The Umbraco Community

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the excellent Umbraco yearly developer festival, CodeGarden. For three days I got to hang out with a few hundred other Umbraco developers from all over the world, talk shop, get a glimpse of the upcoming awesomeness in V5, pick up some cool tips and tricks, and above all, have FUN.

Umbraco makes a big deal of the fact that they have a friendly and helpful community. They're very proud of it in fact. And rightly so. The Umbraco community is hands down one of the most fun, generous, and helpful group of devs that I interact with on a regular basis. I work with a lot of other open source frameworks and tools, as well as a good number of commercial ones, and of all of them, getting help from the Umbraco guys is the most fun. There's no elitism, everyone's happy to offer advice, and above all, everyone is happy to share their stuff. If someone comes up with something cool, the chances are that they'll release it for others to use.

The community is also very laid back. I've not seen any unpleasant exchanges on the forums, and everyone always has a laugh when they get together for the user group meet ups and the bigger country wide get togethers.

I think the Umbraco guys have managed to achieve something really special. not only have they managed to build a pretty damned cool CMS framework, but they've managed to attract, and promote a great community of passionate, talented and helpful people as well.

I genuinely look forward to meeting up with the guys when we get together, and its always a blast. How many other dev communities do you know who can settle an argument about technologies with a 60 man pillow fight? Or who's members would set up a charitable foundation to help poorer devs get to the annual festival?

:)