v5 RIP

Wednesday, June 13, 2012 by Paul Sterling

UPDATE: We're back on track!

Since the original post post, everyone in the community have been hard at work getting the project back on track and with the release of 4.10 in November we have delivered what we promised at CodeGarden - MVC support in Umbraco. 

In addition we've never had more people participate in the development of Umbraco, we've never registered a bigger number of site launches and the vibe and the morale in the project are at a record high.

In addition to this we have a completely new UX coming in spring 2013 and with v6.0 - coming in December 2012 - a new foundation that increases our already industry best performance and scalability. All of this, through the most transparent development process in the industry that ensures that everybody can follow what's going on right now and what's in store for the near future. 

We made a mistake, took the full responsibility and learned from it and have come out stronger. Much stronger.




Original post:


In the end, the only responsible decision, the only decision that respects the community and the core values of the project was to retire v5.

Firstly, our apologies for not being better prepared with a public announcement for those of you not at Codegarden regarding v5.  It is not a decision that has been brewing for months, but a discussion that was started and researched a few weeks back, culminating in an honest and open conclusion made by the community group who attended the weekend's pre-codegarden retreat.  These were not all HQ and core members but an impartial and honest group of both core and community members, new and old.  

That being said it is a decision that has not been made lightly and on the spur of the moment however happened quickly as it was in the end the most obvious and logical decision to make.  v5 has become an overly complex system that has turned into the very monster Umbraco was originally created as a reaction against.  The community was not involved in its development, with one of the results being a highly complex set of code which also means the community will never HAVE the option of being involved with its development.  This goes against everything Umbraco stands for.  Within the community there was a great deal of frustration with v5.  It was difficult to use, had performance issues, and was generally not an improvement over v4.  The vast majority of Umbraco community members were continuing to develop and release using v4.

A simple look at the solution is to take all that is awesome about v5 and add it into v4.  We will still support Umbraco 5.2 to solve the worst issues with those still running a v5 site, but at this point we cannot recommend beginning any new projects with v5.  The focus needs to return to simplicity, community involvement and transparency, and more will be posted in the coming days/weeks with regards to these things.


Watch the CG12 keynote where Niels explains the reasons why development on v5 could not continue. CG12 Keynote Video

172 comment(s) for “v5 RIP”

  1. Gravatar ImageConny Carlman Says:

    Umbraco is dead -
    Long live Umbraco!

  2. Gravatar ImageRik Helsen Says:

    Quite a shocker you've brought us here... already having Umbraco 5 websites in production (with performance issues) and others in the pipeline.

    I'm curious to hear what'll be happening in the near future with upcoming v4 releases!

    I feel sorry for all the devs that have worked on this for so long, and all the community members that where working on porting excellent packages to v5.

    Can you let us know when the screencast/presentation is to be expected online?


  3. Gravatar ImageJanusz Stabik Says:

    I think you've made a bold, brave and sensible decision, and a decision we welcome. Long live V4.

  4. Gravatar ImageChris McKee Says:

    And for everyone whose already invested time/money into using V5, ah well tough shit. Time to go back and rewrite everything in XSL. Rocking like its 1999.

    Probably should of thought this through before launching it as the next best thing since sliced bread eh.

  5. Gravatar ImageDan Diplo Says:

    It must have been a difficult decision to make but I respect the core team for being able to make it. Umbraco 5 was like some fabulous sky-scraper that seemed awesome when you looked at the blueprint but in reality just couldn't stay upright. If something doesn't work and can't be fixed then the best thing is to move on as swiftly as possible, hard as that might be.

    I do feel sorry for Alex, as he's obviously an amazing programmer, and his code was so well structured and written. I also feel sorry for all the people who invested time in v5 - be they core team, community or 3rd party companies. It would be interesting to know what will happen to them, especially people who paid for v5 courses?

    Going forward I hope the best parts of v4 and v5 can be combined in the future - that really would be awesome! Good luck.

  6. Gravatar ImagePete Says:

    This is very disappointing news. We have been pinning our hopes on V5, waiting patiently for a production-worthy release so we can begin migrating 60+ sites and hopefully solve a lot of issues we are having with v3/4 sites currently running. Sure didn't see this coming.

    How could this project have been managed so poorly? How could you have allowed this to happen? For the past 2 years all we have heard is how awesome the new version is going to be, how revolutionary it would be. Now... what? Umbraco has always been a love/hate thing for me. It's a great concept and for the most part it has served us well. But there are so many annoying problems and workarounds to deal with and the lack of consistent, up to date documentation continues to be a problem despite numerous promises to fix that. I'm afraid the time might have arrived for us to start looking for a new CMS.

    RIP indeed.

  7. Gravatar ImageMichiel Says:

    I honestly didn't see that coming. It sure seems like a huge investment down the drain and a very expensive lesson. However, seeing as it's never been recommended to start a new project on v5... nothing really changes today. A bold decision for sure...

    I do feel, like Rik Helsen, sorry for those that invested in v5. I know some people that were really looking forward to adoption of v5 because they had plans to release some great packages.

    To be honest: I respect this decision, but it will take some time to regain my trust in your execution. I now wonder if I should have high or low expectations for the future of Umbraco.

    Good luck!

  8. Gravatar ImageAsbjørn Says:

    What??? How can this possibly be? Umbraco v5 is a great idea. Umbraco badly needed a rewrite! And I still think that you made the right choice with v5 - a difficult choice, but the right one. Difficult in the short term, certainly, but right in the long term. Sure, Hive may have been a bit overambitious - that could perhaps have been simplified...
    This is absolutely terrible news - luckily I haven't started a v5 site that I was going to start soon. Returning to Web Forms is going to be a pain. I was very much enjoying the extensibility and freedom offered by MVC. Sure, Umbraco 5 has its quirks - but I wouldn't expect otherwise with what is essentially a brand-new product.
    This flip-flop decision sows serious doubts about the value of Umbraco as a platform and whether I should even use it in the future. How can I possibly trust the Umbraco developers again after this? Working at something for over two years and then suddenly throw it away just because you cannot get a few details to work is foolish in the extreme.

  9. Gravatar ImageHartvig Says:

    We'll be posting the keynote ASAP which have most of the arguments that you're requesting. It's being encoded as we speak.

  10. Gravatar ImageRalph Says:

    What next is the big question, we are looking to move all development to MVC and v5 was looking like the future.

    I don't see how v4 can handle MVC without a rewrite. This would mean we need to wait years before we can do with Umbraco right?

    That is really shame we love Umbraco

  11. Gravatar ImageGeorge Says:

    People at Sitecore must be throwing high-fives all around today. This is absolutely crazy - Umbraco 4.x is not exactly a tower of beauty that shines through the dark night. The issues with 5 need to simply be ironed out-I have seen nothing in that code base to justify throwing it out. This makes no sense and really does call into question the business decisions that are being made by those behind Umbraco. I for one am not going back to XSLT nor am I looking for hacks to get MVC/RAZOR to work along side XSLT.

  12. Gravatar ImageJohn C Says:

    Never mind, not to far into the v5 project, just wish i didn't have to recreate all my doc types and data types into a v4 installation.

  13. Gravatar ImageSimon Justesen Says:

    Asbjørn: Yes.. umbraco needs a rewrite from a developer-perspective, but V4 is still a great product. 75.000+ installations worldwide is a great argument...

  14. Gravatar ImageCraig Cronin Says:

    I really can't believe it, only got V5 Level 2 Trained last week. I was also really looking forward to the MVC framework and new features of V5. Really hope its not too long before this is incorporated.....happy days

  15. Gravatar ImageDoug Robertson Says:

    What in H311 are you thinking!?!? I am one of the people who has never used v4 and have no intention of ever using an XSLT based system. I started using Umbraco specificly because of the MVC/Razor base you were building upon. It met needs that no other system could support. I have sites that are live right now and limping along waiting for some performance fixes and bug updates. And you are just abandoning v5????

    Can you at least have the decency to roll it out as a true open source project. Maybe some people will pick it up and make it work. This feels like a complete betrayal. I have put in a ton of effort while listening to promises of the next release will work. Now I have a system I put a huge amount of time into getting totally abandonded. WTF!!!!

  16. Gravatar ImageJonathan Jones Says:

    This is the correct and only logical path for v5. I've been using Umbraco since the early days and v5 was so much of a jump, and into a buggy slow system that I avoided it like the plague. Thank-you for confirming I am not insane and the not the only consultant recommending using an "old" version over new!

    Looking forward to some new features in V4 though! Dashboard is looking very dated compared to your competitors and my client's only real gripe!

  17. Gravatar ImageSimon Justesen Says:

    Doug: Umbraco is released with a MIT license.. It's as free as in free beer.

  18. Gravatar ImageMark Says:

    The comments above show mixed feelings, and emotion aside Umbraco HQ need to do what is right for the platform. You can't flog a dead horse.

    BUT, having put emotion aside and looking at the financial side of things regarding having trained 5 devs and flown out an Umbraco HQ Trainer from Australia to Cape Town (at our OWN expense) - I would like to know whether Umbraco HQ will be flying out Peter again to train us on V4 which is an XSLT based system? Sorry chaps, but there needs to be some financial recourse here from Umbraco HQ, for the massive investment we made into V5 training in March 2012.

    Please advise.


  19. Gravatar ImageClaes Brandt Says:

    May I suggest that you remove the v5 downloads then?

  20. Gravatar ImageJustWOW Says:

    This is about as bad as it gets...and a major PR disaster..what a way to alienate the developer community...personally, having spent about $3000 getting certified on V5 (travel included, not to mention 40 hours of lost client billings), and then ponying up almost another $2500 to attend CG12, specifically because it was hyped as "all V5", to have everyone show up and then have the rug pulled from beneath them is unconscionable....somebody, maybe several somebodies, need to lose their job. How can we ever trust the same developers who had absolutely no idea what they were doing to now refocus on v4....just WOW.

    Seems to me CG12 was organized and advertised under fraudulent terms...refunds are due.

    ...and what, if any, compensation will be made available to those people that helped fund the development of V5 by ponying up training for a now discontinued project....need to wrap my head around this....

  21. Gravatar ImageMel Says:

    I don't think there is any denying that Umbraco 4 is a great CMS, I've been using it for a while now and will probably continue to do so.

    The part which gets me about today's news though, is my confidence in the future of Umbraco. Maybe it was a good decision for HQ to cut losses and drop v5, but I can't help but imagine what the consequences could have been if I'd already started moving clients on to the new platform and then had to turn around and explain how months of work had been wasted. Commerical suicide.

    I was one of the first to attend the v5 training courses, as a freelancer I have to choose where I allocate my training budget wisely. Frustratingly this now seems to be a wasted investment and I could have spent the money attending something else. I will be looking to cancel my upcoming Level 2 course as soon as possible.

    IMHO the way forward here is to focus on analysing why v5 has become so complex and move forward with support of the community, rather than trying to retrofit 4.x with the new features.

    Best regards

  22. Gravatar ImageStefan Says:

    This makes no sense at all!

    “Sometimes you have to let go of your darlings to discover something new. And to be brutally honest, XSLT haven't been a happy marriage for most people. In fact, it repeatedly comes out as the number one disliked 'feature' of Umbraco whether you talk to front-end devs or .NET devs.” - Niels Hartvig about Umbraco v.5

    Just remember to put Razor in v4 !

  23. Gravatar ImageHenri Says:

    Razor has been in v4 for a year now, you don't have to write a single line of xslt.

  24. Gravatar ImageAsbjørn Says:

    So what?? Are you abandoning Razor and going back to that awful XSLT next - that seems to be the logic behind this...
    This reeks of some internal battle that has reached its unfortunate conclusion. This is a sad day indeed.
    I have been an avid Umbraco fan for quite a while, but for me it's quite the reverse. Umbraco v4 has a number of nagging issues that need fixing - and soon. I was looking forward to v5, which had already solved a number of these and with the new extensibility, the rest would probably have been resolved in the not too distant future.
    As things are, does anybody have recommendations for an alternative CMS with some of the same qualities as Umbraco? I am about to start a major new project and I was going to use v5 for that, but this casts into doubt whether I should even use Umbraco... Frankly, I don't trust the Umbraco developers after this. If Umbraco is going downhill, I'll want to get off before things get really bad.
    And where is that community involvement you speak of? I certainly haven't heard *anything* about this until this blog post. This amateurish in the extreme and may well be the beginning of the end for Umbraco.

  25. Gravatar ImageHartvig Says:

    @Stefan: Razor have been in v4 for more than 18 months.

  26. Gravatar ImageSeth Niemuth Says:

    As Henri says, you do not have to use XSLT at all in umbraco 4. The cache is held in XML but you can easily access the api in usercontrols to get the content as you want or razor has been part of umbraco 4 for a long time.

  27. Gravatar ImageDave Says:

    @stefan : v4 supports razor since 4.6 release so I don't get people complaining about XSLT. There have been alternatives for XSLT macro's since I started using it in 2007. First usercontrols and since 4.6 razor

  28. Gravatar ImageMatthew Watson Says:

    I for one welcome our new V4 overlords...

    Its good news from my perspective, but appreciate how early v5 adopters might be upset by this.

    Just remember Razor is available in v4 and it is great, so don't fret about going back to XSLT.

    I think they should branch v5 with a rename too, removing it from the Umbraco brand, but letting the community run with it as an open source enterprise solution.

  29. Gravatar ImageBenjamin Bykowski Says:

    You know this kinda reminds me of how HTML5 came to be. So many people were hard at work with XHTML 2.0. Big unwieldy spec, with lots of rules and specifics. Very strict, very complex.

    Then some smart and creative folks started the WHATWG and said, “Let’s change the game and stop the spec insanity. Let’s pave the cow paths and get the global web community into this thing! W3C you're invited too!” and now you have this new amazing Web technology with all kinds of new potential that even when it fails, fails gracefully and really brings constant innovative change and discussion to the table.

    I think Umbraco should look at that as a model for how to proceed.

  30. Gravatar ImageHenri Says:

    @Seth or you can export the document types to .net and create a small dll that does the content fetching and then output it with razor. that's how i do it, no web forms, no xslt. :)

    @Matthew I agree, v5 should be considered a community driven open source umbraco research project, which is not the main product, but a place where things can be experimented with.

  31. Gravatar ImageMarc Love Says:

    I have been using Umbraco for several years and seen many other CMS systems that are no where near as good as Umbraco. I havent developed any sites yet on V5 so this wont really affect me. I am surprised at some of the negative comments. The Umbraco team have built a great CMS in V4 and obviously have not made this decision easily. I will remain a fan of Umbraco and look forward to seeing the combination of V5 and V4 to make an even better CMS (If thats possible!!)

  32. Gravatar ImageDan Diplo Says:

    To all the people complaining about having to use XSLT and Web Forms in v4, please do a little research. Razor has been in v4 since 4.5 and you do not have to use web-forms.

    I'm almost complete on a large dual-language site that integrates with a large number of external systems (including web-services and payment providers) and I haven't written a line of XSLT or used a single ASP.NET control (there is no ViewState or runat=server on a single page). It's class libraries for logic and Razor for presentation. You don't need v5 for that.

  33. Gravatar ImageNick Durrant Says:

    I am interested to see what Niels says about these comments. The storm is brewing. Umbraco v5 has been hyped up considerably in recent months and we were all onboard. We have even taken risks with our clients, putting our neck on the line that Umbraco 5 is the future. There is also the question around the training certification.

    It creates an embarrassing situation for Umbraco and for us, considering the profile Umbraco has created, this is a significant knock in reputation. Yes, it will recover and be forgotten in time, but considering the involvement we have in some large global sites running Umbraco, I have always punted Umbraco solution and in recent months pushing v5 as a major new platform to use.

    Continuing with v4 makes sense, in fact I questioned v5 when it was first discussed as there was no upgrade route to v5 for customers. v4 is fine for now, but there will still need to be some significant architectural changes down the line. What happens when we get to v4.

    We still love Umbraco and will continue to fully support, but we need some serious communication from Umbraco considering the investment to date.

  34. Gravatar ImagePetr Šnobelt Says:

    Great decision!


    BTW: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

  35. Gravatar ImageJohn Walker Says:

    I'm shocked by the decision but not shocked at the same time. It's obvious just how much work has gone into V5 and to make the decision to pull this must have been an incredibly difficult one.

    Personally I only spent a little time playing around with V5 and decided to stick to V4 with the issues regarding performance. I sure do feel very sorry for everyone who put lots of time in and gained certificates for V5, hopefully something can be sorted to support these developers.

    Definitely looking forward to seeing what goodness from V5 can be ported into V4.

  36. Gravatar ImageSteve Says:

    Hi, Are you planning to put V4 up on the Windows Azure Websites App gallery?

  37. Gravatar ImageRik Says:

    v4 has various challenges when it comes to Azure hosting, we where hoping to see drastic improvements in V5...

  38. Gravatar ImageNick Durrant Says:

    We had challenges on the Amazon EC2 platform, but finally optimized to get the best performance we could, however, the site had more complexities to it than simply running Umbraco (v4 ofcourse :))

  39. Gravatar ImageMichele Says:

    Sorry about that, but yes, I understand the decision. Personally, I didn't like v5 so much, even if I was trying and studying it, but for the latest new project I decided to go on with v4...
    Anyway, it's fine to see that there's some people wise enough to make a few steps back before going to crash into something...

  40. Gravatar ImageBilly Koch Says:

    Now this takes real balls to do. Not many software companies will actually realize that the system doesnt work out and then say it needs to go. While most would spend so much time trying to fix it and patch it and patch it with no true real solution. It was an effort tried by the Umbraco team with hopes it would work out. This is a lesson learned for everyone and now all we can do is move on. I respect them for not trying to cover up and then keep trying to fix and patch it and being honest and saying okay this is not working.

  41. Gravatar ImagePeter Holmsgaard Says:

    In long terms I belive it is the right decision. Long live v4... (or v6 - a v4/v5 hybrid)

  42. Gravatar ImageRenzo Says:

    I do not understand the following reasoning:


    Complex code only means that unskilled developers can't contribute. And i take it you made it this way for a reason.

  43. Gravatar ImageChris Gaskell Says:

    I really hope this doesnt undermine the huge amount of work an engergy that's gone into the Umbraco project as a whole. At the Manchester Umbraco Meetup a couple of months back guys where really excited about V5 - it's a shame to watch that energy turn to anger.

    I'm still massively behind the Umbraco project but guys you really must follow this up with some good comms back to the community to restore our confidence.

  44. Gravatar ImageAntony Says:

    I can't help thinking that this is a bit rash. I've been following the threads regarding v5's performance issues and I understand that the Core devs have been discussing how to fix it so its not a decision that has been taken lightly.
    Sure, v4 can easily be extended to support MVC sites natively (MvcBridge does an excellent job of supporting RenderAction in V4 - Much better than Surface Controllers IMHO) but I think we will need a clean break/reboot to launch the successor to the umbraco xml cache.
    Overall, I think we need V5 but unfortunately Hive (possibly including the whole Typed Entity mapping system) needs a re-think

  45. Gravatar ImageHeather Floyd Says:

    I was just as surprised as everyone to see this announcement today, and will echo the comments of sympathy for those brave and forward-looking developers who have jumped in with both feet with v5 and are now looking at a lot of wasted time and confidence. As someone who has been working with umbraco since v2, I am personally gratified to see how many bright people are supporting this project and the excitement in the community in general gives me faith in the future of this platform.

    However, they don't call it the "bleeding edge" for nothing. Regardless of the "hype" from HQ, there was no way I would have considered implementing a production website until version 5.2+ at least. Sadly, I don't have much time to spend testing & playing with new versions, so I hadn't even cracked open a v5 test site for a serious look around yet.

    I just want express my vote of confidence for the umbraco framework, and the umbraco HQ team. Neither is perfect, for sure, but since 2006 I have seen steady growth and improvement in both. My hope is that the HQ team takes some time to reflect on long-term strategy for the organization and product, and that they also look closely at how they communicate with the community which puts so much faith in them. The time for hubris has passed. I know that through the years some "Cassandras" in the community have pointed out flaws in umbraco, and haven't always received the respectful response which would have been best. We all need to remember that everyone who contributes to umbraco - the HQ devs, forum posters, bug reporters, package creators - do it because they CARE about the future of umbraco, and what to make it the best .Net CMS out there. I personally believe it is.

    A sincere Thank You to everyone who makes umbraco great.

  46. Gravatar ImageMark Says:

    A lot of people are saying this is a brave decision.

    It may have been brave if v5 had been canned before it was released. Canning a product AFTER release, and after people have committed time and money to it (and planned their business around it), isn't brave, it's foolish. You just lost all credibility for those businesses which need to have any trust in their CMS platform and the planning around it (which basically covers all your potential Enterprise users). Is this a tacit admission that Umbraco as a brand isn't suitable for the Enterprise?

    The reasons given all seem rather weak, amounting to: "V5 isn't as mature as V4 and the community aren't used to developing with it." Well, duh.

  47. Gravatar ImageKimb Jones Says:

    Everyone who was on v5 jump to WordPress! :) j/k

    I'm pleased because I never really found the time to invest in learning all the new v5 stuff and now XSLT has been dumped in v4 I can take a 2nd look at Umbraco without worrying that any work I do may not work with the new version :)

  48. Gravatar ImageAnatoliy.K Says:

    agree with Antony Says:
    13 Jun 12 @ 04:35 GMT+1

    U% -to heavy. It should be as simple as possible (~U4).
    Hive - been designed good, extendable. but unfortunately to complicated. Because hive - javascript implementation also.

    Plugin manager (MEF) - not needed for first time.

  49. Gravatar ImageThomas Kahn Says:

    I takes a lot of courage to make a decision like this and I applaud the Umbraco team for making it. We've had quite a lot of trouble with getting Umbraco 5 to work properly when moving our sites to our ISP. Our umbraco 4.x sites are working great though.

    When it comes to XSLT, I guess I'm one of the (few?) developers that really love coding in XSLT. I think it's beautiful although somewhat verbose.

  50. Gravatar ImageAnon Says:

    As a person who knows what really happened. I can only describe it as throwing your toys out the cot and throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

  51. Gravatar ImageNeven Says:

    I support v5 RIP.
    If Umbraco grew too complex it wouldn't be Umbraco ever more. Your decision shows that you know what you are doing.

  52. Gravatar ImageKenny Burns Says:

    We have been using Umbraco for over a year now and have to say it is a fantastic system. We use razor all the time, no xslt and a few webforms/usercontrols and it has been great so far. I do feel sorry for those who have invested a lot of time and effort into V5 but we felt it best to wait until things panned out...Phew!

    I know a lot of people might be outraged at this decision but I believe in the system and I am sure the guys are doing it for the right reasons.

    V4 will no doubt get some fantastic additions after the work that went into V5 but if they thought it didn't have a viable future...well it takes big brass ones to admit that.

    Still with you, keep up the great work and look forward to the next update.


  53. Gravatar ImageRandy McCluer Says:

    I'm not one to freak out lightly, but this is shocking news. This news may actually cost me my job, as I've spent the last 6mo focusing my companies tiny dev resources at u5 for a Sitecore -> u5 migration. I know this is a risk with adopting cutting edge tech, but I thought we were safe once we reached RTM. My boss is taking the news better than I am, but this has cost my company tens of thousands of unrecoverable dollars. {Goes in the corner to cry}

  54. Gravatar ImageEric Boen Says:

    Bold move, thanks for the hard work and communication. My wife and business partner tells our clients that Umbraco is the Mercedes of CMSs, so I'm glad you made the decision before it was to late for to many and tarnished that reputation. We look forward to more great releases of Umbraco and so do our clients who have over 40+ installations.

  55. Gravatar ImageMantorok Says:

    I don't think you've really considered the repercussions of this decision, admittedly it takes balls to do this but the reaction so far is not entirely positive, as expected.

    The biggest concern for me is confidence in the product now, so what if 4.7 is there ready and waiting? It doesn't change the fact that a product that has been touted with such greatness has fallen flat on its face. For me my confidence in your abilities has been affected, and it's not just because you delivered a pig, it's because you have failed to realise it was a pig until it was too late, where is the QA in all of this?

    I'm not sure whether it's going to affect you that much or not but you should expect a flood of refund-requests over the coming weeks, charging for training and communications on v5 is going to cost you dearly I think.

    But that's nothing compared to the ripple-effect this is going to have, and it's such a shocker to us all because of the high standards that have been set before v5.

    Such a shame, I hope you can recover, because some of your v5 investors might not.

  56. Gravatar ImageDoug Robgertson Says:

    At 5.0 I was cautious, asked around and got the advice to hold on until v5.1. So I started playing and working on a site in the background. v5.1 came out and I started devloping. Then we had performance issues and people said wait until v5.2. I have been using the nightly builds and working hard to make it work as best possible with the expectation that v5.2 would be the one.

    At no time did I ever get a hint from ANYONE that there was a possibility that Umbraco would just completely dump v5.x. Based on lots of indications that things were getting better I plugged away. I have huge amounts of time and personal money tied up in a brand new site built entirely on v5. I have never used v4.whatever and never intend to.

    If there was a possibilty that you were going to drop v5 entirely some kind of warning should have been given a long time ago. I feel completely screwed on this. The v4 Umbraco people can have their system back, but I have just been left to drown. You people suck.

    I hope you at least make some concrete plans to migrate the v5 system out into the public domain more. Yes, I understand that Umbraco is MIT lic "Free as in %^#$%@ beer", but as the headquarters people have said, it has never really been a community project. Where are the project notes, I can get the source code, but it is documented like crap. Are you going to at least do something to help out those of us you have just screwed. Please put some effort into shifting it out of HQ so we aren't completely abandonded.

    This hurts me so badly. I am a small business that thought I could build a solid dynamic web site on top of an up and coming CMS platform. Everyone was always so positive about what was coming. I could use my experience in .NET and MVC in a way that felt natural. I thought I was going to be done in the next few weeks. Now I have to completely shift to a different CMS and all the hours I have put into this are lost. I am now months away from having anything and have to learn a completely different CMS to do it. I can assure you it will not be Umbraco.

    You can't even imagine the rage I feel about this right now.

  57. Gravatar ImageJonathan Saxon Says:

    When I first heard the news I was quite upset but now I have had the time to watch the codegarden presentation I realise that this truly was the only real choice.

    I do feel sorry for the people that invested time into v5 and just hope that this does not make them think twice about using Umbraco in the future.

    One thing that must be said though in the defence of Umbraco is that the product is free and nobody forced anyone to use v5.

  58. Gravatar ImageTom Madden Says:

    In March this year, I told people that I didn't think v5 would be usable until at least after CodeGarden, just this morning, before the announcement, I told a fellow CG12 attendee that I didn't expect V5 should be considered production ready until next year at least. I've been, frankly, astonished at how many developers have implemented v5 sites on an obviously unproven and incomplete system.

    I think that the community themselves, and I include myself in this, should take part of the blame/responsibility, and for 2 main reasons.

    1. Not enough people take the time to beta test the product (all versions) and feed back on bugs. This is obvious, because every time a .1 release comes out, it is always quickly followed by a .01 and .02 release because people then start to use it and provide the feedback required

    2. There is a feeling, rightly or wrongly, that criticising the project is seen in a bad light. I had this exact feeling myself back in March, and my feedback then, as now is this:

    Umbraco don't apply version numbers correctly their releases. I was told this before I had even looked at Umbraco in the v3 days, when I was told a release version should be considered as a beta. When v5 was released, I told a number of people that I considered it to be an alpha, or a CTP. Obviously, with hindsight, I wish I had raised this at the time, but I didn't want to be seen as being negative.

    I think, BTW, that point 2 is because of point 1, so if more people get involved in testing beta releases, we should have more stable releases each time.

    I agree totally that cancelling v5 is the correct decision, kudos for making probably the hardest decision since deciding to make Umbraco open-source in the first place.

    Hopefully, we'll see a session in the coming days on using MVC to provide the front end of sites using v4. This would allow developers to get all the MVC goodness, while clients can use the existing v4 back end to edit their sites. Every client I've trained loves the simplicity of the Umbraco backend.

    Good decision, all the best

  59. Gravatar ImageJonathan Saxon Says:

    Tom I think you are right and that sounds like a great way to go in the future for umbraco.

  60. Gravatar ImageSøren Erland Says:

    This is an absolute disaster, both management- and communications-wise.

    How can you let a project be 4 months out with a v5.2 on the way constantly trumpeting it as "the future", running (quite expensive mind you) courses and then kill it off??

    What the h.ll am I going to tell my clients? "Hi, you know that site we're building for you that is 2 months away from going live..? We'll have to redo that".

    My confidence in Umbraco is negative right now. I'm not sure it will ever be positive again. How can I trust anything coming out of HQ?

    I have probably built my last site on Umbraco. Unfortunately that was a v5 site.

  61. Gravatar ImageMatias Wald Says:

    Don't accept this! we need to ask Umbraco to release all assets for V5 to the public! Let's make this a true community driven open source project!

    If you support this idea, I've created a petition online so Umbraco HQ takes notice!



  62. Gravatar ImageJonathan Saxon Says:

    Again Im with all the people that had created u5 sites maybe the project could be donated but I think this is highly unlikely to happen.

  63. Gravatar ImageHenri Says:

    @Matias What assets are you refering to? It is open source, and has always been, with a MIT license. And documentation is on github.

  64. Gravatar ImageAsbjørn Says:

    I have watched the keynote - and while I am still not happy about the way this has been handled, I at least understand it a bit more.
    However, I hope you are serious this time. Improving v4 should really have been the decision from the start, because Umbraco v4 needs it badly. And I still think a move to MVC cannot come soon enough - I hope that is still in the works. What shouldn't have been changed was the data layer, which actually works pretty good (not perfect, but then again, what is perfect).
    I am looking forward to seeing v4 improve (though I wonder what we shall call it after 4.9).
    At least it is finally clear whether to use v4 or v5. Thank you for that!

  65. Gravatar ImageNico Lubbers Says:

    Holy crap, this is shocking news.
    I have no other words for it.

  66. Gravatar ImageDarren Says:

    Hi there is my v5 certification still valid then? If not can I get my money back for the training I took?

  67. Gravatar ImageStevo Says:

    After having to report this ugly news this morning to my CEO, I was fired for choosing V5 and leading this company down the wrong path.
    If anyone thinks V4 is going to be awesome in anyway, or somehow you can take V5 and make it awesome, you are wrong...wrong...wrong!
    Learn from my mistake, this product is outdated and dead!
    Im heading to Sitefinity CMS.

  68. Gravatar Imagelynn eriksen Says:

    Tough but good descision. If the logic-layer doesn't hold up then it's just asking a disaster in waiting.

    One thing that would be of great benefit immediately:

    A 4.x release project that compiles. This is necessary for those who want to use Umbraco with MVC.

  69. Gravatar ImageCarlos Says:

    @Stevo: If you got fired because of this, then you should thank Hartvig & Co because your boss is a stupid idiot and your job probably sucked!

    Long live U4!

  70. Gravatar ImagePaul Randall Says:

    Niels Hartvig! Can you give us an idea of how MVC will fit into the work that will go into V4? I think I speak for many of us ... we want MVC. I appreciate the keynote .. seems like this was genuine honesty at work. Obviously there will be problems with abandoning V5 for some anyway but personally I could use some insight into how MVC will be incorporated or how we can build using MVC with the core remaining V4. Thanks for your time.

  71. Gravatar ImageSimplicio Jison jr Says:

    Thanks for Umbraco Team for the honest and bold decision !

  72. Gravatar ImageAlan Says:

    Theres a lot about this decision that screams amateur hour. Firstly, for such a fundamental announcement that affects the entire Umbraco community, not just 380-odd lucky sods that can afford a business trip to Europe - this needs to be handled in a much more professional, PR managed manner. Like it or not, this is now a business-grade CMS that they court big businesses to part with ~E10K to help fund. Until yesterday there wasn't a single mention that ending v5 developmnent was an option. So therefore all these people who invest time, professional influence in the workplace, and money in backing, have been left sorely wanting.

    Luckily I hadn't investigated v5 to any great degree, but if I had, and like some people on here lost a pot of money on training, or even worse backed it for a large project that would affect my professional reputation - I'd be fuming.

    Also, you'd think from the retweeted messages of support by the members of HQ that the community unilaterally backed this decision and praised the bravery - the message on here tells a very different story - and we were told that spin was something against Umbraco values in the keynote? Hope the takeway message about spin wasn't, eerm.. spin.

    As someone else said it would have been brave to pull before launch, brave isn't the word I'd use when it's very funding has been paid for by training courses etc that will now be next to useless.

    I have to say I like 4.x a lot, and will probably continue to use it personally, with caution. But I'd be loathed to professionally back it to the hilt in the future. Shame as there are a lot of things going for this platform, I hope the community rallies and keeps the product viable. But it'll take a lot longer I think though for it to recover it's trust in the enterprise.

  73. Gravatar ImageStefan Says:

    I also would like to know, like Paul and some others, how MVC will fit into the work that will go into V4?
    I guess i just said razor before but ofc I meant the MVC / Razor combo. I just saw the keynote and in the v4 quaters talk there was nothing about MVC - although i can see on the umbraco project twitter that MVC is still in the cards. But please, we need some info about this soon! When will the roadmap be online ?

  74. Gravatar ImageNicolai Heilbuth Says:

    Version 5 sounded SO awsome on paper, but in reality it was just too complex to carry the name Umbraco!

    Not an easy one, but the right descision!

  75. Gravatar ImageIsmail Mayat Says:

    This was a thunderbolt out of the blue but not totally surprising.

    I had sat through a few v5 talks over the last 18months or so and thought this is way too complicated however I would console myself with its you, give it time once you actually have a play it will all be fine. Looks like I was wrong!

    Niels in his keynote yesterday made a point about gentleman's silence when it comes to Umbraco. I think one of the reasons is that its opensource free as in air therefore I don't have the automatic God given right to bitch about something that has been given to me for free. Something behind which people have put so much time and effort all for the love of it and not financial gain. THIS is always in the back of my mind when working with Umbraco and leads onto my next point.

    I have worked with umbraco since 2005 and I have NEVER I repeat NEVER done a bleeding edge install. I always wait at least a couple of months before using a new release. Umbraco is opensource they do not have the huge resources that paid CMS's have also a signification amount of the work is done by un paid volunteers . So I don't understand why people have gone ahead into production with v5. In fact we recently lost a client because we told them to wait with regards to v5.

    Overall I think its the right decision its a bit late coming but better late than never, I feel for the people who have production sites up and who have done the certifications. With regards to the production people you have some comfort in that it will be stabilized to a point.

    Anyhow that's just my 5 pence worth what do I know!

  76. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @alan: As we've said many times by now, it was definitely a mistake that we didn't had a public message ready. We're not PR people and learning every day.

    All tweets are public available in the Umbraco search feed - and on our blog we choose to have unmoderated comments. When one of us retweet someone it's because we like their tweet - nothing else.

  77. Gravatar ImageMikkel Says:

    It's going to be very expensive for the Pro users of Umbraco, and very un-expensive for all the hobby users.
    With all the paid features you are asking the community to invest in, this is a suicide decision.

    Now Umbraco is just a small CMS for hobby users,

  78. Gravatar ImageMantorok Says:

    Ok, let's start looking forward and truly assess the damage and how we can mitigate:

  79. Gravatar ImageG Says:

    Attendees of the training courses should be given some kind of compensation, how can you charge people to train on a system that you know is not ready? I really loved umbraco but i feel sick thinking about using it again.

  80. Gravatar ImageAlan Says:

    OK I understand you're not PR people. But when something gets this big, like 100k+ installs, and Fortune 500 claims all over the site, if something this controversial gets decided you're best off leaving that to the experts to disseminate, not ad-hoc at a conference where the rest of the world plays catchup. Especially in this day and age of armchair experts on twitter!

    Like I say it doesn't affect me personally, I just feel sorry for those it does. You rely on enterprise for your funding model and they're the ones that will be most spooked. The fanboys will always cherp up about how great a decision it was. Like was implied in the keynote, praise never improves anything, criticism does. I really hope Umbraco recovers from this as it's fundamentally a great concept and platform, just when playing with the big boys things need handlng a bit more professionally, otherwise it goes back to the realm of hobbyist CMS. And I really hope it doesn't.

  81. Gravatar ImageDave Says:

    Disappointing news. The company I'm working at wanted to start their project a little too early for version 5 so we ended up choosing v4.

    I've waded through a fair few bugs and had the overall feeling that v4 has had too many features added to it overtime that end up not working well together (plugins working with courier anyone?). A ground up re-write to drop some features (XSLT support) and improve the underlying architecture (e.g. allowing multiple inheritance with document types) seemed sensible decisions to make Umbraco development simpler and less painful.

    It's a real shame the dream is over! When's version 6 coming? :)

  82. Gravatar ImageTest Says:

    I guess there are valid reasons not to base one's business on opensource :p

  83. Gravatar ImageJames Says:

    Sad news.

    It might be the right decision, but the damage this will do to Umbraco's reputation can't be overstated.

    I've been pushing (successfully) for Umbraco to be used for a major new project, but after this, how could I ever make that case again - or more importantly, why *would* I put my credibility and my reputation on the line with Umbraco again?

    Ah well, there's always WordPress.

  84. Gravatar ImageNiklas Gislum Says:

    We are one those companies who decided to use Umbraco V5 as the CMS to deliver the content for our websites.

    We had a lot of discussions weather we should use 4.7 or 5.0. We concluded that 4.7 proved to us that the guys knew what they were doing, but it would be stupid to start a 4.7 project, because it would be discontinued. V5 looked good to us, it was using MVC which we had planned that our future projects should use.

    We started initial development, testing and planing on the V5 beta, It was a bit slow, but we saw big improvements in the following releases and kept on.

    We have spent a lot of time. approx 5 months planning, learning, coding everything around V5, from one day to another all of that was wasted.

    From our view it was only some small issues that stopped us from using V5 fully, memory issues, strange hangs. But there was no doubt it would get fixed!!

    In Niels keynote he was complaining that the uses didn't complain enough, and those complaints would also affect the core team on their decisions, please take a look at all the complaints you properly get from all over the place about stopping V5 development.

    Now we are looking at 4.7 to see if we can use any of the development we have done so far... doesn't look good though. A lot of work has to be redone!!

    And right now I'm not even sure that we should do any work in 4.7, because I'm not sure if this eventually will end up killing Umbraco totally!!

    Be honest guys core team / MVP / community, do you all agree that this is right decision!!

    Are you sure this decision wasn't made because package developers, complained about their work being rendered worthless (at least that was not going to be a problem two years from now.. our work got useless yesterday without warning!!)

    I would like to know from other Umbraco core developers that V4 is the way to go, and they will back it up all the way, so I can plan our next move!

  85. Gravatar ImageGerry White Says:

    Well - I for one thing that if something isn't going in the right direction and back peddling slightly works better ... I am all for it - too many projects get massively out of hand in the wrong direction... I hope this means that v4 will be better developed and as someone pretty rubbish at web dev I am struggling a bit with bugs in 4 ... would prefer a reliable Volkswagen than an usable TVR ...

  86. Gravatar ImageMatt Brailsford Says:

    Hi Niklas,

    In answer to your question, I hole heartedly agree with the decision 100%. Having been an active package dev, and having worked for the HQ for the last year, the difference between the two versions is night and day. Am I disappointed that v5 wasn't a success? of course I am. But I have the up most confidence that we will learn from our mistakes and make v4 even better than v5 and have the added benefit of taking the community along with us.

    The other thing to remember is, whilst the v5 project will be unsupported from now on, many of the great concepts can and will be ported to v4, including MVC. IMHO it's not the death of v5, it's reignition and the moving forward of an already established and solid platform which is v4.

  87. Gravatar ImageAaron Powell Says:

    @Niklas - As someone who was involved in the decision I will say that I do agree with it and make no mistake, this decision wasn't an easy one to make. I'm one of those who had invested their own resources in building a commercial product on top of v5 so for me is was the only one that I could see as a logical solution; having worked on the v5 source code it was always an up-hill battle to do anything. Having tried to build a package it was an unpleasant experience.

    One thing that you need to keep in mind is that this is more about the HQ deciding not to invest *their* resources in v5, yet if the community believes in the project and wants it to grow then they have the ability to do that.

  88. Gravatar ImageShannon Deminick Says:

    Hi @Niklas,
    This decision was obviously a very difficult one and didn't come about without a lot of deliberation. I've have been immersed with the making of v5 for the last 1.5 year focusing mostly on the MVC portion of the project, so I can assure you we didn't make this decision lightly.

    One of the big issues with v5 is complexity and how we all would go about maintaining it. The codebase is very complicated, so complicated in fact that I can't figure out how a lot of it works or fits together and I've been working on it for 1.5 years. This has actively prevented many community members from getting involved. There were very few people following along with the actual codebase and even fewer that we're able to help out with bug fixes. I don't believe a project like this cannot sustain itself because it alienates most of the great Umbraco community members from being involved. Umbraco itself is not a complicated beast. It was invented to be simple and it should stay this way, whereas v5 is the complete opposite of this. If issues crop up regarding data (which is obviously a very important part of a CMS), there's really not many people who are able to or willing to attempt to figure it out since it is incredibly difficult to debug. In order to refactor v5 to be simplistic would take a great deal of time and I truly believe that it would take longer to do this as it would to get all of the really great ideas from v5 into v4.

    There have been some really great things to come out of v5 and almost all of them can be migrated into v4 including much of the code as-is and hopefully we can get this all in the pipeline real soon.

  89. Gravatar ImageMorten Christensen Says:

    @Niklas I'm part of the core team and was also on the retreat where the decision has made. There should be no doubt that this was not an easy decision. I, myself, have worked on version 5 for about 6 months.

    I back the decision to stop development of version 5, as it has become too complex and doesn't fit the values of what Umbraco is supposed to be. I believe there is a lot more to be gained by initially focussing on improving version 4 and then start to port over some of the bits of version 5 that are still usable. Remember that we are not doing a Shift+Delete, as there are a lot of really useful stuff in version 5 that we can still use, as well as a lot of knowledge gained - both of what to do and what not to do.

    - Morten

  90. Gravatar Imagekevan bulmer Says:

    one word 'N2CMS' I ditched Umbraco long ago

  91. Gravatar ImageMikkel Says:

    It's INSANE that you did'nt keep the secret and just prepared a v6.

    you MUST continue to work on 5, and prepare a 6.

  92. Gravatar ImageMichiel Says:

    Let's not forget the reason v5 was started from scratch. I'm looking forward to a blog post that refutes the arguments given in the beginning for the clean slate approach, and does so without too much spin.

    "Some would (and have) argued for a progressive enhancement of the existing code in order to get there. But there comes a point where you've replaced so many parts of the car that you're left only with the original chassis, and you have to attack that problem if you are to make fundamental improvements."

    Source: http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2010/11/26/umbraco-5-may-the-blogging-commence.aspx

    How will you attack that problem (which is the codebase in v4, also pretty difficult to comprehend and not that consistent). What's the strategy to make possible the sort of fundamental improvements that are needed on the short term. And how is going to be faster than it would be to re-align v5 with the needs of the community?

    And also important for everyone involved: what's the estimated time to release for each of these major fundamentals?

    Keep us informed guys, communication is your most important asset this week and the next few weeks! (Possibly your only asset until we see a new release of v4...)

  93. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    We'll keep you posted, but less this week as we need to work with the rest of the community what the way forward is (here at CodeGarden). So if you experience a bit of silence the next few days, that's why :)

    As for the old blog post, I can only say that we've learned a lot ever since it was posted as it obviously turned out to be the wrong decision (which is backed up by most software lessons anyway http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html et all).

    From here, only time can tell if we did the right thing - but everyone at the core retreat who've been working directly on v5 (Morten, Shannon, Matt, Tim, Aaron) believes so and so does the rest of the eighteen who worked on using v5 in the wild.

  94. Gravatar ImageMarc Says:

    That is shocking and a PR desaster. That should have been communicated much much better and ... sorry to says that .. more clever!

    Anyways, enough talks.

    We need to focus on how to polish a 4.8, better a 4.8.5 and 4.9 and prepare a post-v5-version. And we need to be fast! Time to market is (mind the quality!) crucial now.

  95. Gravatar ImagePaul Knopf Says:

    I strongly recommend N2CMS. MVC3/razor. There is nothing it can't do. Literally.

  96. Gravatar ImageRon Hitch Says:

    :( This is really bad news for all of us who invested our time into v5. We go with Kentico CMS for all our next projects...

  97. Gravatar ImageDouglas Ludlow Says:

    Does this mean that we can finally see more improvements in the Umbraco Pro packages meant for 4, specifically Contour? Talk about something fundamentally flawed. That project needs to be open source!

  98. Gravatar ImageDaniel Nutu Says:

    I'm really disappointed that you've dropped the v5 framework. It could of been something great! Yes, it needed a little polish, a few more docs and some example plugins (e.g. simple commerce) - to give the community more confidence is this new framework.
    I've watched Umbraco and Orchard evolve from alpha to release and both are great CMS, but I've had high hopes for the v5. I liked the idea of v4 where you can create you layout from scrath with no extra markup, but that's about it. With v5 we've finally had a database structure you can work with (EAV), finally a nice architecture on which you can develop.
    I know that many people are accommodated to the v4 (which is a little bit old, crappy even, if I can say so) and with less abstraction, something like PHP solutions look like (declare something somewhere and use it). I know that many of the people in the community aren't developers and like simple stuff that can be copy-pasted into an XSLT.
    I just hope that v5 will inspire v6 and we can have a nice CMS.

  99. Gravatar ImagePatrick Says:

    I really don't know what to say. If you guys think it is undoable to make it descent, than I guess you are right. But I have to say, from a developers perspective I liked how it worked. Still, I can't see why it couldn't be an umbraco MVC 1.2 version. Let them live together and let people slowly convert while you fix the bugs. Maybe even create a sliding migration to a version 6 that has a upgrade path from version 4.9 and 5.*

  100. Gravatar ImageTimothy Lee Russell Says:

    It seems to me that this decision was a bit hasty. Certainly, it is Umbraco HQ’s prerogative to decide where to spend their limited funds -- but functionally speaking, version 5 was not that far off. I’ve built three sites with it and have spent some time looking through the code and I'm not sure I understand how the architecture is fundamentally "broken".

    There were performance issues, memory issues and interface bugs certainly (which we did provide feedback about on issues.umbraco.org) but that is what one would expect from an early software product. Those issues would have resolved themselves eventually by expending the appropriate amount of effort.

    The move to rebuild the platform on MVC was the correct one, I believe – but apparently it was a larger job than Umbraco HQ had anticipated. Building the various pieces using the provider pattern added complexity but it is the type of complexity that is useful, for instance, to be able to plug-in a membership provider that talks to an existing user authentication service or to be able to extend the storage to other types of data providers. Enterprise customers need this type of functionality.

    As investors in v5 via training costs and certifications, we are pretty disappointed about this to say the least.

    One thing is clear in hindsight -- that the team realizes that it would have been much better to call it Umbraco MVC 1.0 Beta – which would have set the expectation more reasonably.

  101. Gravatar ImageDamian Guiney Says:

    So what about the thousands (yes thousands) of dollars our company invested in training resources on version 5? You got us excited about the product, we took developers off paying work and sent to the training sessions, we paid our invoices... What now? We want our money back. That's what.

  102. Gravatar ImageRandy McCluer Says:

    @Timothy, I'm in agreement with almost everything you've said. From watching the keynote, it seems that Niels was more concerned the the codebase had crossed some line between 'web-dev-friendly' over to 'software engineer'-friendly. And he has always wanted Umbraco to be a web dev's tool.
    While I am still feel shocked & betrayed by this decision, I do agree with Niels that lots of devs out there were going to have trouble understanding & contributing to the codebase. This changes the OSS nature of the product and puts pressure on the HQ team to keep things going.
    I'm just sad that there is no obvious alternative out there after spending 1yr waiting for v5 and 6mo working with it. I've never touched 4.x, so it's time to re-evaluate it vs Kentico & Sitefinity, I guess.

  103. Gravatar Imageandrew Says:

    I can’t help but think this is an extremely bad call from Umbraco Core given a medium to long term strategy for the CMS platform. When you consider all of the reasons and justification for why Umb5 was initiated in the first place they all still stand true imo. Given the main problems with the initial release of umb5 (i.e. performance) I had expected the core team to consider redeveloping the troubled areas of the project rather than scrapping it completely, even if that meant deferring customers from using it in a production environment for another 6+ months.

    I’m very interested to hear exactly why the Core team don’t think the troubled areas of umb5 can’t be re-developed. Given the total number of umb5 downloads (100,000 in total for all umb5 releases according to codeplex) I wonder what percentage of those translate into:

    1) R+D users
    2) people wanting to go live ASAP
    3) and this is the category I’m in – a strategic approach of developing an enterprise scale system that coincided with a timeframe for a stable iteration of umb5 i.e. 5.3 or 5.4+

  104. Gravatar Imageandrew Says:

    @Timothy Lee Russell - great comments!

  105. Gravatar ImageTommy Says:

    V4 is a great CMS. But if you want to use native MVC CMS. Kooboo is a choice, which created by mvc3.

  106. Gravatar Imageadmin Says:

    Ｙｅａｈ， I just found that ｋｏｏｂｏｏ　ｉｓ the　ｂｅｓｔ mvc3 cms ！

  107. Gravatar ImageTimothy Lee Russell Says:

    Given that many folks invested a significant amount of money and time in the platform through training and certification, my personal feeling is that the core team should, at minimum, spend some time outlining what they feel are deficiencies with the v5 platform and outline them for the community as well as document what components they believe would need to be rewritten and their thoughts as to the direction they would go if attempting a remediation. These proposed remediation strategies would be in reference to the changes mentioned in the keynote that were estimated to take 9 months to a year to complete.

    After that is done, re-brand the v5 project as Umbraco MVC 1.0 CTP, state its R&D status along with the recommendation to use 4.7.x+ for production projects.

    At that point, they would go back to putting their resources into working on the v4 codebase as they stated was their plan which seems like a reasonable thing to do given that their resources are constrained by the fact that the product is open source and not strictly a commercial endeavor. It is understandable that they feel the need to prioritize the effort where they believe the greatest effect will be realized.

    At that point, the MVC project can be tinkered with by the community and evolved over time. As @andrew stated, the Umbraco project needs a medium to long term strategy which, in my opinion, should be moving in the direction of Microsoft's long term strategy for ASP.NET which seems to be MVC.

    I believe that the reason that the community doesn't feel that they can contribute to the project (if that is in fact an accurate representation) is because a lot of us are have been working with WebForms for years and are just now beginning to work in MVC which comparatively is fairly new. Over the next couple of years though, more and more developers will have experience with MVC and will feel more comfortable contributing.

    I understand the philosophy argument about Umbraco being about simplicity for web designers and actually, I think v5 achieves that goal fairly well even in its immature state -- but often software developers are the ones that enable web designers the use of a platform like Umbraco so it is imperative to provide the underlying modern technology that developers need to make the modifications that allow us to fit the platform into our particular circumstances.

    In our situation, we need to hook user authentication to a global user service and then create instances of Umbraco for the web designers to build websites for our clients. We found that our web designers never needed to go outside the Umbraco web interface to build a website and in the three projects that we completed, they were able to build everything they needed in v5 as it is in its current state.

    For the long term health of the project both the developer and web designer constituencies need to have their needs met...Umbraco 5 was absolutely, 100% on the path to providing a solution that is unique in the marketplace allowing web designers a simple but powerful product to build websites while enabling the developers that support them to work in a modern paradigm.

    At least for us, if the membership provider functionality was completed and the performance and memory issues were addressed it would suite our needs completely. I find myself unable to believe, given v5's current state, that these goals are not achievable.

    In summary, my professional opinion is that the v5 codebase is a successful project from a technical and conceptual perspective -- it just needs a little more work.

    There is nothing wrong with improving v4 as many will benefit from that but I believe that completely abandoning v5 is a serious mistake.

    Umbraco HQ, respectfully, please reconsider your strategy.


  108. Gravatar ImageMark Says:

    +1 for Kooboo CMS. Works like a charm with MVC3

  109. Gravatar ImagePoorbandTony Says:

    Good decision guys - held off any v5 migration after issues with Antivirus compatibility, and performance issues also told me to 'hold on' just a bit longer.

    Takes balls to admit you were going down the wrong track. I for one love v4 and working with more and more clients developing for it. Long live Umbraco!

  110. Gravatar ImageJames Lau Says:

    Abandon Umbraco now. Port my website to another MVC3 platform. Enjoy the beauty of using 'standard' technology, the reason why I chose Umbraco5 at the beginning .

  111. Gravatar ImageJessica Says:

    As a courtesy to those who have invested time and money in educations for v5, maybe the Umbraco team should remove the fee on Umbraco TV for a period of time.

  112. Gravatar ImageDan Diplo Says:

    It's worth reading the following blog post by Ayende Rahien on why U5's architecture is fundamentally flawed:


    No amount of "polish" or tinkering can solve those core problems. It would take a complete re-write of the core. Would people prefer to find this out now or wait until they'd invested even more time in it? This is the least bad option.

  113. Gravatar ImageRob Says:

    I thought Umbraco was meant to be a commercial viable solution and not some amateur operation.

    This decision will have a great commercial impact on my business and will make for a very awkward conversation with my clients...

    Regret selecting Umbraco and will actively seek/recommend alternatives in the future.

  114. Gravatar ImageBrian Says:

    Its a very bad decision, especially as it was touted as released. My project is still very much a prototype so not too bad for me to swop to something else. I jumped straight in at V5 so will not be going down the v4 route instead I'll be using Orchard.

    I was going to do the certification training, so glad I didn't. Condolences to anyone who has paid for this and for anyone who has lost their job over this.

    I guess it's always a risk to use and base your business on Open Source.

  115. Gravatar ImageBasem Says:

    Brave decision, but you could have created momentum to v6 instead moving backwards. Instead of "killing" v5, why not "freeze" v5 in the spirit of developing v6. What a disastrous move.

  116. Gravatar ImageRebelCMS Says:

    For all the Umbraco 5 supporters. We have your back! We are going to take the bull by the horns and dig you out of this mess!!

    Come and see our plans here: http://www.rebelcms.com

    We ARE FORKING "Umbraco 5" and keeping it OSS

  117. Gravatar ImagePeter Says:

    Perhaps in the next major version there should be a clear migration path from version V4 so we don't have to start all over again? This prevented us from even being remotely interested in V5. Not to mention there's not much wrong with V4 anyhow.

  118. Gravatar ImageWing Says:

    @RebelCMS Love your name, but it's strange to sell XD

  119. Gravatar ImagePatrick Says:

    I hope atleast you will give all your documentation, umbraco tv content and all other stuff about umbraco V5 to rebelcms so they can fix it and get the project up to speed!

  120. Gravatar ImagePeter Says:

    Suggestions on how to handle the v5 fallout on Our: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/32583-suggestions-on-how-to-handle-the-v5-fallout

  121. Gravatar ImageRebelCMS Says:

    @Wing stranger than Umbraco, Fiddler or RhinoMocks? ;)

  122. Gravatar ImagePeter Says:

    @Milstein no one in their right mind is going to abandon a stable Umbraco 4.x with hundreds of packages, thousands of tutorials, and tens of thousands of dollars invested for another Web Forms CMS. If there were a comparable MVC based CMS out there then perhaps people would consider the switch but in reality there is no better CMS than Umbraco v4 that is MVC based.

    MVC based competitors exist but they are not commercially viable.

  123. Gravatar ImageSimon Justesen Says:

    Who's behind RebelCMS? You (RebelCMS) proclaim to be able to fix umbraco 5 issues, but you are not willing to reveal your names etc, so we can find out if there are any truth about your statement.

    Until you are able to show a quality release, you are to the CMS industry what script kiddies are to the hacking society.

  124. Gravatar ImageRebelCMS Says:

    @simonjustesen we already revealed ourselves at the start of the day. If you followed the action you would have known! We would be honoured to be called script kiddies! They still have passion!

  125. Gravatar Imageesunxray Says:

    If you don't like V4, You can select another CMS like: Kooboo, N2CMS,MojoPortal,SageFrame,DNN.
    But I think V4 is not so bad.

  126. Gravatar ImageMike Says:


    Enough with the spam already. Why don't you contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way, instead of spamming your links here and on Twitter. It's quite unbecoming the way you are doing it.

  127. Gravatar ImageMike Says:


    You are even spamming Codeplex pull request comments now? That's really not constructive. please stay out of places where others are trying to get actual work done and limit yourself to Twitter and/or your own website for your marketing endeavors


  128. Gravatar ImageSimon Justesen Says:

    RebelCMS: I've been catching up... Looks can be deceiving, but from looking at your Github-page, your team seem to be experienced with mainly UI, PHP and JS-projects?

  129. Gravatar ImageRebelCMS Says:

    @simonjustesen I can understand why you could come to that conclusion from our github public repositories. We consist of 2 UI devs that specialise in php/js/html/css and 3 devs who average 11 years C#.NET experience each. We all use Umbraco and have done for years. I can provide more detail by request: info@rebelcms.com

  130. Gravatar ImageFinn Ketler Says:

    What a wake-up call.
    Going from a hyped CMS and an attractive choice, to be the first to discontinue a new release, losing most of its credibility is a remarkable development. Umbraco seems to be a company having a lot of fun, but not taking the internal quality procedures all that serious - leaving numerous of companies with the loss of time and millions.
    For IT entrepreneurs Umbraco might be interesting, but companies investing in their future have to ask themselves whether a company with such an immature behavior is wise counting on.

  131. Gravatar ImageSoeren Laursen Says:

    just curious about what Umbraco HQ thinks about the idea of running a parallel development of v5 for those people who actually invested lots in the new version and put solutions in production? I think it is a very justifiable course of action.

  132. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @Soeren: Post v5.2 we won't be working on the v5 code base unless security issues surfaces. We'll use most of our resources into putting the healthy parts of v5 back into v4.

  133. Gravatar Imagetimothy Says:

    v5 shouldn't have been released as stable.
    By doing so HQ made a commitment it didn't honor.

    In an enterprise setting decisions are made for the long haul. You don't get to switch technologies every year because of the massive effort involved in training & migration.

    Announced as the future & released stable, the company I'm working for atm decided to go for v5 and accepted that the product needed maturing. What they didn't & couldn't prepare for was this announcement.

    Umbraco and the HQ have lost a lot of credibility today.

    As a developer I am relieved though, after working with low-level v5 for 6 months.
    The overall architecture was clean & flexible (but hard to get a grasp of without any form of docs) except for the DAL (Hive), which was horrible by design. Even caching (in 5.2) can't compensate for that.

    I am convinced that in the long run this decision will benefit all.

  134. Gravatar ImageRob Says:

    The decision will benefit Umbracco who have decided to cut their loses for developing and supporting their 'released' product and pass the commercial hit to their partners/user bases.

    Using the 'community' card does not hide the fact that Umbracco have made a very 'commercial' decision for other companies and individuals to pay for the cost of their mistake.

  135. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @rob When using 'fact' please back it up with empirical evidence. Until you do, I'd like to state that - as backed up by not just most of whom were involved in the dev of v5 but also .NET super stars such as Ayende - the architecture of v5 wasn't good despite it could look that way. That's unfortunate but only leaves three options:
    1) Close your eyes and pretend everything is good. That would have done incredible harm to anyone betting on the product.
    2) Change the underlying architecture. This would be breaking changes and not benefit anyone in the process
    3) Seek an alternative. In our case it's taking the parts from v5 that are healthy and append them to v4 which is healthy as well (and used by 99%+ of active installations). This means a fast and quickly improved v4 while meeting the design goals sans the complexity of v5.

    The loss we've taken on v5 is massive. Both financially and credibility wise. It was the absolute last resort.

    Kind regards

  136. Gravatar Imagemike Says:

    "The loss we've taken on v5 is massive. Both financially and credibility wise."

    Which is worrisome, is Umbraco HQ in existential danger? Are you financially stable, can you survive this?

  137. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @mike: The Umbraco HQ isn't in danger. We're a healthy and sustainable company that write off any investments in code immediately.

  138. Gravatar ImageRob Says:


    My company will take a commercial hit "both financially and creditability wise" from your decision, that's a fact.

    Trouble is we were one of the companies that did bet on the project - it was released with a commercial license. If you could have opened it up to debate and laid down a course over the next year where we could have worked with you to work out a strategy to minimise the PR damage your decision has caused to us we could plan a more sensible code migration with you - that would have been a more commercially fair decision by you.

    I'm glad you have a healthy and sustainable company that can write off investments in code immediately - the problem is other companies using your product may not be able to write off their investments in code quite so easily.

  139. Gravatar ImageJohnA Says:

    @Niels tough decision. do you have any comments on rebelcms? surely you must have seen this coming?

  140. Gravatar Imagerpolyn Says:

    I attended Code Garden, and left inspired for the future of v4. Interfacing with fellow community members and core contributors was wonderful. Real talent, energy, and vision are enthusiastically amassing to drive the project forward. Great strides were made even within the short time that we were gathered.

    It is a legitimate worry, however, that HQ will be unable to harness the momentum that they successfully amassed throughout the event. I am optimistic. They have taken the first step. I want to have faith. HQ has effectively inspired that impulse. In reality, all we have at this point is spin---despite proclamations to the contrary.

    'Community' is the new 'MVC 3/Hive' until we see a consistent pattern of HQ delivering on its new direction. Umbraco's community is wonderful---here and now today---but fully effective usage of the community in shaping Umbraco's direction is an acknowledged weakness of the overall project.

    I want to direct everyone to the new open 'Umbraco development' mailing list:


    I see this as the seed of a great thing. We are also awaiting a roadmap, our.umbraco.org source release, and other additional follow up from the conference. If a central location of links and descriptions for all these new resources has already become available, then I have missed it.

    I would love to see a blog post summarizing these resources once they become available. I expect that it is already in the works. We need it for evaluation, for employers and prospective clients, and to support people like me wanting to understand effectively contributing back to the community. HQ, in a sense, needs to deliver an API clarifying how the community of users and developers can effectively integrate themselves with the product's future. It was a major point of discussion, addressed by HQ at the conference.

    Absence of negative feedback from the community was another major topic of the conference, with the suggestion that we are too nice. It did not go over well with all attendees. Absence of positive reception to critical feedback is the largest deficit that I see, from both the community and HQ. Niels was often identified as emblematic of the situation in private conversation. It was good hear his own acknowledgement on stage. I have full faith that there will be real change.

    Niels as 'Dear Leader' was an official running joke of the conference. The Emperor With No Clothes would be a more fitting summary of the sentiment I heard most frequently raised from the not-entirely-content contingent of the community. As drafty as it must have felt for moments throughout the conference, credit is due for his composure. I believe he has reason for his confidence, built upon the strength of his employees and the community he has fostered.

    I want to stress that in all direct interactions with HQ members---they consistently conducted themselves as absolute professionals. I was impressed by the willingness to go the extra mile to share insight, address concerns, discuss technical issues, and instill faith. They are all people who left me wanting to actively be engaged with Umbraco's future. I was particularly encouraged by their strong receptiveness to critical feedback.

    Rather than simply suggest that we need to be more critical, I want to hear from HQ how we can be most effectively critical. Anyone who has held a customer facing position knows that feedback varies greatly in quality. Let us become known as a community that consistently delivers high quality feedback, both to HQ and one another. Direct us to great criticism, so that we can all make the most of our involvement.

    I have always been a lurker within the community. I left Code Garden with inspiration to become directly involved. Thank you HQ, community, scholarship contributors, and Tuborg for both a wonderful and productive experience.

  141. Gravatar ImageMike Says:


    Can you afford to hire a community manager?

    Just kidding, but not really ;-)

  142. Gravatar ImageDennis Says:

    @Niels: The fact is that other companies invested in this, and with you offering a commercial option, you bind yourself to those companies to deliver. Instead, you completely pulled back everything.

    You can be very ignorant about this, but it's the truth. And Umbraco has just proven that 'open source', in any way possible, will never work. I'd rather go for SharePoint now than an open alternative. I'm an architect at a large company and I am SO abandoning Umbraco. Luckely our investments weren't too big so far.

  143. Gravatar Imagerpolyn Says:

    @Dennis: I understand your professional concerns, to an extent. I am lost at:

    "And Umbraco has just proven that 'open source', in any way possible, will never work."

    I think Umbraco 5's demise stems more from its failure to fully embrace an open approach. Sure, source code was available---but influence over direction of the project was admittedly pretty closed off from the community. I see acknowledgement of that fact as an essential point in moving forward. With the multitude of successful 'open source' projects out there, I am at a loss to understand your outright dismissal of open source altogether.

    HQ is aware of how they are failing today, when it comes to community. HQ was transparent about that and many other shortcomings at the conference. I hope to see more of that information packaged in an easily digested format for those who were not in attendance, focused on forward moving changes. A lot of exciting things are in the works.

    Marketing was included as a known shortcoming, and communicating Umbraco's future direction at a higher business level is going to be a key component of addressing that deficit. As a lower level technical user, I feel that Umbraco 4's future is looking tremendously promising. I share many reservations with other users, including yourself, but there is ample reason for optimism. MVC is far from dead, for instance, and a sane path forward is in its planning stages.

    If anyone is curious about the possible future of Umbraco and MVC, check out this early release MVC package from core developer Shannon Deminick:


    Expect the good parts of Umbraco 5 to represent the future of Umbraco 4---with the added bonus of backwards compatibility.

  144. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @Dennis When MS released Sharepoint, they canned dev of their old MS CMS with no upgrade path whatsoever. So of everything, it may not be what you're looking for!

    We're working with our v5 clients which mainly are companies who've bought training to sort things out.

  145. Gravatar ImageCarlos Says:

    Umbraco V5 may have been hyped. But that didn't mean you needed to run them onto V5, which was still in RC I believe. Yes, there may need to be some sort of free training or incentive given to the people or companies who did fly out trainer or spend money on the conferences. Which it looks like they are doing.
    But at the same time. This teaches people about upgrading to the latest and greatest anything. Usually there are many bugs, usually there are things to fix, and sometimes, the product gets pulled. That is the way of the development of product, software, etc.

    Why so many people are so up in arms about this is beyond me? Sure, be a little upset but not vile or condescending with it. I am glad Umbraco scrapped V5. Why would I want to use something that is broken and when you try to fix it, it just breaks something else. That is what was happening to V5. And it was not community driven, which also was like some proprietary CMS's. Why would I want to use that too?
    XSLT complaints, many responses explained this and if you weren't using Razor in 4.6 or 4.7 that is your issue because it has been out for about a year and a half.
    Great call, I look forward to seeing how Umbraco enhances the 4.x.x versions. I am looking forward to the enhancements.

  146. Gravatar Imagetimothy Says:


    Actually, v5 was released stable (5.0 & 5.1).

    See my previous reply; Big companies go for the latest stable version because they want something that is future proof. The company I'm working for today knew they needed to consider v5 immature. But they went for it anyway because v4 was on it's way out, v5 was released stable & HQ was commercially supporting v5.

    They were prepared for some issues while the product matured, but not for v5 to be pulled entirely.

    Hence my point, they shouldn't have labeled v5 stable.
    Something like Umbraco MVC 0.1 (like I read somewhere) would have been more appropriate.

  147. Gravatar ImageDaniel Mettler Says:

    Congratulations to your courage.

    It takes big balls to make such a decision. And I absolutely agree with what you say - awesome concept, nobody gets it. My company had made something similar in 2003, flexible etc. amazing. But: too complicated, you needed to be an engineer.

    So we dumped it for an open-source CMS (in our case DNN). Hard decision, but was very, very successfull. And I believe your decision will be the beginning of your success. Great stuff, great balls, keep on going!

    Greets from the iJungleBoy

  148. Gravatar ImageJim Jones Says:

    I would also like to pay compliments to your balls

    May your balls continue through many more releases, leaving embarrassment all over the faces of those who doubt the future of your fine product.

  149. Gravatar ImageDavid Dimmer Says:

    This is a bittersweet moment for Fyin.com and Umbraco. We have invested heavily with Umbraco 5, already launching three successful production websites. The MVC framework was a huge step up from 4.x. @ViewBag you will be missed.

    We truly hope version 5.x lives on, even if it was rebranded to Umbraco MVC 1.2.

  150. Gravatar ImageDavid Dimmer Says:

    Getting MVC in Umbraco 4.x as soon as reasonably possible would really cheer us up.

  151. Gravatar ImageJames Hildeman Says:

    Wow, this is a stunning, disappointing, jaw-dropping announcement. I just read most of the 150+ comments that pretty much capture the sentiment. Agree this is a bigger hit for the pro-side of Umbraco than the hobby side. Agree with David Dimmer that MVC in 4.x would "cheer us up" (not the words I was thinking of but...). We've invested in MVC training and to suddenly have no path to move forward with is a jolt to say the least.

    Where can I find the roadmap developed at CG12?

  152. Gravatar ImageShashi Penumarthy Says:

    @Neils, Umbraco HQ, Community,

    Please hire a project manager. This would never have happened if you had someone at the top driving realism into the project.

    I know most devs don't like managers but it takes someone who's prioritizing value delivered over technical brilliance to get a good product out.

    At least now, recognize the fact that you have a failure of management, that you need to do what you do best and let someone with the right skills help you with planning, process, communication, etc.

    I have absolutely no doubt you'll survive this, learn from it and do great things in the future, but *only* if you stop trying to do everything yourself.

  153. Gravatar Imageearl Says:

    I am very disappointed, I have spent 100+ hours to learn v5 did two sites for my clients, I want to go with mvc, not the web forms(v4.X). I am sure you guys can fix this issue, guys, definitely there is a way to fix the code.

    After hearing this news, I Googled and found a new CMS call "Composite C1"
    It is supporting MVC3 and I think has good documentation than umbraco.

  154. Gravatar ImageDaniel Bardi Says:

    @Earl v4 will support MVC.. I am tired of hearing everyone talk about how v4 is only WebForms and v5 was the MVC savior... stop thinking this and start reading what everyone is saying. v4 is NOT webforms only.. there is a recently released package that will help you get v4 onto MVC. Gheesh! v4 MVC package : http://our.umbraco.org/projects/website-utilities/umbramvco Sorry for being frustrated, but I am tired of reading the complaints about not having MVC with v4.

  155. Gravatar ImagePaul de Metter Says:

    The news reached me during my Holiday, I was quite flabbergasted to be honest. Such a major decision that was made which will undoubtly have a major impact in the confidence of the product, but...

    We have been Umbraco since version 2.1 and have been making websites with this CMS since 2005. Every year the product has gotten better and the comunity bigger. Until now perhaps. You may or may not agree how Umbraco 5 came to be, but you can only be responsible for using the Umbraco 5 open-source yourself.

    During our test of Umbraco 5 we encountered major performance problems (thanks to brianweet who posted on this since January). Since then we have been involved in identifying the problems. In the end we have made the decision not to use Umbraco 5 for commercial projects yet. I see people claiming refunds and as part of this may seem plausible, you are always responsible for your own actions.

    Empires rise, empires fall, but the good parts remain. It will take a while before Umbraco is back up to speed, people will abandon the product due to this, but we have no doubt this will trigger Umbraco HQ even more to come back the best they can. As both the product and the organization have grown tremendously over the last years this will be a lesson not soon forgotten and will no doubt strengthen the product in the end.

    Maybe this announcement would have made more sense if it was Codegard 13 :-) None the less, Umbraco 4 is still a great product and we are looking forward to know which course will be followed.

  156. Gravatar ImagePaul Mason Says:

    V5 = Ummm.... Broken!

  157. Gravatar ImageAlex Says:

    The biggest bummer is for the early adopters like us, who tried to get along with v5 because it was the "next best thing". We were shocked to find out there was no XSLT support in v5 anymore, and tried to put up with it and instead use the awful, non-predictable and shitty Razor syntax, so that we wouldn't end in the v4.7 dead end. We worked around the lack of stock modules like blog, forum, etc., worked around the lack of documentation, around the fact that 5.0 and 5.1 had less than acceptable performance, even for developing.

    And now you're killing v5. You wasted the time of thousands of developers out there, people who tried building websites, people who tried to develop the first new components. I'm not saying you should stick with v5, because it was shit from the start on, but this exit strategy kills a lot of trust. Umbraco HQ seems to be a BendyObject itself, intransparent and unpredictable.

  158. Gravatar ImageProf Sillej Says:

    It's a shame that you have to discontinue something you've been working on for so long. However, you should probably just start developing an all new CMS based on PHP and stop being archaic.

    Apache servers outnumber microsoft servers more than 2:1, PHP CMS's and developers outnumber .net CMS's and developers almost 4:1. We should all strive to develop on open source for the good of development in general.

    Umbraco was OK, but pointless, get with the times, get a job working with the drupal or wordpress team.

  159. Gravatar ImageAnti Prof Sillej Says:

    Prof - you're SO not even close to making any point. Umbraco is open source. Web Servers have no mention here. IIS is great. But if you want to run .NET apps on linux - checkout mono. At least know WTF you're talking about before you post BS.

  160. Gravatar ImageNiels Hartvig Says:

    @Anti: Let's keep the tone friendly despite any heat on this blog, please! You could easily make the same point without offending Prof the way you did.

    Good karma and all that jazz, right :)

  161. Gravatar ImageVinayak Says:

    I have a question. We have developed a site for client on V5.1 and is about to go live in production. Since Umbraco decided to put V5 to RIP, what should be our approach to the site developed in V5? Should we re-develop it on V4 or wait for V5.2 to resolve problem in V5.1 and upgrade it to V5.2. Umbraco is saying that they will support 5.2.

  162. Gravatar Imagemark Says:


    Upgrade to 5.2 in the short term and then strategies a long term plan to leave Umbracco in favour of another CMS that does not waste you time or money in developing for technology that has a life span of 2 months

  163. Gravatar ImageMuzikayise Says:

    umbraco is one of the best .NET open source CMS I've used. v4 works perfectly fine for me been using it on sites that needed a CMS. XSLT works fine in fact you dont even need to write too much XSLT and i think razor also works fine v4.

    in terms of M$ MVC .NET framework i must say its great but I've been trying Ruby on Rails and so far it seems to have 1 up over the M$ MVC framework. I'm not saying RoR is perfect as well because wow just setting it up was a mission.

    anyway back to umbraco i am thankful to the core team and community who have contributed to this project over the years, thank you. I really like umbraco, i am shocked that some ppl have reacted in the way they did, yeah sure its a disappointment but the way they have expressed their concerns it would seem like everything was lost! well hey we still have v4 and its awesome.

  164. Gravatar ImageKarl Says:

    +1 for kooboo cms. You rebels, help kooboo instead,really nice cms but lacks some features like page permissions. But lightweight and fast

  165. Gravatar ImageDiane Bryan Says:

    Here's my 2 bits:

    0. I have used CMS right, left and center. I never saw one as elegant as Umbraco. This mis-step is more than a little bit bruto -- like watching Audrey Hepburn stumble into a mud puddle, tripping on her own hem. But Umbraco itself is still really well conceived.
    1. Niels, you've hired a project manager, and this is good. You also need a PR manager immediately.
    2. You should make it loudly clear you will put resources into making workable whatever is truly broken in v5 for those who committed to it. If that is simply not possible...
    3. You should absolutely hire someone to hand-hold the enterprise users who adopted the "stable"commercial release of v5. That level of free support should help mitigate the bad blood with the enterprise tier of adopters. Unfortunately for you, your commercial model does imply some commitment to support. (If I've misunderstood the terms of v5 as a commercial product, then I'll withdraw this point)
    4. I think it would be proper etiquette to refund all v5 training for anyone who demands it. Of course, if a company is getting professional hand-holding, they shouldn't demand the refund.
    5. You should make much of the fact that MVC and Razor "work fine in v4" I mean, really much. And for site designers who don't have a clue why that's good news, help us to understand.
    6. I still like you, I still like Umbraco, and we're still building our next site in v4, looking forward to v6.

  166. Gravatar Imageroger malik Says:

    As a developers of over 15 years, personally, I think Umbraco need to concentrate on the upgrade operation and making it a bug free click operation that is fully tested and completely backwards compatible before they do anything else.

    This will create an enormous amount of confidence throughout the community and new releases will genuinely be treated as a step forward.

  167. Gravatar ImageM Says:

    I know this is an old post and not really expecting anyone to ever see this comment, but I couldn't agree with roger (the previous comment) more... upgrades NEED to be smoother, our clients expect them, and with every new site launched it gets exponentially more difficult to keep them all on a sensible upgrade path. Every upgrade we've done so far, even just in the recent v4.7 to v4.9 range, have all had their own challenges to keep up with and lots of time spent doing so. So while I'm excited to see what v6.0 brings, I'm also worried about being told again that upgrades aren't important to the team and being left behind to fend for myself with a portfolio of aging v4 sites.

  168. Gravatar ImageAnas Younus Says:

    Well done! i really like the people who are brave when they come to make decisions.

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