When setting up a new doctype with properties. Do you set up a new group container, or have them "group-less"? Is there a distinguished preference? or merely wing-it, to what sits right.

This is veering towards Forum post territory, but I would say it's largely personal preference. It's all about taxonomy, if I have 3 closely related properties and nothing else.. I usually don't bother, but if I have categories of properties I'd definitely add some groups

Brill thanks - that's been my train of thought to - when you're freelancing and coding on your own, it's sometimes hard to tell if you doing something right or wrong.

I agree with Seb, if I have a Tab with multiple properties, then I'll use groups to group logicallly related properties E.g. if I have a "Content" tab, I might have 2 groups, a "Hero Banner" group to hold he properties related to that (e.g. the H1, subtitle, background image) and a generic "Content" group for the page's content props (e.g. block list/grid) Personally, I try to group/tab things to minimise the amount of scrolling, whilst also minimising the amount of tabs

Like you have pointed out, sometimes you get the Tab Name, and Group Name being the same. eg. Content. I think I've found it easier to put things in groups as it makes it easier to nudge in a Property when inheriting from various compositions. (Noodling with the sortOrder) Agreed - this probably should have been put on the forum - but it's not really anything super techy - I was merely musing over my Marmite Butty at lunch.

Compositions also merge tabs too 😄 E.g. in my example, I'd have a "Grid Composition" and a "Hero Banner Composition", Which both have a "Content" Tab. Then I'd use the sort order on the Groups within those compositions to define the order (e.g. -5 for the Hero Banner group to make sure it's at the top) Ooo that's another tip I've learnt, do your order values in increments of 5 or 10, that way if you need to insert a new group in the middle, it's less likely that you'll need to go and increment all the other orderings by 1 (learnt the hard way lol)

haha! - I'm an increment of 10 umbracian - lol. To be honest, Little is said about how to set up a "good back office" and best practise. I'm sure there must be a blog-tutorial on it somewhere. We should get @CodeSharePaul on the case - He's the face of Umbraco,.. on the login-screen at least 😀

Components composed into tabs and then groups here. A little more work to set up, a lot less work when requirements change.