. For those who missed the last blogpost…. MemberExport (Pro) helps you export members from your Umbraco installation to a csv file. The Free edition is limited to export only 200 records. With the PRO version it’s  possible to save the export options  steps for later use .

Free Edition

The free edition of MemberExport can be found on our.umbraco.org. Please vote the project up if you used and liked it.

Pricing

You can buy a single domain license of MemberExport PRO. With a single domain license you are allowed to use  MemberExport PRO  for a single domain and all subdomains, such as www.example.com, accept.example.com, and local.example.com. We also have a Enterprise license available. With an Enterprise license you are allowed to install the MemberExport PRO package on unlimited production web servers, and use it for unlimited Umbraco instances within the Enterprise. A single domain license will be available for  39 Euro, an enterprise license for 149 euro.  When you buy a license you’ll get free updates within 90 days of purchase and  free updates for all minor releases within a major release.  For example, if you purchased a  1.0 version of MemberExport PRO, you get free updates of all 1.x versions through our client area.

Special 1.0 offer. When you buy the 1.0 release you’ll get a free update to 2.x. This is a 1.0 offer only!

More Info

For more info, download, or purchase you can check out the MemberExport website

For those who follow me on twitter probably know that I’m working on a new package for Umbraco that can export Members to a csv file. Below you see the first screenshot of the package. Basically you select the groups and fields you want to export, you specify the export options and when you click the export button a csv file is generated on the fly which you can download.

Two days ago I started tweeting about this because I was very happy that exporting a few hundred members only took 2 seconds. Immediately people warned me about the fact that I used Member.GetAll to get a list of all the members which is very slow when you want to export more than 500 records. Thanks again for this warning guys (also for the brain breaking sql I had to write to improve the performance ).  So I changed the Member.GetAll functionality to a custom SQL query, imported 5000 extra records  and did a performance test to see if  the modification was a success. Guess what, the export of 5000+ records only took 2142 milliseconds. I think that’s a great result to end the week with.

When will this package be available?

Next Monday I will send the package to a few people that  want to beta test MemberExport. When it’s stable enough I’ll release the package. There will be two versions of the package, a free (limited to export 200) records version and a PRO version that can also save the export options for later use. The price for the pro version will be 39 euro (ex 19% Dutch VAT, only for Dutch customers) .

I hope you find the package interesting!

With Taskscheduler you can schedule url's/pages to be executed on a certain date and time. It’s a simplified version of the Windows task scheduler, build on top of the Umbraco scheduler functionality. If you’ve used  CMSImport PRO, the package should look familiar because TaskScheduler is based on the scheduled import functionality of CMSImport PRO.  When you installed the package and browse to the developer section you’ll notice the new Scheduled Tasks tree. From here you can create new Scheduled tasks, or browse to existing ones.

Schedule a task

When you create a scheduled task, you’ll see the following screen. In this screen you can configure the scheduled task.

The scheduled task name contains the name of the scheduled task. This will also be shown in the tree and you can use this in the notification email template.

The Schedule Url contains the url that you want to execute. You can insert a full url (http://mydemosite.com/scheduledpage.aspx), an absolute path(/scheduledpage.aspx) or a relative path(~/scheduledpage.aspx). The last option will come handy when you start working with Umbraco 4.1 where virtual folders are supported. When you want to retrieve the HTTP output of the page and use that in your notify email you can set the url output to true.

If you want to retrieve a notification email that tells you the scheduled task has executed you can fill in your emailaddress in the notify emailaddress field.

Basically you’ll have three options

• Execute every week on certain days and a certain time.
• Execute every day on a certain time
• Execute every hour

Settings

Not a lot of settings to configure. Only the settings for the notification email. You can configure the from address, the subject  and the email template. In the email template you can use two tags.

• [#Taskname]. Will be replaced with the name of the configured task
• [#Output] . Will be replaced with the html that got returned from the page if you had checked “Use Url output in url”.

System Requirements

TaskScheduler is tested on Umbraco 4.0.3.1, is compatible with .NET Framework 2.0  and is compatible with SQL Server(Express) 2005, 2008.

Download

You can download the package from our.umbraco.org

As always I hope that you like the package and it’s useful for you.

I’m very pleased to announce that CMSImport 1.0.3 is released. Now I can hear you think CMSImport? Must be a fork of the great UmbImport package. No this isn’t the case. A few weeks back Niels (AKA @Umbraco) asked me to change the name since Umbraco HQ got a lot of requests about this package. So now the name is CMSImport and that’s not going to change anymore.

CMSImport PRO

Finally we’ve finished our commercial edition of CMSImport.  CMSImport PRO gives you all the options of the default package and the following extra features:

• Update Content
• Save Import Steps
• Schedule imports for a certain time and day

Pricing

You can buy a single domain license of CMSImport. With a single domain license you are allowed to use  CMSImport PRO for a single domain and all subdomains, such as www.example.com, accept.example.com, and local.example.com.

We also have a Enterprise license available. With an Enterprise license you are allowed to install the CMSImport PRO on unlimited production web servers, and use it for unlimited Umbraco instances within the Enterprise. 

A single domain license will be available for  99 Euro, an enterpise license for 389 euro.

When you buy a license you’ll get free updates within 90 days of purchase and  free updates for all minor releases within a major release.  For example, if you purchased a  1.0 version of CMSImport, you get free updates of all 1.x versions through our client area.

Special 1.0 offer.When you buy the 1.0 release you’ll get a free update to 2.x. This is a 1.0 offer only!

What’s more in this release?

Several issues are solved in this release(both in the free and Pro release):

• "item with the same key already added" error when using duplicate column names
• Automapping column names
• The imported document creator is not always the administrator anymore. It's using the logged in user now. When you schedule an import you can select the user that should be used as the creator of the document
• Special characters in CSV are now supported, we’ve changed the reader from ANSI text to Unicode
• Sometimes CSV replaced spaces with empty strings, this is solved now
• With member import you can now merge any member property into the template. Simply surround the member property with [#(property here)]
• Using a renamed Umbraco folder. This is possible now, although it will be better to change it after install, otherwise you have to install manually.
• We’ve removed the limitation to allow only one DataAdapter. We are thinking to build a DataAdapter pack which contains adapters to import from wordpress, Rss, Outlook, excel etc. These adapters will be available for free in the Commercial Edition and for a small fee for the Free edition.

Roadmap

In the 1.x version we will add the following functionality:

• FieldAdapters. Sounds boring but this is a big thing. When you import data now, sometimes the import will fail. For example if you import boolean as text (true/false) and want to store that in a True/False field in Umbraco it will fail. Umbraco expects that the value will be 0/1. FieldAdapters will solve this problem. If a insert of data fails. CMSImport will check if 1 o more FieldAdapters are available to convert the data in the right format. This will be added to version 1.1 which must be ready before CodeGarden 2010.
• Dictionary Import. Need I say more?
• Hierarchical imports(PRO only).

In the 2.x version we will add the following functionality:

• Hierarchical import support in Data Adapters. Not the same as the 1.x Hierarchical import feature
• Export/import definitions (PRO only). An easy way to deploy Import definitions

More Info

For more info, download, or purchase you’ll go to http://www.cmsimport.com/

Usually I develop websites that require login functionality for one or more roles, now this is all cool for my clients but it’s a nightmare for me because I simply can’t remember all the login and passwords. To make my life and other developers life’s a little bit easier I’ve developed the Memberswitcher package. This package let's you easily login members and switch between members by simply selecting a member from a pull down list instead of enter the username and password. It’s using a lower level asp.net membership method to login the member based on the username and is fully compatible with all the asp.net Membership controls. Also the methods to fill the Membergroup and Member pulldowns are using Membership methods, so it will work with the Umbraco members but also with other membership providers.

Once installed, an extra macro is added to the list. In your template select the Memberswitcher macro, optional specify a node to redirect to once logged in and that’s it.
<umbraco:Macro RedirectToNodeAfterLogin="" Alias="MemberSwitcher" runat="server"></umbraco:Macro>

When you visit the website you’ll see the control in action. First select the Membergroup and Member.

 
When you click the Login selected member button you’ll be logged in as you can see in the following screenshot that is using the asp.net LoginStatus control.

Needless to say:
DO NOT USE THIS PACKAGE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT!!

Download the package here

Last week Warren Buckley asked for a URL Rewrite Action to use in his awesome next version of the  Umbraco Creative Website Starter site (if Warren release it make sure you download it, it's great!!). I was already thinking of creating some sort of packactions library so I started working on that a little bit sooner (and more in a hurry) than expected. The result is  a new Codeplex project called Package Actions Contrib that will hopefully be used by the community and I'm also hoping for a lot of contributors that will be part of this project.

Package Actions?

Package actions are great to include some custom functionality during the install of your package, just by implementing the IPackageAction interface and the use of Package XML in the package creator. This PDF describes all default package actions that are included in the V4 release of umbraco and it also describes how to use them.

AddUrlRewriteRule Action

Currently only one package action is included in the project. That is the AddUrlRewriteRule Action. With the AddUrlRewriteRule  you can add a new rewrite rule to the UrlRewriting.config file. The xml snippet below descibes the xml for adding the UrlRewrite rule to the config file. The action element is the normal element that you must include for each package action. The Alias is the alias that is used in the AddUrlRewriteRule class. The undo option is implemented but will not work because of this bug I recently found. And the add element is what you normally will add manually in the UrlRewriting.config file.

<Action runat="install" undo="true" alias="AddUrlRewriteRule">
    <add name="CWS_emaiAFriendID" 
    virtualUrl="^~/email-a-friend/(.[0-9]*).aspx" 
    rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString" 
    destinationUrl="~/email-a-friend.aspx?nodeID=$1" 
    ignoreCase="true" />
</Action>

What's next

The next thing that will be added to the project is not a new action but it will be a tool where you can test your package action and package action xml without actually having to install a package. Instead you can upload the dll and enter the xml and press the testbutton to validate that the action installed or uninstalled correctly or what errors did occur. Also I like to have some documentation in the way that the normal package actions are described.

Contribute to the project

I think this project can only be a success with help from the community. So if you have some really cool custom package action now that could be useful to share please apply a patch on Codeplex or contact me by mail, also if you just have a great idea that could be included in the project.

Click here to visit the Codeplex project site. Hope to see some really nice package actions included in the contrib.

Content Maintenance Dashboard is a simple package to bulk publish, unpublish and delete content items based on name,state and document type. When you install it and go to the developer section of Umbraco you can see the search screen like the image below. From the search results screen you can perform actions on a single Item or you can choose to perform the same action on all the items in the search result.

The package is using sql to search for the documents. I'm using the new datalayer so it should be working on any type of database that is supported by Umbraco, however I only tested the package on SQL Server. I have tested this package also on the Umbraco RC3 release(this is probably the first package that is compiled against the RC3 Binaries). You can download the package here, if you want the complete source code you can download it here.