Codegarden 2023 Keynote Product Highlights

Strong Community 

The Umbraco community is strong and growing. With regular new contributors and a lot of returning ones, we get the benefit of having users and implementers help shape the products. This years list of MVPs, both new and returning, is more impressive than ever!

On stage, we announced 17 new and 66 renewed MVPs have just been announced on Codegarden’s stage. That’s a total of 83 "Most Valuable People" and they have all helped immensely with their contributions to the Umbraco eco-system over the past year!

Check out the full list of MVPs for 2023.

Umbraco Cloud on the rise

Umbraco Cloud has grown substantially in the past year, not least thanks to a solid .NET foundation and all the new features that help build and maintain Umbraco projects. 

Cloud is now multi-region, letting you select a cloud region closest to your users or ensure data never leaves a specific region. Furthermore, you can choose dedicated compute options on all plans,  all the way from a very affordable starter plan up to choosing from 3  super powerful Pro plans.

Talking about performance, also a new “performance and availability”-dashboard has been added, so you can track your app performance, request failure rate and even CPU and memory usage.  And with MFA and organization-wide admin of it, you can make sure all your users are actually who you think they are. 

Embracing bigger projects

With a clear focus on making Cloud an even better fit for bigger projects, an updated roadmap was introduced, with mentions of Flexible environment and load balancing as the highlights. 

One new feature is highly anticipated and was a big focus in the keynote: CI/CD integration for Umbraco Cloud.  We saw a demo of this upcoming feature. CI/CD integration allows cloud customers to customize the source-code repository and control the build pipeline, making it possible to run automated acceptance tests, build frontend assets, or anything to your liking. CI/CD integration will be generally available in Q3 but starts a limited beta access soon.

See the updated product roadmap for more details on upcoming Cloud features. 

Sustainability in Umbraco Cloud

A new sustainability dashboard is coming to Umbraco Cloud where, on a project and environment level, you can track emissions and changes, plus compare how you are doing to average websites. This initiative, along with many others, is part of Umbraco’s journey towards carbon neutrality, which you can read more about it in the Umbraco Impact Report. 

DXP as the evolution of CMS

We have also further expanded on how we see Umbraco in the context of Digital Experience Platforms, where the two opposites are the “composable DXP” and “platform DXP”.  

A majority of projects are in reality is a hybrid of the two, and Umbraco is a great fit for all three scenarios.

Introducing Umbraco Commerce

After the acquisition of Outfield Digital, Umbraco revealed “Umbraco Commerce” as a new way to build e-commerce with Umbraco.

Find out more on the Umbraco Commerce product page.

Umbraco Workflow

Since last Codegarden, Umbraco also acquired and rebranded, the product that is now Umbraco Workflow. This adds advanced and customizable content editing workflows to Umbraco, so you can configure what approvals are needed before publishing. Umbraco Workflow is 199 EUR monthly and is available now.

Read more on the Umbraco Workflow product page.

Successful launch of Umbraco Marketplace

It was only ~6 months ago that the Umbraco marketplace launched, already showcasing 240+ packages and integrations that makes your life with Umbraco easier, whether you are a developer or an editor. This is bigger than any of the marketplaces from the traditional competitors. 

See the integrations and packages listed on Umbraco Marketplace.

Headless is now in core

With the (very soon approaching) release of Umbraco 12, Umbraco now has a built-in Content Delivery API, so you can take your Umbraco data anywhere and to any audience. Built-in support for a headless approach has also landed in Umbraco Forms and will come to Umbraco Commerce in Q3.

See the Umbraco 12 release candidate blog post for more information.

Alpha release of new backoffice 

The team is hard at work on a new version of the beloved Umbraco backoffice. This will bring you a flexible and scalable API, in a standards-based way that is recognizable,  easy to learn, and attractive for frontend developers. A preview version is now available, so package and integration authors can get familiar, with and be ready for the final release which is currently targeting Umbraco version 14 (May 2023). 

And you can already try out the new backoffice today! Head over to the New Backoffice documentation space for more information on the alpha release.

CMS focus on the upper mid-market 

Other notable items on the updated roadmap for CMS, that are welcome enhancements, especially for medium to larger sites, include a new lazy-loaded cache, giving you more control, potentially less memory pressure, and faster startup times. And then the team will work on further expanding the “block” technology introduced with the Block List editor and more recently expanded with the new Block Grid editor. This popular feature will become even better with support for block reuse, block-level variation, and even blocks in the Rich Text Editor. There is an open Request for Comments (RFC) for Reusable Content in the form of Global Blocks where you can get all the details and help shape the feature. 

See the Umbraco Product Roadmap for a full overview of upcoming features and products.

Looking forward to the next year

The engineering team has almost tripled in just under 3 years and we’re looking forward to bringing you many more features and improvements across the expanding product portfolio - and not least to seeing all the amazing digital experiences you build with Umbraco. Enjoy Codegarden if you are there or join us online.