This article was written shortly after Umbraco Codegarden 2022 which ended on Friday, 17th June 2022. Parts of this article may have changed at the time of publication.
Table of contents
Summary
Codegarden is the biggest annual one-of-a-kind knowledge-sharing conference in the world, and I was proud to be representing Pixel Builders. The event was held between Wednesday, 15th June 2022 to Friday, 17th June 2022 in Odense, Denmark and for the first time ever it is a hybrid event which had both in-person & virtual attendees (pre-COVID it was traditionally in-person attendees only). I was fortunate to be attending as an unlimited access virtual attendee for a second year running (last year it was free and virtual only) and went full throttle with my listening ears with the hope to learn one or two new things.
The Umbraco Keynote
With every Codegarden comes a traditional opening Keynote to kick things off. The Keynote included a look back at the past year, including several announcements and things to look forward to in the future. The speakers on stage were Kim Sneum Madsen, Filip Bech-Larsen and Emma Burstow. Umbraco welcomed a special guest on stage to kick things off with Peter Rahbæk Juel, the mayor of Odense who gave a warm welcome to all Codegarden attendees.
MVP’s
The session began honouring 7 new & 59 renewed Umbraco MVP’s (“Most Valuable People”). Congratulations to all those people who have received this unique title. #H5YR!
Notable mentions to the 7 new 2022 MVP's:
- Corné Hoskam
- Jason Elkin
- Jesper Mayntzhusen
- Joke Van Hamme
- Matthew Hart
- Nurhak Kaya
- Shannon Deminick
More about the 2022 MVP's can be found here: https://umbraco.com/blog/the-umbraco-2022-mvps/
New vision
Umbraco HQ have a positive future ahead of themselves and have set quite a few goals which they’re hoping to all accomplish by the end of 2027. These include:
- Umbraco Cloud including strong headless offering, is the preferred CMS for partners and mid-market to lower enterprise customers by continuing to be #1 in editing experience and the most loved CMS by developers
- That we enable customers and partners to compose their preferred tech stack by simplifying integrations – Composable DXP
- Continue developing and innovating Umbraco CMS together with a growing and thriving Umbraco Community ensuring true outside-in perspective. Resulting in us having more than 2 million websites running on Umbraco.
- Global coverage (24/7/365) with national/regional offices covering our key markets
Which direction?
Umbraco has been trying to map what the competitive landscape looks like and where it sees itself in the future and where it sees itself now. Currently it sees itself in the lower mid-market segment (along with Orchard, DNN, Joomal) and the vision is that they see themselves in the upper market and enterprise DXP space (along with Sitecore, Optimizely and Kentico). Heartcore also shares a similar vision within the CMS space (along with Contentful). Umbraco HQ have rest assured that they won’t leave people behind and CMS will continue to live on as it currently does.
Product Focused
- Commercial & Open Source – The great thing about having an open-source platform of which all of their commercial products are based upon is that community contributions which make their way into a final release enhance and improve the experience of products such as Umbraco Cloud and Heartcore given they inherit those same features.
- Open source is about transparency – Their values are about openness and being transparent about what they’re doing. One of the values is openness that speaks to the same point and want to share as much information as they can about what, why, how they do it and what the long-term plans are.
- Listening to feedback – Proactive in listening to feedback over the last year from developers, agencies, end-users, editor & partners. There is a new community team listening to feedback from the community
Umbraco Product Updates
Umbraco Cloud
Umbraco Cloud is one of the available commercial offerings and is the one-stop-shop for all your Umbraco needs - the fastest, easiest, and best way to work with the most advanced open-source .NET CMS. Everything is installed, configured, and ready for development. Just click Create Project and in a few steps, Umbraco CMS is up and running.
It will speed up your time-to-market, allows you to spend your time on features and helps you stay safe and up to date.
Best place to host Umbraco
Umbraco vision is that they want it to be the best place to host Umbraco CMS want to push it to everybody as a no-brainer solution to choose Cloud for all of your products. A few key features which were highlighted were:
- Deployment of culture & hostnames
- Static outgoing IP
- Transport security options
- 2 Factor Authentication (2FA)
- Partial restore of forms
- Named firewall rules
- Content Comparison
- Schema comparison and configuration surfacing
- CDN – Now an out of the box feature running Cloudflare
- Backoffice User Group Selection
- Domain Deployment
- Usage metrics and top10
- New infrastructure on Azure
- Umbraco 9/10 & .Net 5+
- Deploy Dashboard
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Member deployment
- Restore options
Updated cloud plans
Umbraco Cloud has 3 premium plans which customers can choose from:
- Starter – Restricted to 500 content nodes, 50000 page views per month, 5 GB media storage, 50GB bandwidth per month and 3 custom domains.
- Standard – Restricted to 2500 content nodes, 250000 page views per month, 50 GB media storage, 300GB bandwidth per month and 10 custom domains.
- Professional - Restricted to 7500 content nodes, 750000 page views per month, 500 GB media storage, 1000GB bandwidth per month and 50 custom domains.
From now on, all the above plans can have unlimited content nodes, page views per month and many more custom domains to associate with their site. All for no extra cost when compared to before.
What’s next for Cloud?
- 2FA for Umbraco ID
- Scheduled and API driven content transfers – deploy content changes at the right time.
- Secret management – A secure place to store API keys or any other private settings
- US Region with more regions to follow later
- Dedicated resources – 3 exclusive options to choose a dedicated option for reasonable prices for exclusivity.
- More to come! What out for the roadmap.
Read more about the Umbraco Cloud updates here: https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-cloud-update-june-2022/
Umbraco Heartcore
Umbraco Heartcore is a headless CMS that's friendly for editors and flexible for developers. It's built on top of the open-source CMS and a collaboration with Cloudflare.
A few key features from the last year:
- Scaled with Cloudflare
- Content notifications
- Eye dropper color picker
- Umbraco ID
- BlockList editor
- Improved caching
- Data Property Editor
- Content Delivery Platform
- New infrastructure
- Google Maps Property Editor
- Extended GraphQL support
- Dedicated issue-tracker
- Edge-side caching
- GraphQL Persisted queries – now available to all plans!
Roadmap
- Custom Grid editors
- Custom Property Editors
- Secured Webhooks
- Zapier for Forms
- REST API v3 on OpenAPI
Umbraco Forms
With the latest set of releases, Umbraco Forms now makes it easy to organise thanks to its new folder structure which can individually be permissions based so you can assign the right responsibilities to specific personnel. Another great new feature is being able to localise the editing experience with your editors so they can enjoy the UI in their native language.
Roadmap
- Improvements for Workflow & multi-step forms
- Backoffice Form previews
- Still 249 USD & Free in Cloud
Umbraco CMS
Umbraco now runs .Net 5 and .Net 6. As of June 2022, Umbraco 9 has overtaken Umbraco 8 with the number of dashboard requests. Since launch, there’s been 13 releases shipped for Umbraco CMS version 9. These have included the following new features:
- Telemetry options – A feature since Umbraco 8.1 which sends statistical data to Umbraco HQ about how Umbraco is used. This is a feature regardless of the environment, however there is the ability to opt out.
- Content Version Clean-up
- Stabilisation
- User & Member 2FA
- Package telemetry - Statistics show that 54.88% of packages used on sites were community created, but only 24.56% were by HQ. Most used packages being Umbraco Forms, Umbraco Deploy, Umbraco ID, uSync, Contentment, HeartCore & GMaps.
- Item tracking - Warning to prevent related content from affecting others
- Easy external login providers for members
There is now a release cadence of new major releases every 6 months (June & December) and 6 weeks for every minor version. This aims to reduce the number of changes with each upgrade.
Umbraco 10
Out of pure coincidence, Umbraco’s next flagship version was released on day 2 of Codegarden (16/06/2022). The first all public and feature complete release candidate was released on 04/05/2022 and has had 5 release candidates available until launch.
Umbraco 10 has a few major upgrades since Umbraco 9, these include the following:
- Nullable reference types – Following on from Microsoft’s own best practices, this helps a developer minimise the likelihood that code causes the runtime to throw a Null Reference Exception.
- SQLite – Replaces SQL CE (Compact Edition) which caused limitations with .Net 6. SQLite is cross platform, fast embedded database perfect for development and small sites.
- Microsoft .Net 6 – The latest long-term support (LTS) version their flagship cross platform framework. Microsoft ships with a new LTS .Net version every second year which falls in line with Umbraco LTS release schedule (see below).
- 3rd party packages –
- Imagesharp 2 – Image manipulation library now with native WebP support.
- Examine 3 – The search abstraction and library now build on the latest version of Lucene.Net
- NPoco 5 – Object-relational mapping
- AngularJS
- Cross platform support – Starting from version 10, Umbraco is now officially supported on UNIX. With the experiences from version 9, core devs on multiple platforms, and support for a cross-platform embedded database, you can use Umbraco 10 on all UNIX platforms.
- Cleaner code base – More Umbraco files have been moved out of the projects file set and embedded within the Umbraco class libraries.
Read more about the Umbraco 10 release here: https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-10-release/
What’s next
- Permissions for variants – Expected in Umbraco 11 (2022 Q4)
- Block Grid Editor – Work in progress to replaces the old Grid Editor. Block Editor Meets Grid Editor. – Expected in Umbraco 11 (2022 Q4)
- Entity Framework (EF) Core – Expected in Umbraco 12 (2023 Q2)
- Headless API – Adding headless to the core! – Expected in Umbraco 12 (2023 Q2)
- Block level variation – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- Content reuse – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- Enterprise focus – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- New ORM – In the future. Replacement for NPoco. – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- Lazy Loaded Content – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- Webhooks – Expected in Umbraco 13 (2023 Q4)
- New Backoffice – In the future. Get rid of AngularJS & technical debt from old framework. 3 parts:
- Standalone UI library (uui.umbraco.com)
- Well-defined API
- New implementation
- RFC out – RFC 0024 – Implement the New Backoffice
- New prototype
- Aiming for Umbraco 13 – Dec 23
Read more about the future of Umbraco CMS here: https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-cms-roadmap-something-to-look-forward-to/
DXP (Digital Experience Platform)
Umbraco sees itself as a Composable DXP – a DXP assembled from integrating a series of externally run best-of-breed solutions that work together via APIs and leverage microservices architecture. These include (but not limited to) the following technology partners:
- Commercetools - https://umbraco.com/blog/integrating-umbraco-cms-with-commercetools/
- Hubspot - https://umbraco.com/blog/integrating-umbraco-forms-with-hubspot-crm/
- SEMrush - https://umbraco.com/blog/integrating-umbraco-cms-with-semrush/
- Zapier - https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/tutorials/Connecting-Umbraco-Forms-and-Zapier/
- Google Search Console - https://umbraco.com/blog/integrating-umbraco-cms-with-google-search-console-url-inspection-tool/
- Shopify - https://umbraco.com/blog/integrating-umbraco-cms-with-shopify/
There will also be a new Umbraco Marketplace which will replace the Our Packages catalog (https://our.umbraco.com/packages/) which will be populated from NuGet with packages tagged “umbraco-marketplace”.
Long-term Support (LTS) and End-of-Life (EOL)
This wasn't mentioned in the keynote, however it's still worth mentioning.
So as already noted above that Umbraco CMS will release a LTS version every 2 years (or every 4th major version) to coincide with the Microsoft release schedule for each LTS version of .Net (formally .Net Core). These versions (i.e., 10, 13, 17) will have an extended support and security phase when compared with the non-LTS versions (i.e., 9, 11, 12) which will see a shorter support and security phase before eventually seeing an earlier EOL in comparison.
Whilst a product version is still within a support phase, it will receive bug fixes, regressions, and security patches. These will be released as per a fixed release cadence of every 6 weeks. After the support phase we will enter the security phase which continue to receive security fixes as per the 6-week release cadence. Once the product has reached EOL it will no longer continue to see any releases.
More information about this and other Umbraco products can be found on the Umbraco knowledge center: https://umbraco.com/products/knowledge-center/long-term-support-and-end-of-life/
Another interesting article I found by Eric Seng, which consolidates all the information regarding LTD & EOL for the .NET family can be read here: https://blog.inedo.com/dotnet/3-dotnet-lts-charts
Video Replay
If you'd like to watch the Keynote for yourself, then Umbraco have now uploaded this to YouTube:
You can also access all the other talks made over the 3 day period:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG_nqaT-rbpx7QcHtQE4Efr83U6Lqf4Fp
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I'm hoping you managed to take away some useful insights and gave you a clearer vision of Umbraco's future.
If this article has helped you in any way, or would like to provide any constructive feedback please drop me a comment below.
Top comments (0)