A yearly conference to celebrate Umbraco and the talented pool of developers that work with the platform, Codegarden offers insight into all things up and coming.  

Our development team joined the conference this year, bringing back with them new and exciting updates about Umbraco… 

1) Cloud offering  

Umbraco’s cloud offering was one of this year’s highly discussed topics. Their cloud product has been around for some time, labelling itself as a ‘one-stop-shop for all your Umbraco needs.’ 

While the product is not new, the capabilities and features it offers has had an upgrade. At this year’s Codegarden, Umbraco announced updates to their cloud solution: 

• Increased global reach  
• Scheduling of upgrades  
• Hot fixes 
• Support for CI/CD pipelines 
• New endpoints to support development 

Alongside these updates, Umbraco highlighted their commitment to ensuring security online is a constant priority. Their feature, ‘Secret Management’, has been created to address the vulnerability that can come from storing sensitive data in a cloud solution, such as passwords and digital keys. Secret management is essentially a virtual vault, hosted in Azure, that allows your sensitive information to be protected by another layer of security. Combined with their latest addition of multi-factor authentication, Umbraco continues to ensure your data is in safe hands.  

2) Sustainability  

A focus on sustainability is no longer a ‘nice to have’ in any business, it’s now a necessity. As we all become more aware of our impact on the planet, brands are placing emphasis on their sustainability efforts. Umbraco are no different, recently announcing their dedicated sustainability team. 

As a company, Umbraco is working towards being carbon neutral by making changes to the day-to-day running of the business such as switching to renewable energy. Alongside this, they have acknowledged areas of their products that create the highest emissions as an ongoing challenge to address.  

For users of their platform, the cloud solution also offers in-depth sustainability reporting. If you use Umbraco’s cloud service or host a website, you can get reports that show how efficient your site is and what kind of carbon footprint it produces. By providing their customers with this information, Umbraco gives its users the knowledge and tools to help create more carbon-friendly websites. 

3) Umbraco Commerce 

Another big topic at the event was Umbraco’s latest development in the world of eCommerce. Until now, Umbraco didn’t have its own eCommerce functionality. Instead, platform users had to rely on third-party plug-ins.   

But Umbraco recently announced their acquirement of commerce provider Vendr, allowing them to offer their users an in-house commerce solution as a paid-for add-on. This latest functionality is set to be launched on the 5^th July 2023 and promises to deliver simple data management, multi-market capabilities and next-level analytics. 

You can learn more about this exciting development on their website.  

4) Umbraco 12 

With the release of Umbraco 12 imminent, it’s no surprise this is one of our top takeaways from the event. As with any upgrade, there will be new functionalities or improvements to the existing platform. A big update from Codegarden was surrounding their Content Delivery API, which essentially is Umbraco adapting their platform to a headless platform.  

Currently, Umbraco platforms require front-end support who work on the visual side of the site, and a back-end team who create APIs and work with the data in the background. Umbraco’s Content Delivery API looks to deliver a site that doesn’t require this back-end developer support.  

In their own documentation about the API, Umbraco writes: 

“It allows you to retrieve your content items in a JSON format and lets you preset them in different channels, using your preferred technology stack. This feature preserves the friendly editing experience of Umbraco, while also ensuring a performant delivery of content in a headless fashion.” 

• Umbraco CMS Documentation 

5) New back office  

You’re only as good as your technology and Umbraco’s back office is undergoing a refresh. Previously using AngularJS, a platform created by Google, Umbraco are making the move to a new platform called Web Components. The platform is well known in the development community and showcases Umbraco’s commitment to keeping up with the latest tech. 

 This update won’t be available with Umbraco 12 but is set to be ready to go for Umbraco 14, which will be released in 2024. From this point, the back office of your site will be built using Web Components and will enable your site’s developers to extend the back office with ease.  

6) Workflow 

Much like their eCommerce offering, Umbraco has previously not had any specific workflow capabilities. However, last August, Umbraco acquired Plumber, a workflow extension that Umbraco had been using for several years prior to the acquisition. Similar to their commerce solution, Umbraco now offer workflow capabilities as a paid for extension.  

Alongside the full paid for option, Umbraco will offer a free tier of workflows that provides significant capabilities for those who can’t purchase the full package. This is a welcome development, as it opens users to Umbraco who may have previously used another platform because the requirement for workflows was not being met.  

NetConstruct and Umbraco  

With over 20 years of experience in the digital space, we have countless expertise when it comes to selecting the right platform for you. Having worked with Umbraco on many of our projects, we know exactly which of our clients are suited to their platform.  

  

• Hammonds: Leading fitted furniture brand and an idhl Group wide client, Hammonds needed a website that could support their ongoing development. Their Umbraco site includes a complex product set and an account area for their customers to make transactions. We are continuing to work together to enhance the site post go live.   
• Horticultural Trades Association: The HTA wanted four of their sites to undergo a redesign and rebuild. With flexibility a key component of their project, Umbraco was the perfect platform to support their goals. Creating four sites from one instance of Umbraco, we saved them time, money and resource.  

If you’re looking to move platforms and would like to understand more about Umbraco and whether it’s the right provider for you, get in touch with our team of friendly experts to find out more.