Group picture at Umbraco Spring 2024

Umbraco Spring 2024 update

Technical Director Emmanuel Tissera covers the latest happenings in the world of Umbraco and Luminary’s involvement with the platform.

Emmanuel Tissera

17 October 2024

7 minute read

It’s been a busy few months for Umbraco. Here’s a round-up from Luminary’s perspective of what’s happened, what’s currently happening and what’s in the pipeline for the platform.

What's happened?

Umbraco 14 released with new back office and features

Umbraco 14 was released in May 2024, introducing a new back office implementation known as Bellissima. Subsequent releases, versions 14.1 and 14.2, brought further enhancements and bug fixes.

Umbraco Flavored Markdown (UFM), introduced in version 14.1, enhances property descriptions and labels in block editors and collection view columns. Custom Views for Blocks, introduced in version 14.2, grants developers control over content representation and editing in the back office using web components.

Luminary developers recognised as Umbraco MVPs

Luminary's Solutions Architect, Mario Lopez, and I were recognised for our contributions to the Umbraco community. Mario and I were renewed as Umbraco MVPs for the fourth and fifth year in a row, respectively. Mario was at Umbraco Codegarden in Odense Denmark to claim his title. 

Mario Lopez at event

Umbraco appoints new CEO

Umbraco has appointed Mats Persson as its new CEO, effective from 1 September 2024. Persson, who has extensive international experience in the software and technology sector, will succeed Kim Sneum Madsen. Madsen will remain an active member of the Board of Directors. Persson's previous roles include leadership positions at Cavai, Adform, and IBM. The Chairman of the Board at Umbraco, Martin Henricson, expressed confidence in Persson's ability to build on Umbraco's international expansion. 

Sustainability dashboard on Umbraco Cloud

Umbraco released a sustainability dashboard that helps track, analyse, and report carbon emissions associated with your Umbraco Cloud projects. The dashboard provides clear metrics, helping you understand the environmental impact of your cloud usage. This aligns with Luminary’s own goals of being carbon neutral

Sustainability dashboard on Umbraco Cloud

What's happening now?

Umbraco 15 release candidate available for testing

The release candidate for Umbraco 15 is now available, showcasing a range of exciting new features and improvements focused on streamlining development and enhancing performance.

Umbraco 15 introduces several new features, including an alternative UI for the Rich Text Editor based on Tiptap, simplifying the configuration of client credentials for the Management API, an experimental hybrid caching feature for performance improvements, and block-level variants for maintaining consistent structure in multilingual websites. Umbraco 15 also includes updated dependencies, supporting the latest versions of its dependencies, including .NET 9.

Umbraco encourages community involvement in testing the release candidate and providing feedback to help shape the final release, scheduled for 14 November 2024.

Hacktoberfest 2024 encourages community contributions

Umbraco is actively participating in Hacktoberfest, a month-long celebration of open source, inviting developers of all levels to contribute to the Umbraco ecosystem. This year, contributions include providing feedback and submitting bug reports for the Umbraco 15 release candidate. Luminary has been active in these Hacktoberfests in the past, including running a 24-hour around-the-world Umbraco hackathon.

Umbraco acquires uMarketingSuite

Umbraco has acquired uMarketingSuite, a popular add-on known for its advanced marketing analytics, customer insights, A/B testing, and personalisation capabilities. This acquisition aligns with Umbraco's long-term product strategy of enhancing the CMS experience with powerful marketing tools.  The uMarketingSuite team has joined Umbraco's Commercial Packages/DXP team, ensuring continued development and innovation. Integration plans for uMarketingSuite into the Umbraco product roadmap will be revealed later this year.

Medium-severity security issues patched in Umbraco 14

Umbraco addressed medium-severity security issues in Umbraco 14, including improper access control and potential information leaks in error messages. A patch has been released, urging users to upgrade to the latest minor version, 14.1.2, or the upcoming 14.2.0 release. Umbraco Cloud sites are automatically patched.

What's planned?

Continued development of Umbraco 14 and 15

Umbraco is committed to continuous improvement and has outlined plans for upcoming releases. Umbraco 14.3 will concentrate on bug fixes and smaller features such as Media Library Preview Extensions, Import/Export for Document and Media Types, and the Clipboard service for copy/paste functionality, while Umbraco 15 focuses on performance, multilingual capabilities, and API integrations through features like Lazy Loaded Content Cache, Block Level Variants, and Client Credentials.

Enhancements to Umbraco Cloud

Umbraco Cloud is set to unveil a host of enhancements, including a redesigned UI with improved project history tracking, detailed upgrade logs, and refined search functionality. New database features such as Import Database will offer greater flexibility for managing database content. Additionally, a Custom Login Provider feature is in the works, allowing organisations to integrate preferred identity providers like Azure AD or Google into their Umbraco Cloud projects.

Luminary played a pivotal role in partnering with Umbraco HQ to establish the Umbraco Cloud Australian data centre, offering enhanced performance and data sovereignty for local businesses. The enhancements to Umbraco Cloud help with establishing more Australian clients on this platform.

Umbraco Heartcore enhancements

Heartcore, Umbraco’s SaaS Headless CMS, will undergo significant enhancements, including the introduction of Persisted GraphQL Queries. This new feature will enable developers to save and execute GraphQL queries by name, offering more granular access control to content. Our clients such as Money3 would benefit from these enhancements that will reduce development costs.

New features in Umbraco Commerce

Umbraco Commerce 14 introduces various enhancements, including back office localisation for international teams, a Management API for custom UI development and external system integration, improved order management with custom data storage and display options, customisable quick actions and bulk actions for streamlined workflows, and updated analytics widgets with enhanced APIs for informative dashboards.

Umbraco Workflow improvements

Umbraco Workflow is set to receive new features that will enhance content management processes. These features include content bundling and scheduling, allowing users to group content nodes into Release Sets, schedule their publication, and manage them through a defined approval workflow. Additionally, an enhanced UI overview will provide a comprehensive view of scheduled Release Sets, their statuses, and associated tasks. These improvements aim to provide greater control and visibility over content releases, facilitating smoother collaboration and campaign management within Umbraco.

Umbraco Forms updates

Umbraco Forms 13 and 14 now allow users to include additional data when rendering forms, which is saved with each submission. This data can be used to customise workflows, such as sending notifications to different recipients based on form data or leveraging it as input for dynamic content generation.

Umbraco UI Builder 14 alpha release

The alpha release of Umbraco UI Builder 14 is imminent, incorporating the new back office architecture introduced in Umbraco 14. While Umbraco CMS has shifted to a front-end registration pattern for back office features, UI Builder will continue to support familiar server-side patterns, ensuring a smooth development experience.

Umbraco deploy enhancements

Umbraco Deploy, a tool for transferring content and configurations between Umbraco environments, will receive enhancements in schema management, including schema updates, individual schema deletion, and automatic deletion of unused schemas. Additionally, the content export functionality will be more versatile with new options to define specific criteria for exporting content, such as node types, date ranges, and specific properties.

Community involvement

Umbraco has formed a new Security & Privacy Community Team, composed of skilled individuals dedicated to enhancing the security and privacy aspects of the Umbraco platform. Additionally, the CMS Advisory Board, responsible for providing guidance and feedback on Umbraco CMS development, has welcomed new members, enriching the board with diverse perspectives and expertise.

Upcoming end-of-life for Umbraco 8

Umbraco 8 will reach its end-of-life on 24 February 2025. After this date, Umbraco 8 will no longer receive security patches and updates. While it will continue to function, users are encouraged to upgrade to a supported version for security and functionality reasons.

Key insights and trends

Umbraco CTO Filip Bech-Larsen has outlined the four lighthouses guiding Umbraco’s future. Umbraco's product strategy is guided by four key trends in the CMS space: content platform, composable architecture, search, and personalisation. Umbraco aims to build a solid foundation for content management by leveraging AI-generated content, provide a user-friendly approach to composable architecture, enhance search capabilities, and offer integrated personalisation tools through its acquisition of uMarketingSuite.

Watch this space

Stay tuned for future updates from Luminary about Umbraco, including developments with the CMS, happenings in the Umbraco community, and news relating to Luminary’s involvement with the platform.


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