Introducing Umbraco Uno
This week we introduced our brand new SaaS offering, Umbraco Uno.
With the goal of making digital business simpler for everyone, Umbraco Uno will make it fast and easy for everyone to get an Umbraco website up and running on Umbraco Cloud. With the use of themes and widgets, everyone can create a great website without having to write a single line of code.
I’ve got more details below, but make sure you also check out the official launch post with more details and background on the new product from our founder Niels Hartvig.
Let’s take a closer look at what you get with Uno:
Umbraco Themes
With Umbraco Uno, we use Umbraco Themes to pre-populate your new Umbraco project. From launch, we have one theme available which is a built-in collaboration with our friends at the Igloo project. This theme consists of a great website layout, presented with “Unicorn Spa and Hotel” demo content. This demo site contains examples of product presentations, blogs, contact forms etc. The content is easily structured in the backoffice with the help of pre-built widgets enabling you to alter it to your needs and populate it with your content.
The front page of The Unicorn Hotel and Spa demo site.
Content Widgets - structured content
Structuring and building content with Umbraco Uno is made easy with 18 available content widgets to choose from. These include everything from text editing to adding an Instagram feed on your site.
You can use these widgets in an easy fashion when putting together the structure for your individual pages and easily edit their content throughout the lifetime of your website.
Selecting and editing a widget in Uno
Viewing how the widget looks on the front end
What about custom code?
Umbraco is well known for its flexibility enabling Umbraco developers to customize everything in the platform - how does custom code work in Umbraco Uno?
At launch, custom code is not possible. The ambition for Umbraco Uno is to allow for new ways to complete tasks that would previously require low-level code customizations, making Umbraco even simpler and easier to use for everyone. We do however continue to respect the need for full code flexibility and we, therefore, expect to make full customization available soon in a similar fashion like you know today from Umbraco Cloud.
What’s next for Uno?
While Umbraco Uno is powerful at launch, making it possible to complete an Umbraco website without any need for coding, this is just a starting point for the platform. Over time we will be improving Uno with additional features to enhance the editing experience and adding more flexibility for custom needs.
At launch the Roadmap contains the following improvements:
Now:
- Custom Code giving you the ability to use Umbraco Uno as a starting point for a more custom coded project. This will borrow some of the features you know today from Umbraco Cloud while we continue to improve Uno with additional no/low -code functionality.
Next:
- Additional Themes giving you a broader selection of options to choose from in terms of both layout, demo content and widget configuration.
- Improved Widgets with an even more powerful editing experience than you can experience in the launched version, utilizing the upcoming block editor for Umbraco as mentioned on previous Product Update.
- Support for Multilingual Content giving you the ability to build content in several languages for the same website in an easy fashion.
Keep an eye on the public Product Roadmap for details as we move forward with these initiatives and look out for future blog posts for new initiatives coming up.
Take Uno for a free spin
Umbraco Uno is already available as an option when you spin up a new project on Umbraco Cloud, or why not take it for a spin first and test all the features in a free 14 days trial.
We hope you enjoy the new possibilities and we look forward to seeing your fantastic output and getting your feedback on the platform.
.NET Core is next for Umbraco CMS
While we prepare for the next release of Umbraco CMS (8.7) including the new block editor (see the previous Product Update) I wanted to bring your attention to the .NET core development of Umbraco. This project is moving forward as planned and we currently expect to bring an Alpha release to you in Q3 where you can get your first hands-on experience with a backoffice running .NET Core.
If you would like to be part of this project, get in touch with Bjarke and the .NET core community team who are leading the project.
If you are ready to jump into code, I’ve got good news for you! There are several options available on GitHub where there’s also a brand new migration task waiting for some action.
Additional open source projects built by Umbraco
You all know how the CMS is benefitting from the professional cloud services Umbraco has brought to the table over time. But you may not know that we are also delivering open source code outside of the CMS itself.
As part of our efforts working with Umbraco Heartcore we’ve been working on several open source initiatives. An example is a port of NestHydrationJS, allowing conversion of tabular data into a nested object/array structure, to .NET which you can find in our Umbraco GitHub repository.
More information on this project and additional open source initiatives in a later blog post.
That’s a wrap for this product update. There’s too much going on to include it all in one update, but head over to our public Roadmap for more info on work in progress.
Until the next update, reach out on product@umbraco.com for any questions or feedback.
All the best
Jacob Midtgaard-Olesen, Umbraco CTO