Umbraco is a powerful ASP.NET open source CMS highlighted in great flexibility and intuitive editing experience. There are thousands of organizations and individuals worldwide hosting websites on the platform, making Umbraco one of the top five most popular server applications on the web.
In below, we’re going to offer a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create an Umbraco website manually on Bisend ASP.NET hosting service plans.
Now, let’s get started!
Step 1. Create a Microsoft SQL Server Database
Actually, no matter what kind of application you want to install, you need to create a Microsoft SQL Server database through your Plesk control panel.
Log into your Plesk control panel using the username and password we have sent to your new account welcome email.
Once logged in, go to the Databases section and click on the Add Database button on the top left.
Next, you’re required to add general information to your database, select the checkbox next to Create a database user and enter details for your database user. Also, don’t forget selecting the User has access to all databases within the selected subscription checkbox. Thereafter, click on the OK button to continue.
After the database successfully created, you will be returned to your Databases section and see the newly created Umbraco database.
Step 2. Verify ASP.NET Settings Are Correct
Generally speaking, to make sure your Umbraco 7.10.4 installation run stably and smoothly, a Windows-based server should meet the minimum system requirements like:
IIS 7
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or better
ASP.NET 4.5 Full Trust
Ability to set file permissions to include create/read/write for the user that “owns” the Application Pool for your site.
To check the .NET Framework version, you can go to Websites & Domains > ASP.NET Settings in your Plesk control panel, where you can find that we currently have ASP.NET 4.7 supported.
Then, scroll down to the Compilation and debugging, and select C# as the default webpage language because Umbraco in fact is written in C#.
Under the Code access security, ensure the CAS trust level has been set to Full.
Finally, click on OK button to apply all the settings.
Step 3. Install Umraco from Your Plesk
Since Plesk control panel at this point still hasn’t integrated Umbraco into the Applications, you have to download Umbraco from the official website and upload it to the Plesk manually.
Download, Unzip & Prepare Umbraco
Visit https://our.umbraco.org/download/releases/ and choose the latest Umbraco 7.10.4 version. On the next page, download the UmbracoCms.7.10.4.zip to your local computer.
Before uploading the unzipped files to your website hosting server, you should make some configurations to the database. Go to the Databases section, and click on the Connection Info button to display the connection information for that database.
It is advisable that you take a note of the database connection information, which will be used to replace the connectionStrings parameter in the web.config like below:
Next, you need to modify the pages parameter to:
Last, add the following values inside <system.web> and after <pages>…<pages/> parameters.
Upload Umbraco Zip File to Plesk
Now, you can start uploading the Umbraco installation files to the root folder httpdocs of the hosting server.
Log into your Plesk control panel, and navigate to Websites & Domains > File Manager.
Usually, we recommend upload the file to the root directory (httpdocs). Under the httpdocs folder, click on the Upload button to upload the Umbraco zip file on your local computer to Plesk. Once uploaded, extract the zip file.
Go back to Websites & Domains page, check if the path to the website home directory is httpdocs. If not, you can click the link of Hosting Settings to change the Document root settings.
Setup the File and Folder Permissions
To ensure a stable and smoothly running Umbraco installation, you need to correctly set the permissions before the installation of Umbraco. Get to know what permissions each folder/file should be set to by visiting the www.umbraco.org/documentation.
Then, open the httpdocs folder and on the right side of each folder or file, you will see a button. What you need to do next is clicking on it and selecting Change Permissions option to set the permissions for that folder or file. In the meantime, don’t forget to keep “Allow inheritable permissions from the parent to propagate to this object and all child objects” unchecked while selecting “Replace permission entries on all child objects”.
Complete Installation
Now, you can visit your website url to complete the installation of Umbraco. It’s very easy and all you need to do is following the steps it offers.
Step 4. Create a Basic Website using Umraco
To install a basic Umbraco website, you need a clean, empty installation of Umbraco; namely, no starter site has been installed. If you just follow our installation instructions, you can feel free to follow our creation process in below step by step.
Check you have an empty Umbraco install
Hit your local host address and you should see the Umbraco empty page screen like:
Prepare the Initializr template site
Unzip the Initializr contents to a folder on your local computer. Then, open the index.html from the directory in a browser to have a look at the template.
Log into your Umbraco dashboard and you can see an empty Umbraco installation
Create a custom document type
Go to the Settings section in Umbraco, you will find that Document Types is positioned as the first option, click on it. There are three options appear and click Document Type option.
Give the new Document Type the Name=HomePage and you will see that an alias is created. Enter in the Description field “This is our homepage template” and click Save to store the new Document Type.
This not ends, however. You still need to name your Document Type, add an icon to it, and allow Homepage Document Type as root. What’s next is adding your first content tab by clicking on the Add property link, where you can create the necessary data containers in which your editors can enter the necessary content for the homepage.
Edit your first template
Go to Settings > Templates folder, you will see a child node—”Homepage”. Click on the Homepage node and copy the template code in. Open up index.html from the Initializr in a text editor, take a note of the whole thing then paste it into the template within the curly brace “}”. Click the Save button.
Create your first content node
Click the Content button and hover the grey text CONTENT, there will be three dots …-click this. If everything has been correctly done, you should see the option to create your Homepage.
Just click the icon of Homepage and you will see what’ve just been setting up—the document type is now going to drive your homepage content—it gives you and your editors the fields you need. In the field at the top of the page, you’ll see “Enter a name…” click this and enter the name for your new content node.
Thereafter, click the green Save and publish button to complete creating your first Umbraco website!
Besides Umbraco website setup, you may want more information like:
