Umbraco and Block List – A developers experience

The Umbraco CMS have a lot of benefits that makes it one of the best CMS on the market. Recently, I’ve been using “block list”, which is a useful feature that helps you handle components. This have been my experience when using block list as a developer.

My life after using block list

After I started to use block list it helped me to better understand and handle components. It has a property called ”available blocks”, that helps to handle what content can be shown inside the block list. Each block is an element type, where we can add content for our website. Also, customization UI and each block is more elastic then it was before.

With the additions we are also able to specialize content with different components. It previously worked differently since you had to use macros. Now you spend way less time due to block list.

You are also able, with the new feature, to use a prefered image for your blocks. Due to these thumbnails, visually it becomes much easier to differentiate the different blocks you are building. Rather then reading the title of the block you now instead use the thumbnail images for a better understanding.

Positive things with “Block List”

• Simple to handle blocks.
• Have one UmbracoViewPage as BlockListItem.
• Quicker to get properties because of the data model.
• Easier to add/remove new block.

I`m very happy that Umbaco have implemented block list and I hope that they will continue with more perfections in order to do our lives better! What I see as a next step can be implementing new list like block list + macro which will show results right away for a backoffice manager.

If you are interested to have us help you build an Umbraco site, feel free to contact us.