OUR BLOG

The UK Government Digital Service Standards require all new source code to be released as open source code. Point 12: Make all new source code open and reusable, and publish it under appropriate licences. When we developed a new website for UK Central Government we were required to release our code as Open Source.  This presented challenges we've not faced before, such as how to preserve private information such passwords and access keys. In this article written for 24Days.in our Technical Director, Paul Marden, talks about how to develop websites as open source.…

Single Sign On (SSO) - where one set of credentials is shared across multiple applications - makes systems safer and easier to manage, and is often mandated in larger enterprise level IT departments. The SSO prototocol of choice in large corporate’s is the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), and at Carbon Six Digital we’ve undertaken a number of projects that involved integrating SAML into Umbraco, which is our Content Management System of choice. In each case, our goal has been to provide a seamless integration for a core directory of users into Umbraco, while aiming to maintain the existing Umbraco…

Umbraco's Public Access feature enables developers with very little experience to build a membership site, with pages protected with usernames and passwords.  If you're logged in and have permissions you see the content, if you're not logged in you're challenged for login creds, and if you're logged in but don't have permission you see an error message. However, there are use cases where a site needs to show more fine grained options for password protected content.  In the learning portal we developed for Download Learning, a training module should show the video if you're logged in and have permission, if…

Recently one of our existing customers in the Education sector asked us to investigate options to to improve the integration of their customer systems.  Currently we manage the web applications that Tutors and Learners use to access learning resources, which we developed using Umbraco. Tutors also have access to an online customer portal developed by a different agency which enables them to register courses and learners.  While this is also a .NET based system it currently has little integration with the Umbraco site.  For example, users have two separate log-ins and passwords, and when logged into one application they…