Feature
The Gist
- Umbraco's momentum. Umbraco saw significant growth in 2023 with new features like Umbraco Commerce and a focus on professional development.
- 2024 roadmap insights. The Winter Keynote highlighted Umbraco's 2024 priorities, including enhanced APIs, composable architecture, and low-code interfaces.
- Continued innovation. Umbraco is set to evolve with a focus on stability, expanded capabilities, and a revamped partner program.
Last year was a busy year for Umbraco, an open source content management system. The platform went from strength to strength.
It had an active product roadmap that included the launch of Umbraco Commerce, the evolution of Umbraco Cloud and the end-of-year release of Umbraco 13. The popular annual conference Umbraco Codegarden also celebrated the professional development community, which is often highly active.
In general, Umbraco moved forward without necessarily losing its core strengths: being easy to use with an intuitive editing experience, and having a passionate professional community.
What can we expect from Umbraco in 2024? Recently, Umbraco held a Winter Keynote event that featured some of its leadership team and outlined some of its strategic priorities, as well as the specific product roadmap for 2024.
Let's explore some of the themes emerging from the keynote.
Umbraco’s Direction of Travel in 2024
Regardless of what was covered in the keynote, at a high level it seems likely that Umbraco’s direction of travel in 2024 will be a continuation of the themes we’ve seen in 2023. Some of these are common digital customer experience trends that can be seen with other platforms and vendors:
- Continuing support for headless publishing; for example with enhanced APIs
- Increased emphasis on composable features and support for composable architecture
- Increased functionality and features to widen capabilities, enabling Umbraco to grow from a Content Management System (CMS) to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
- Leveraging low-code/no-code interfaces to give marketers and business users more power and less need to rely on IT colleagues
- Continuing to expand the ability to integrate with other solutions with the necessary connectors
- Appealing to a wider selection of organizations, particularly larger enterprises.
Related Article: 5 Improvements to Umbraco Content Management System
Keeping the Platform Current and Stable
Umbraco has kept the platform current and stable with a regular and predictable cadence of releases, and with a far easier and less painful upgrade path, particularly after Umbraco 10. This marks one of its significant achievements in the past couple of years.
This stability provides a medium- to long-term view of the platform. It allows more businesses — including enterprises — to commit to using the platform for their wider digital footprint and corporate website, above and beyond projects or sites that have a more limited shelf life. Umbraco focused on the latter in the past.
A key attribute of Umbraco in 2024 is that the platform will continue to be current, stable and predictable. For example, Umbraco 13 was launched in late December and is a long-term supported release. It is designed to support projects until at least Q4 2026, and also be straightforward to upgrade.
Umbraco 13 also supports .NET 8 so it also has stronger performance and is better for developers. Additionally, the official add-ons from Umbraco, including Commerce, Forms and Deploy, are also all now up to date with Umbraco 13.
The target dates for the 2024 release cadence are also published; Umbraco 14 is due in May, and Umbraco 15 in November, each as short-term supported releases. However, like any roadmap, these dates are prone to shift. For example, Umbraco 14’s target date has already shifted by a couple of weeks.
Related Article: 10 Things to Know About Umbraco's Content Management System Updates
Focusing on Umbraco’s Existing Strengths, While Shoring up the Partner Program
As for winter keynote session, many touted Umbraco’s recognized strengths, in particular its passionate global development community. Umbraco’s ease of use, particularly for non-business users and content editors, remains a selling point.
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Umbraco HQ is going to ensure these elements continue to be strengths in 2024, with support for community events and meet-ups, as well as its Codegarden event. The release of a new Backoffice in May (more on this below) will also ensure that interfaces remain intuitive with little training required.
An interesting side note for the company? Umbraco also has a partnership with Forrester in the works, which has the potential to appeal to enterprise clients, as well as IT teams as a whole.
Umbraco also wants to improve and formalize its partner program and ecosystem so it is more in line with other leading CMS and DXP platforms. In 2023, new Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers for partners were announced. They'll complete the program this year, with every partner required to be within one of the tiers by the end of June, and the old system withdrawn.
The keynote session also covered a commitment to closer collaboration with partners, more alignment between products, add-ons and the partner program, and also enhanced training to make it easier to become a certified Umbraco expert.
Related Article: Umbraco Eyes DXP Middle Market Takeover With Outfield Digital Acquisition
A Product Roadmap That Continues to Evolve the Platform
The keynote session also covered Umbraco’s product roadmap for 2024, featuring some upcoming highlights, most of which have already been mentioned in various updates. The product roadmap is also available to view on the Umbraco website.
Key product updates include the release of the Umbraco Backoffice, due to be released with Umbraco 14 in May; this is a brand-new backend and admin experience for both content creators and developers, supported by new APIs. The work on the Backoffice has been in flight for quite a while and has become known as “Project Bellissima.'' The new log-in screen released with Umbraco 13 provides a hint of the look and feel for the new release.
Umbraco will also make improvements to the editing capabilities with an expansion of what you can do with content blocks so these can be used across different pages. Variations will also be possible at the block-level. So, for example, you could apply the same block across different pages but use different languages.
More flexibility is also coming to Umbraco Cloud environments, giving teams more choice on how they set up their environment; for example aligning with their preferred DevOps approach.
In 2024, a more flexible and dynamic approach is suggested, enabling branching for QA or feature development, among other possibilities There will also be the opportunity for more scalability with multiple versions of Umbraco to support load balancing for redundancy and performance. Greater choice around cloud will be welcomed by digital agencies and enterprises who inevitably have a preferred way of organizing their environment.
Umbraco also has a brand new management API coming that will allow all content to be managed, helping any development teams building a solution that relies on content housed in Umbraco.
Finally, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues continue to grow in importance for digital projects. Previously announced, Umbraco will be releasing its sustainability reporting dashboard that reports on the carbon footprint of an Umbraco Cloud project.
Related Article: Umbraco or Sitecore? Looking Through a Developer Lens
Umbraco Will Continue to Move Forward in 2024
It looks like 2024 will be another good year for Umbraco with an active roadmap, but also a continuing focus on what makes the platform unique. It will also be interesting to see what additional updates emerge over the next 12 months.
