What's Umbraco 9?
Umbraco 9 is the upcoming version of the open-source Umbraco CMS. This version is a migration of the entire Umbraco codebase from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core (and .NET 5). The targeted release date is September 28th, 2021.
Learn more about the Umbraco 9 project right here.
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.
Author bio:
Dennis Adolfi has been an active member of the Umbraco community for many years writing numerous blog posts, tutorials, contributing to the source code, hosting and speaking at public events, teaching and helping out in the forum. For these contributions, he has been awarded 3x MVP (Most Valuable Person) in 2021, 2020, and 2016.
A true #H5YR-star ⭐️ !
Like Dennis, do you want to get a head start with Umbraco 9?
As you can tell from Dennis’ story above, there’s no need to wait until the final release to get yourself acquainted with Umbraco 9.
The Umbraco 9 Release Candidate is out now and currently in its second version (psst… rumor has it that RC3 will be out tomorrow and that it’s going to be tab-tastic 😉 ).
Go download the Umbraco Release Candidate here - and as Dennis mentions, go and check out the official Umbraco 9 Documentation to help you get started.
