Umbraco… Not ready for the limelight yet?

I’ve been trying to use Umbraco CMS with my web host (See yesterday’s rant for a little more on that), but it seems that every version prior to 4.1 won’t run under “Medium Trust” (Something my web host seems to need). Thus I have downloaded the 4.1b2 version of Umbraco, and what do I find?

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Request failed.

Source Error:

Line 145: <providers> Line 146: <clear /> Line 147: <add name="UmbracoRoleProvider" type="umbraco.providers.members.UmbracoRoleProvider" /> Line 148: </providers> Line 149: </roleManager>

Looking through the bugtracker, I find the answer that “This'll be because I haven't brought my replacements for umbraco.providers into the 4.1 trunk yet. Will do later on today.” That was posted on the 18th, and the issue was marked as “Fixed”, yet going through the changelogs there doesn’t appear to be any such fix applied as of yet.

This kind of thing is infuriating, and makes the past 3 months spent learning Umbraco’s templating and design system a complete waste. At the moment, I can’t use this system, as powerful and nice as it is, which means I’ve wasted valuable time. So I’m on the lookout for another open-source (or at least free-to-use) CMS system that supports discussion fora, is reasonably simple to use on the back end, and works under Medium Trust .net v2 (Perhaps v3.5, but given that 3.5 runs on-top of v2, it’s difficult to see what version is actually installed). I’d also prefer C#, but that’s not really a necessity.

Anyone have any suggestions?

1&1 Internet – Great pricing, not so hot .Net support, Atrocious billing…

Well, here we go with another rant. It’s been a little too long since the last one of these, so here we go.

I have an account with 1&1 internet, to do Microsoft Web Hosting. The price was great for what you get (I mean, really, check it out for yourself!) but for billing… I guess it would be easier if we had a credit card, but the banks seem to disagree with us on that, so we used (or at least tried to use) a Visa Gift Card instead.

They have difficulty accepting them, it seems. And while you can pay with PayPal, it uses PayPal’s “Pre-Authorised Debit” system. Great, except for two things. One, it needs a credit card associated with the account, and two, it doesn’t work at all outside the US. Not that you can see that. You can go (from their merchant link to set it up) and set the authorisation, choose the maximum amount they can take, and as far as you can see everything is AOK. But if you sign in to your PayPal account (Using your country’s portal), there’s no sign of any pre-authorised options, you can’t adjust them or anything. ‘Cause it’s US only.

So now I have paid them using a Swift EFT, a direct electronic money transfer from my bank to them. I called them to confirm they’ve received it, and they claim so, but I’m still getting automated messages on my account details page saying it’s overdue. *sigh*. I’ll call them again on Monday and see what they say.

The other issue is that they run their .net apps at Medium trust, and with little sign of what version and extensions are installed.

The “Medium Trust” lead me to not be able to use Umbraco 4.0b (Which I was developing against on my local staging site). I’m hoping they’re running .net 3.5, ‘cause then I can use the newly-released Umbraco 4.1b (Which does work against Medium trust, but Requires .net 3.5). If they’re not running .net 3.5, I’m going to be screwed here, quite honestly. At that point it starts looking more cost and effort effective to buy a basic box on Amazon EC2 and use that to host, though the bandwidth costs there would be the main expense.

Still, live and learn, huh?