title: Umbraco, is it just me or is it really hard to use?
body: <p>Looking for some feedback on those of you who have evaluated  umbraco lately. </p>
  
  <p>I've been on a quest for the 'best' cms that balances ease of use/extendability/customization etc. to use as a base for a new vertical product I am in the planning stages on, so for the past month or so I have been downloading, installing, reading source code and creating test sites in every asp.net cms I can get my hands on - and so far I have pulled down GraffitCMS, MojoPortal, Oxite, Orchard, Kuboo and maybe a couple of others that I am not remembering of the top of my head.</p>
  
  <p>For each of those, <strong>except Umbraco</strong>, I have been up and running in less than a couple of hours, including adding pages, customizing templates, and in some cases (especially Graffiti), writing drop in widgets in C# in a matter of just a few hours....</p>
  
  <p>But with Umbraco, after wrestling it for almost 2 days just getting it to run, and now another morning watching videos, and then building pages etc, I am still unable to even get even a simple site operational, and even the pages I have gotten working crash routinely (not to mention being a dog)...</p>
  
  <p>So, the question is: Am I doing it wrong? or is it really that hard to work with? and more importantly, if I continue to push forward, will it be worth it? or do I cut my losses and move on?</p>
  
  <p>Edit: asp.net with SQL Server support are requirements of anything I pick.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE ONE YEAR LATER (Feb/2011):</strong>
  <em>My initial impressions are still accurate, Umbraco is different than most of the other CMS's that I have used in the past, and for me took a bit longer than usual to 'get it', but now that I have, I have to say I have a much better appreciation of the product, what it does, and how it does it - and to top it all of, it really performs really well - especially with the latest release of 4.6.1. So call me a convert - I am glad I stuck it out and then took another look. I only update this post now, over one year later so as not to leave my initial negative 'review' here for posterity.</em></p>