Must Have Umbraco Packages and Techniques - Our uWestFest '16 Presentation

Last week Alan and I had the honor or presenting at the uWestFest '16 conference in San Diego, CA.  uWestFest is an Umbraco CMS conference for those of us who use it in North America.  Its part festival, part educational, and all relevant to those of us who use Umbraco on an every day basis.

This year's conference was a ton of fun and it was great to have a big ProWorks presence to meet new people, learn some new things, and bond as a team.  ProWorks was a Silver sponsor and we are proud to make events like this happen.

On to the presentation!

We focused on the Content Editor experience and how we as Umbraco developers and designers could make their lives easier.  Some of the things we presented were out of the box in Umbraco and some were packages that enhance the Content Editor experience.

Here are some links to the packages we presented:

Help Packages:

• Bookshelf - Integrated help manuals
• ProWorks Inline HTML Help Label - Inline help for your editors

 Property Editors:

• Nested Content - complex property content lists using Document Types as the model
• nuPickers - a set of nice property editors and data sources with custom views on the data
• Archetype - complex property content lists
• u7 Grid DataType - Tabular data entry
• Content Picker with Preview - Content picking with custom views of the content
• Extended Media Picker - media picker with more data entry options
• UrlPicker - internal, media, and external URLs baked into one editor
• MultiUrlPicker - internal, media, and external URLs baked into one editor
• Angular Maps - Location picker
• Switcher - Pretty "switch" style boolean picker
• Vorto - Multi-lingual on a property granularity

Packages to Help You (Umbraco Craftsmen):

• Diplo Trace Log Viewer - View Umbraco Logs in the Back-office
• Core Value Converters - Convert information to models in your controllers and views
• uSync - All Umbraco configuration (DB items) written to disk and can be read in for modification
• Hybrid Framework - Make a more MVC feel to your Umbraco builds
• Ditto - Mapping Umbraco content into your strongly typed models
• LINQ to Examine - Use Linq style queries to search Examine
• UmbracoFileSystemProvider.Azure - Store your media in the Cloud
• MemberListView for Umbraco 7 - Dashboard for editing members quickly
• UnVersion - Remove un-needed old versions of content to reclaim space
• TheDashboard - Visual data about what's happening in your Umbraco install

Grid Packages:

• LeBlender - Create grid editors easily
• DocType Grid Editor - Create grid editors easily with Document Types
• LePainter - Skin the back-office grid to be representative of your front-end styles
• Umbraco Grid Renderers - Swap out Bootstrap for your favorite CSS framework
• AttackMonkey Grid Locker - Make specific grid elements Read-only

BONUS!  Here are some other packages that didn't fit that we like:

• Articulate - Blogging
• Slimsy - Responsive Images
• Courier - Content Deployment
• CMS Import - Data Import (Content and Media)
• Merchello - eCommerce
• uCommerce - eCommerce