Thank You Umbraco Community

Hello,
So last week was the annual Umbraco developer conference; CodeGarden 15 that is hosted in the homeland of the Umbraco project Copenhagen.

This was the first year I was unable to attend the conference to catch up with the Umbraco community, which I like to call my second family, due to a recent new arrival to my family of my wonderful little daughter!

So with the first CodeGarden that I have missed since I started attending back in 2007 the one & only time it left Copenhagen & came to London that year & was a little gutted to not be able to come this year

If you was at this years CodeGarden you would have seen in the keynote or watched it back online, that I had a lovely surprise from the man himself, Niels Hartvig aka Chief Unicorn turning up unannounced at my front door and was presented with t fantastic LifeTime Umbraco MVP award, which is very touching & nice to hear that my contributions & efforts are noticed.

Rather than me drone on too much I thought I would create a short video instead, but once again a BIG, BIG Thank You Umbraco community for the LifeTime award & for giving me such a lovely reception. It did give me a nice warm happy feeling & a slight happy tear to the eye on Monday morning when I watched it back.

But before I go & wrap up, I want to say congratulations to my fellow MVPs at this years Umbraco CodeGarden that include the lovely bunch of people who continually work hard to make the community a friendlier & happier place, so again congrats to the following:

  • Lee Kelleher – Umbrella Inc
  • Matt Brailsford – The Outfield
  • Jeavon Leopold – Crumpled Dog
  • Jan Skovgaard
  • Jeroen Breuer

Umbraco 2015-2016 MVPS
The Umbraco 2015 MVPs. Photo: Doug Robar

Thanks again Niels for a fantastic surprise!

Securing Umbraco Web APIs using JSON Web Tokens

Hello all,
First off a very happy new year to you all. I hope you had a good time off over the festive period and relaxed.

Over this festive period in between our baby girl arriving during late night feeds and insomnia kicking in, I managed to find a little time to polish off my new pet project for the wonderful Umbraco CMS. So I herby introduce you to UmbracoAuthTokens!

What is Umbraco Auth Tokens?

Umbraco Auth Tokens is a project that I have built that allows you to secure Umbraco WebAPI Controllers using a token based authentication using JSON Web Tokens aka JWT; pronounced jot. This is ideal for securing WebAPIs that require using a backoffice Umbraco user.

For example you may want to securely from a third party client be it a mobile application or similar create a new page or any other action that a backofficer Umbraco user may do.

What are JWTs?

They are an auth token that allows you to send a piece of JSON encoded as a token and are the more modern approach to deal with auth in applications especially as we build applications across different devices. The videos below will do a lot better trying to explain it than I can do.

Continue reading Securing Umbraco Web APIs using JSON Web Tokens