The Umbraco backoffice itself can be customised and extended, this section is dedicated to getting started with these extension points.
The Umbraco backoffice itself can be customized and extended to fit the experience you want your editors to have when working with your website. This section is dedicated to getting started with these extension points.
Umbraco gives you the opportunity to create and customize packages, Property Editors, and content applications, and even create your own Dashboard. You can also extend things like the search functionality, Health Checks, and configurations.
In this section, you will find some routes to how to do so and some tutorials to create your own personal packages and content applications.
It is recommended that you have some knowledge and prior experience working with AngularJS, to follow the tutorials presented in this section.
To get you started here are some examples of what you can extend in Umbraco:
If you're in a creative mood then why not experiment with some of our tutorials:
Find all the resources you need when you're developing and customizing an Umbraco website - be it backend or extending the backoffice.
Umbraco is built on top of a Microsoft MVC framework. You can build upon this technology to work alongside and extend the functionality in Umbraco. It is also designed to be pluggable so that you can replace key components with your own custom implementations if prefer.
It is possible to build an Umbraco site without Visual Studio and the techniques on this page - see the Creating websites with Umbraco section.
This section is dedicated to introducing techniques that will help you get started with developing an Umbraco site. You'll find out how to develop the framework of an Umbraco project as well as how to extend and customize the Umbraco backoffice.
The concepts in this section go beyond standard templating methodologies and introduce some Umbraco-specific terms and helpers, such as SurfaceControllers and management service APIs. All of which is the technology that you can take advantage of when developing with Umbraco.
You will also find information regarding Umbraco's underlying dependency injection framework.
This will break into two sections: Extending the Umbraco backoffice and Developing custom websites.
The Umbraco backoffice can be extended using AngularJS and C#. Customizing the Umbraco backoffice and editing experience includes creating your own Property Editors, Dashboards, and packages. You will also find information about how to customize things like Health Checks and the built-in search functionality.
Check out the Extending section in the CMS docs for a good place to start.
From a frontend perspective, Umbraco does not dictate HTML, CSS, or JS in your website build. There is nothing Umbraco-specific about it.
Umbraco is highly customizable which means you can integrate it with anything and make it behave as you want. With Umbraco, you start out with a clean slate.
Umbraco uses ASP.NET and MVC patterns and you can extend and write your own controllers using the approach outlined in this section.
When you are customizing or extending your Umbraco website using C# we recommend using Visual Studio.
You can also use a simpler tool like Visual Studio Code or any other text editor you prefer working with. However, this is only recommended when you're not working directly with the C# files.
While you can use a text editor, put changes in the App_code
folder, and have it compiled on startup; we recommend using an IDE.
An IDE will give you a lot of support, as it's built for working with C# files, ASP.NET, and MVC frameworks.
This section shows you some beginner tools and information to get your started with Umbraco. From making a local installation to extending the backoffice.
Looking to create a website with custom styling and tools? As a backend developer, you can follow our instructions to create a fully customizable website. You will learn things like how to set up your environments and how to implement your custom templates. You will find all the tools that you're going to need to install Umbraco and start developing immediately.
There are tutorials on how to inject dependencies, information about how the Umbraco pipeline works, and how you can customize it to fit your needs.
You can implement your own MVC controllers to work alongside Umbraco.
There are two concepts that are Umbraco specific which might prove useful to learn about:
Umbraco is composed of components. Programmatically you can add your own components and customize Umbraco at application startup.
When you're developing with Umbraco you might sometimes run into some errors and issues. Here are some guides to help you with the debugging:
Learn more about composing and components in the article.