We have lots of potential clients ask us if we can run Umbraco on GoDaddy.  In the past, we'd shied away from this due to issues we've seen posted on the Umbraco forum.  With the release of Umbraco 4.7.1 it seemed that the issues (mostly medium trust issues) that prevented Umbraco from running on a shared instance of GoDaddy were resolved.  

We decided to give it a try and see if we can get a site up and running on GoDaddy.  It was surprisingly easy.  Here are our quick step by step notes on how to setup Umbraco on a GoDaddy shared Windows hosting with a SQL Server database instance.  (Note that not all Umbraco packages work on medium trust.  Make sure that the Umbraco packages you need will run on medium trust before choosing GoDaddy).

Steps to setup Umbraco on GoDaddy:

1. We're assumming that you've already setup your database (you can find your database host name by clicking Databases > SQL Server from the Hosting Dashboard, then click the Edit/View Details (pencil icon) in Actions next to the Database ) and Windows hosting environment with GoDaddy
    
2. Download the latest binaries from http://umbraco.codeplex.com/ (4.7.1 or higher -- haven't confirmed v5 yet)
   
   
3. Use FTP to transfer the files to GoDaddy (you'll find your server ip address in the hosting dashboard in the GoDaddy Hosting Control Panel)
     
4. Set the permissions on GoDaddy in the File Directory folder (check the folders then select Permissions from the top toolbar - second to last icon, and set permissions to read and write)
    
5. Change the umbracoDbDsn in web.config to your db string (this will prevent any umbraco errors on the install step 3)
    
6. Go to the URL (Preview My Site).  This is usually your domain name including the extension (.com/.org/.net) .previewdns.com. For example, the preview dns for test.com would be test.com.previewdns.com. This should start the Umbraco installation wizard (/install/default.aspx)
    
7. After finishing the wizard (this should be self explanatory) you may continue to be redirected to the install wizard. If this happens, the umbracoConfigurationStatus in the web.config is probably blank. Set this to the Umbraco version installed (i.e. "4.7.1")
    
8. At this point you should have a functional Umbraco installation up and running on GoDaddy.

Hope this helped.  We just wanted to let people know that it is possible and quite easy to setup Umbraco on a GoDaddy shared instance.

We've recently had the pleasure of doing some unique customization of Shopify and were ecstatic to work with the platform again.  After working out some recent headaches on some poorly designed and documented Movable Type plugins (Facebook Connect - built by the MT team), it was a pleasure to work with Shopify.

We needed to create linked products to allow customers to buy a bikini top and bottom from the same page.  This currently isn't allowed as out of the box functionality from Shopify, however working with Shopify's easy to understand, easy to work with liquid code allowed us to quickly add this functionality.

We're quite fond of Shopify's liquid code, API library and easy to modify themes.

Thanks to everyone who has worked with the Umbraco Forum Administration tool and provided feedback to me.  I was recently contacted by a user who had issues with the tool and we've released an update to the package to address the issue.  You can download the updated package here.

View the detailed upgrade steps here

I extended the umbraco Forum (http://our.umbraco.org/projects/uforum-basics) to provide some basic, necessary administrative functions.  This addition will allow editing and deleting of topics and comments (from the comments page on the forum).  Administration takes place on the forum when logged in as a member of type ForumAdmin.

Here's how to setup these changes

Prereq's

• Umbraco uForum installed

Steps to add admin capabilities

1. Download the admin changes here (note -- updated with additional files on 2/23/10)
2. Copy the files from the deploy folder to the respective umbraco folders in your installation (note: don't overwrite these folders, just move the files)
3. Run the sql script ForumAdminDBTriggers.sql.  This will setup the database triggers that are needed to update the forum and topic table stats when you delete comments or topics
4. Create an umbraco macro for the forumAdmin xslt macro (developer tab > macro > create new, point to the forumAdmin xslt file)
5. Make sure your master file includes a reference to the jquery file (included in the scripts directory)
6. Create a Member Group named ForumAdmin
7. Create a member to administer the forum and add the member to the ForumAdmin group
8. Login to the forum as the forum administrator.  When you view the forum comments, you'll see textboxes with the comments / topic title filled.  You can edit or delete the topic or comments via the link buttons.

The trunk folder includes the updated forum solution.

I think this is all you need to set it up.  If you have any questions or comments, add a comment here or send me an email.  I don't check the umbraco forums often.

Hope this helps

- Zac

I've worked with Umbraco for a while now and have loved working with the robust, extensible CMS.  Its community has been very helpful.  To repay the community, I've created an Ajax Polling package.  You can view a demo here.

This allows the user to easily create a Poll within an umbraco page or as a standalone macro.

You can download the package for the Umbraco Poll here.  This is the first Umbraco package I've released for general use, so feel free to ping me with comments, suggestions and questions.

Here are a few notes regarding the package:

1. You must be running .NET 3.5.  This package utilizes LINQ.
2. You need to run the PollSQL.sql file on your SQL Server db to create the necessary views and tables for the poll package
3. The package uses the appSettings key umbracoDBDSN to connect to the db. 
   <appSettings>
   <add key="umbracoDBDSN" value="server=YOURSERVER; database=YOURDB; user id=USER; password=PASS">
4. This package uses the .NET 3.5 updated version of System.Web.Extensions.  If you aren't currently using this version, you will need to update your web.config appropriately.  If there are many questions regarding this, I'll provide more details.