We all start out as noobs

When I first started with Umbraco, I was very scared of it to start with. It all looked like magic, some sort of black box that would be too hard for me to understand. I wasn't confident at all and I needed somewhere to turn.

I looked online for a book about it, but all I could find was one about version 4. When I started, version 7 had just come out, so there was no book, the documentation was still showing screenshots of version 4 or 6 and so were the starter videos on Umbraco.tv (this isn't the case anymore, they have been updated and I hear they are great now).

Thankfully, there is a fantastic community around Umbraco, so I was able to ask questions on the forum and get answers relatively quickly.

I asked some pretty basic questions, and the people responding to them were very kind and patient with me whilst I clearly didn't know what I was doing yet.

There is such a friendly atmosphere on the forum, it's not like Stack Overflow where you get roasted for not structuring your question properly, people try and find out what you mean so they can help you.

After a while of asking questions myself, and starting to understand how it works, I felf confident enough to answer some questions myself. Admittedly they were easy ones mostly, but it felt good to join in with the community to help others.

Blog Posts

There are lots of blog posts all over the internet about how to do things in Umbraco, they range from small snippets of how to do things, to full in depth articles on how to do something more complicated.

A great source of these blog posts is 24 days in Umbraco. Every December since 2012, members of the Umbraco community have written blog posts as a sort of advent calendar, 1 post per day. They are useful to read on the day but are even more useful to read when you google your problem and find them.

Videos

As well as Umbraco.tv, there are lots of videos on YouTube about how to do things in Umbraco from people like Kevin Giszewski and Casper Anderson

The new Community Section on Our Umbraco

What if you could get all of the latest blog posts and videos in one place?

What if you could find out how many Our Umbraco members there are near you?

Now you can find out all of this information and more at our.umbraco.org/community/.

They pull in blog posts and videos about Umbraco automatically, so go and have a look now and save it in your bookmarks.