Tell us, Dennis, what’ve you been working on?
Lately, I’ve been working on an Umbraco 9 demo project available on GitHub: https://github.com/Adolfi/UmbracoNineDemoSite. The idea started because I wanted to explore Umbraco 9, see how stable it felt and if it was production-ready but I didn’t have an actual client to try it out on. So what I ended up doing was taking the official Umbraco 8 demo site, the one we all know so well from the Umbraco installer, and rebuild it from scratch using Umbraco 9.
But instead of just copy & pasting the old Umbraco 8 demo site into Umbraco 9, I wanted to take this opportunity and improve a few things such as moving a bunch of logic away from views and into controllers, services, and unit test all the things. I also wanted to make something publicly available instead of just building something for myself. #SharingIsCaring.
The response I’ve got so far from the community has been amazing! ❤️
What’s been your biggest surprise so far while working with Umbraco 9?
My biggest surprise was how stable it feels. I started this project on the beta version, not even the RC, so I was kind of expecting that some things would break or not be working as expected but that has not been the case. It just works! Building this project has been a very pleasant experience.
I’ve now built an entire site in Umbraco 9 and everything I’ve wanted to build worked just as I was expecting it to and I never had to do any workarounds.
So no challenges?
My only real challenge when building this project was the lack of documentation. Since Umbraco 9 was still in beta there was no official documentation available, and not a lot of blog posts or tutorials either, so it felt sometimes like I was coding blindfolded.
Instead, I had to dive into the Umbraco 9 source code and try to find out things for myself which had the pleasant side-effect that I’ve been learning a lot about the inner workings and architecture of Umbraco 9. While doing so I’ve been trying to write as much as possible about my Umbraco 9 findings on my blog https://adolfi.dev/ hoping that it may help others in the same situation.
It should be mentioned though that the documentation has caught up since I started with the beta version and there is actually quite a lot of documentation available now at https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Umbraco9Articles.
What do you see as the main benefits of Umbraco 9?
Wow, where should I start? Being able to host Umbraco on Linux containers and reduce server costs, or the fact that I don't have to spin up a virtual machine but instead, I can code on my Mac feels amazing. Unit Testing feels a lot easier which is something I appreciate greatly. It’s faster, smaller sized and everywhere you look the code feels optimized and improved.
When released, do you see yourself using Umbraco 9 as your main version for upcoming projects?
Definitely! All and all, everything feels better with Umbraco 9 and I don't see any reason for starting a new project on the older version. I’m looking forward to starting my next Umbraco project on version 9 and I hope a lot of my existing clients will upgrade shortly.
