24 Days (Un)wrapped!

Website Design

We're pretty sure you noticed the new logo and that we've "gone green"! We trust you noticed there is now a proper home page with the 24 "doors" you expect to see on an advent calendar. If you're a backend developer you probably thought "that's a nice touch". If you're a 'frontender' however, you probably appreciate that this was not straight-forward to implement! But despite giving us some tricky challenges, we owe a big debt of gratitude to Mathias Olin, the designer of our wonderful new look.

Daily Art

The frontpage featured a new artwork every day as well, which Mathias Olin and Niels Steinmeier have been creating using DALL-E. All Christmas-themed in some way, shape or fashion of course :)

Daily Tech Tips

A few years ago Umbraco's "Head of PR", Sebastiaan Janssen, gave an excellent talk explaining all the tools that he used regularly. He had so many to recommend that he never got through them all! We suggested it was time for an update, and that it would make a great 24 Days article... And then somewhere along the way he agreed to write not 1 but 24 articles (!) which we could use to provide a daily 'Tech Tip'. As a result he has his own calendar. But we thought his amazing effort deserved some promotion here too. So here is the full list, now that we've deployed the ability to add article listings to a page 😂:

We imagine everyone will discover plenty of new things in the list above. And for the tools you already knew, it's worth reading Seb's post as he's probably found a way to take it to the next level! We'll be giving many of these a go in the new year. #H5YR Seb!

Upgrade to v10

Not only did we get a new look this year, but we also undertook building an entirely new site. The previous site was v7 in Umbraco Cloud, and was beginning to creak a little, to put it kindly! Chriztian started a new v10 site and did most of the rebuild. Lotte stepped in when Chriztian's extraordinary XPath skills weren't quite enough and we needed some custom C#. Why is it that working on side-projects is always more fun than client ones? Kudos to HQ for how slick v10 in the Cloud has felt.

Chriztian generally doesn't install many packages but these ones made the grade:

• Contentment from Lee Kelleher - this package is used extensively throughout the content editing experience. So much love ❤ for this package!
• Admin Only Property from 24 Days team member Lotte - she built and released this package when we realised 24 Days articles needed a couple of properties that only admins could see/edit, not the authors!
• NestingContently from Nathan Wolfe - this package allows you to disable Nested Content and Block List items

Maybe next year we'll find a way to open source the website. Just in case we need any more features and want to get some of you wonderful folk to help out!

Thank Yous

At the risk of sounding like an Oscars acceptance speech, we also wanted to take this opportunity to say some thank yous.

So THANK YOU to:

• All the article writers: we literally wouldn't have a calendar without you!
• Sebastiaan Janssen: for all those tech tips
• Skrift: for helping to promote each article, and some amazing artwork over on Instagram
• umbraCoffee: for mentioning the articles each week and having some of the team as guests in episode 256
• Mathias Olin : for our fab new look
• Mathias Olin & Niels Steinmeier : for using your credits on DALL-E for our viewing pleasure with the AI artworks
• Tim Payne : for daily tweeting about each article - we noticed and appreciated it!
• Lee Kelleher : for Contentment (we love it so much we wanted to mention it again!)

And finally, thank you to YOU for reading all the articles!

So that's a wrap on 24 Days for another year.

Happy Holidays everyone! And see you at Codegarden 2023 🤞

Love,
Chriztian, Jan, Dave, Lotte and Paul