Feature
The Gist
- Umbraco CMS 2023. Launched Umbraco 13 with new add-ons, enhancing its enterprise appeal and DXP capabilities.
- Continuous innovation. Updated Umbraco Commerce, previewed new backoffice, and CI/CD Flow exited beta, reflecting ongoing enhancements.
- Future focus. Phased out Umbraco 7, with a 2024 roadmap promising more features and upgrades for the CMS platform.
2023 has been quite the year for Umbraco with a number of new features, product announcements and continuing series of enhancements. Early on in the year I reported on some of the headline features that have been released and were making the platform a more appealing option for enterprise customers, including the Umbraco Workflow add-on.
I also wrote about the extensive set of announcements from the summer Codegarden conference which included the launch of Umbraco Commerce as well as a new sustainability dashboard for Umbraco Cloud. In this new post I cover some more recent updates from Umbraco HQ.
What Is Umbraco?
Umbraco is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is well-regarded both by the developer community and business users, who find it very easy to use. Over the past two years it has continued to expand, partly funded by investment from Monterro, a Nordic technology investor who was previously involved with Episerver.
Umbraco has succeeded in establishing a more predictable release schedule and started to expand its features, arguably taking it into digital experience platform (DXP) territory, while preserving the community focus that makes it a compelling alternative to some of the larger more commercial platforms.
Let’s look at some the updates from the past six months.
Related Article: 5 Improvements to Umbraco Content Management System
1. Umbraco 13 Is out NOW
Over the past few years Umbraco HQ has moved to stabilize the platform and to encourage everyone to stay as up to date as possible. There is now a regular and predictable release cadence, the latest versions seek to stay up to date with .NET core, and the pain, cost and effort of upgrading from one version to the next has greatly reduced.
The latest version is Umbraco 13; just released on Dec. 14. It supports .NET 8, C# 12 and includes a number of new features:
- Support for webhooks, providing another option for headless scenarios
- Improvements to the new Media Delivery API (see below!)
- The ability to use Blocks in the rich text editor, providing more options to reuse components for content editors
- A new log-in screen in preparation for the new backoffice coming in version 14 (again see below!)
- And more!
Related Article: Umbraco vs. Sitecore: It's All About the Marketing Use Case
2. The Release of Umbraco UI Builder as a New Add-On
In 2023 Umbraco has extended the range of what can be done with the platform with the release of a number of supported “add-ons” that are usually available at an additional price. These have primarily been developed by third-parties and have then been acquired by Umbraco HQ; to date these include Umbraco Commerce, Umbraco Forms, Umbraco Deploy and Umbraco Workflow. The extension of supported add-ons is a positive step that will appeal to larger customers.
Now a new fifth add-on has been released: Umbraco UI Builder, which is actually free with Umbraco Cloud, and is another evolution of a former partner solution. The UI Builder allows digital teams to “integrate custom database tables or external data sources directly into Umbraco with minimum effort.” It works by building a management user interface to work with the specified data, saving hours of developer time, although it still needs a developer to set it up.
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The UI Builder potentially lowers the barriers and costs in bringing additional data into the Umbraco platform; it could be anything from comments on a web page to data from a Customer Data Platform (CDP), and might be data that you’re bringing into the front-end or using to support decision-making about the experiences you’re delivering.
3. Umbraco Commerce Supports Headless and Improvements to Other Add-Ons
All of the other Umbraco add-ons also get regular releases that deliver new features and enhancements, either as release candidates so they can be tested and tried, or actually going into full release. For example in the past few months, Umbraco Commerce has a new Storefront API that will support headless commerce set-ups; while Umbraco Forms has also gotten a round of minor enhancements. Umbraco Workflow (an add-on to help manage content management workflows) has a new advanced search feature, and Umbraco Deploy has new import and export options to support smoother content migrations. It’s good to see Umbraco HQ continuing to improve the platform across the board including beyond the core products.
4. Enhancements for Umbraco Heartcore
Heartcore is Umbraco’s SaaS-based headless CMS that can help support both headless and composable DXP set-ups, as well as give a significant head start to websites which need rapid implementation. Given the general market push toward headless and composability, its good to see Heartcore not to be left out of getting an upgrade.
Actually, most of what is detailed in Umbraco’s Heartcore update from October is about it getting the latest features that are already live in the core Umbraco CMS including the Block Grid editor. Other improvements on the roadmap envisaged for 2024 include integrating Umbraco Workflow and adding regional hosting for Heartcore as an option to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
5. Preview of the New Backoffice
The usability of the interfaces designed for administrators can sometimes get overlooked, and when there is a change, it can also take some getting used to. It’s pleasing to see Umbraco not only working on a new administration experience but also sharing it with the community to get feedback and also reduce the associated learning curve when it does get released.
The new backoffice experience, now confidently called Project Bellissima, has been in preview release since August and aims to go live as part of the release of Umbraco 14 later in 2024.
6. Umbraco CI/CD Flow comes out of Beta
Umbraco CI/CD Flow is a facility that helps the smooth deployment of Umbraco Cloud projects by integrating Umbraco with various platforms like Azure DevOps and GitHub. This means Umbraco can integrate more seamlessly into the existing development and deployment workflow and environment operated by in-house teams and agencies, and also brings greater scalability as well as advanced capabilities like automated testing.
Umbraco CI/CD Flow is coming out of beta in December. We think this is yet another welcome feature that will appeal to enterprise customers or those with more complex deployments.
7. Umbraco Authorized Services 0.3 Arrives
A new version of Umbraco Authorized Services has arrived, and it aims to help developers more easily deliver integrations with third-party systems. The update offers support for a wider set of “authorization flows” — such as authentication services or API keys — by covering some of the heavy lifting in areas such as authorization, token storage and serialization. In a nutshell, this will help save development time by making integrations simpler.
8. New Media Delivery API
One interesting update released as part of Umbraco 12.2 is a new Media Delivery API that now sits alongside the existing Content Delivery API and works with a similar interface so will be familiar to developers. This is specifically designed to make it easier for developers to work with video and images in headless and omnichannel scenarios involving Umbraco, and again is another example of how Umbraco’s support for headless has ramped up over the past year or so.
9. Umbraco 7 Is No Longer Supported
At the end of September, Umbraco 7 reached end of life and is no longer supported. This means that anyone still working with Umbraco 7 should upgrade as soon as possible to reduce potential issues around performance and security, as any patches will no longer be applied. Umbraco 7 will continue to work as long as it continues to work, but it will be vulnerable; for example a medium-severity security patch issued in December is not being applied to Umbraco 7. If you’re still working with this version, an upgrade should be a top priority for 2024.
10. There’s More From Umbraco Coming in 2024
It’s a wrap for 2023, but we expect there will be an active roadmap for 2024. Umbraco HQ is organizing a Winter Keynote event on Jan. 16 that will cover what to expect next year, and Umbraco 14 will be released. We think there will be more updates, add-ons and enhancements and a full 2024 program that will further extend the power and value of the Umbraco platform.
Umbraco Is Moving Forward!
We’re pleased that Umbraco continues to go from strength to strength with a range of improvements across the board that keep it competitive with other solutions, as well as trying to attract larger organizations without losing its community focus. We’re looking forward to see where Umbraco goes in 2024!
