Frequently Asked Questions

Here you will find answers to nearly any kind of question you might have about writing for the Umbraco advent calendar "24 Days In Umbraco".

For many seasons we have been answering the same questions over and over again because we did not take the time to actually jot down the most frequent answers so we could provide people with a link until now! (Clever eh? 😉).

Deadline

The deadline is November 25th - It's a fixed deadline. If you miss the deadline your article won't be published unfortunately - however you can always publish it on your own blog, or ask if skrift.io would be interested in publishing. So if you did start, but failed to finish it so it could be published in the calendar, then you can still have some well-deserved praise from the community 🙂 This is of course because we need to have the articles done so we can prepare the publishing schedule and have a less stressful December 😊

How much do you pay?

This is a non-profit project and no one involved earns anything. We don't have any kind of sponsorship apart from Umbraco HQ who kindly sponsor our cloud solution. Therefore we do not pay authors either. The project is driven by the enthusiasm to share your knowledge with your peers within the Umbraco community.

Topics

If you take a look at some of the articles you will discover that not all of them are deep-dive tech articles about the inner workings of Umbraco, or the latest and greatest in frontend or backend technologies. The articles can be about anything that is somehow relevant to members of the Umbraco community. For instance we have articles about the culture of sharing, how to run a successful Umbraco meetup and even how to organise a larger Umbraco event like CodeCabin among technical articles about the ins and outs of Umbraco etc.

Some topic ideas that might inspire you could be

Umbraco Cloud
Umbraco Headless and JamStack
Umbraco .NET Core
Your favourite Umbraco packages
Why you think code editor XYZ is awesome and how it supports your workflow
Your workflow from setting up Umbraco to actually rendering the website
How to use Git efficiently
Why you think framework XYZ and Umbraco are the perfect match
How to contribute to open source projects
Establishing a regular meetup culture - Tips'n'tricks
...etc. etc. etc.

We don't publish articles that are heavily "self-promotional". What this means is that you're of course allowed to write about a package you have made for instance, whether it's open source or commercial - But we prefer that you do it in a way that highlights what problem it helps to solve and the ins and outs of it rather than filling the article with loads of "Call to action" links for signing up for newsletters, buying licenses etc.

You're of course allowed to add a link to your company's website, your own personal blog etc. in an introduction text or in the "Author bio".

Format

You're free to choose if you want to start writing your article in Google Docs, Word, a GitHub gist, Notepad or whatever rocks your boat. That's all up to you and your workflow. In the end you will receive an invite to the Umbraco backoffice along with a guide on how to setup your article.

Word count

We suggest around 500-800 words. But don't get hung up on it - Sometimes less is more 😉And what does the word count matter if you decide to do a video instead? 🤔

Video length

We'd suggest a video length of 4-5 minutes - But again less is more so if your video is shorter it will probably be perfectly fine too. If you have some extra time please consider adding a transcription of the video content, which will then serve as a kind of article and provide people who can't watch the video with some context about the subject. This is optional though if you want to go the extra mile.