Migrate an MVC 3 site to Umbraco

To migrate an MVC 3 website to Umbraco we first need to download Umbraco CMS which can be downloaded here

Once downloaded you will have a file called: UmbracoCms.6.1.6.zip

All contents of this file need to be copied into your website folder (all except the folders “App_Code” and “Bin”)

After this you need to open the website in Visual Studio

In Visual Studio you need to drag and drop all these newly copied files into the Solution Explorer so they are linked to the main solution

Following this, you need to open Package Manager Console and type the following: Install-Package UmbracoCms.Core –Version 6.1.6 and press Enter which should start a package installation

Once this completes, open UmbracoSettings.config and update the default rendering engine to Mvc as shown below:

<defaultRenderingEngine>Mvc</defaultRenderingEngine>

Now you need to create an empty database for Umbraco

Once the database is created you need to build the solution and run it

This should take you to the umbraco configuration wizard

Once you go through all the steps of this wizard your new Umbraco backed website should be configured with the new database you just created (it will ask about that database during the wizard)

There is a small change required at this point to make the solution work. You need to inherit all your controllers from the SurfaceController class (Umbraco.Web.Mvc.SurfaceController) as shown below:

public class HomeController : SurfaceController

This should complete your migration.

In order to open the website you need to know how the controllers will be routed by umbraco. They are routed in the following way:

/umbraco/surface/{controllername}/{action}/{id}

A noteworthy migration problem

During this migration I came across a very tricky problem. If you get the following error when adding a new controller:

You just need to delete the following reference and the error will be gone:

Our.Umbraco.uGoLive.47x.dll