Update March 30, 2022: Umbraco Uno has been discontinued as a product. Find the reason here.
Last week, I outlined the vision of making Umbraco simpler for everyone.
According to Lao Tzu of Chinese folklore, a “journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”.
Today, we take one small step for a developer, but one giant leap for getting closer to our vision.
That step is called “Umbraco Uno” and is a product that’ll make it faster to get Umbraco sites up and running and even make it possible to make sites without writing code. The goal is to bridge the gap between the flexibility of Umbraco and the need for technical skills to even begin building a site.
A gap we’d like to help bridge as we see a growing demand for developers worldwide. And just like nobody creates their own CMS anymore, developers should work on things that matter rather than the basics of a website. This call for us to design products that enable better use of the developers' time and at the same time empower non-developers to do more on their own.
With Umbraco Uno, you can build and launch complete sites without ever installing any software or writing any code. However, should you have the need for opening up for the full power and flexibility of the Umbraco platform in order to add integrations or do further customization, this will also be possible.
Umbraco Uno combines Umbraco CMS and Umbraco Cloud with a website foundation and a big library of pre-made widgets. All optimized for speed and with a great set of search engine optimization features.
With Uno, you can create anything from small landing pages to complete corporate websites.
I’m incredibly excited for Umbraco Uno as it’s a fantastic first step in our goal of democratizing digital business and at the same time it also means that we - the Umbraco HQ - get closer to the products we make.
This will help improve the quality of the open-source releases of Umbraco CMS with both feature stability and usability. Something that will benefit everyone whether you’ll be using Uno, run on Umbraco Cloud, or use the free open-source version of the CMS.
The work with Umbraco Uno has already had a profound impact on the Block Editor for the upcoming Umbraco 8.7 release, as we’ll be using it to improve the editor experience of Umbraco Uno when it’s ready.
This means that rather than shipping a feature and then get feedback from the community, we’ll increasingly “drink our own champagne” and try the features ourselves under conditions closer to production environments. This makes future features more relevant and of higher quality.
Umbraco is known for its great editor experience and speed, and judging from the incredible submissions to this year’s Umbraco Awards, our experienced partners keep raising the bar.
But there’s also another side of the coin of flexibility. A solution built by an inexperienced developer or under budget constraints can sometimes mean that the editor experience is under par or the site grinds to a halt.
With Umbraco Uno, we want to continuously help raise the bar for Umbraco websites. With Uno becoming the foundation for the free trials on umbraco.com, it’ll also give people a fantastic first impression of what’s possible with Umbraco and how great the editor experience can be.
Hopefully, it’ll help put positive pressure on the quality of the custom implementations of Umbraco so the next Umbraco Awards will be even more impressive - and perhaps most importantly, that fewer end-clients will experience and accept a poorly designed editor experience.
So let us know what your first impression is (product@umbraco.com) and help us raise the bar for Umbraco websites:
P.S. Like all our products, Uno will keep improving. For information about the further development of Uno, please follow along in our bi-weekly Product Update blog posts and our Product Roadmap.
There’s never been a higher demand for digital business. As a CMS, Umbraco plays a vital role in providing a digital tool that makes it simpler for you to succeed in doing business online. But how can we make Umbraco simpler for more people? Umbraco founder, Niels Hartvig, shares his thoughts about the future steps for Umbraco in order to keep developing software that’s simpler and more democratic - for everyone: