Join Lotte, Bjarke, Jacob, and Kenn for an in-depth look at the new features in Umbraco 15.
We're excited to see more large, complex, and content-heavy websites being built with Umbraco. This shows not only how well Umbraco scales with your business, but also how it's capable of handling large-scale projects right from the start!
In this release, we’ve added features that cater to some of these larger scenarios. Your Umbraco CMS now offers more flexibility for supporting multilingual content, managing advanced caching setups, enhanced machine-to-machine integrations, and much more.
And let’s not forget about the content creators! We’ve introduced some exciting new features for them too, including block-level variations and a brand-new rich text editor.
Let’s start out by looking at what this release brings for large websites and the business behind them.
With Umbraco’s new and improved content cache strategy, your website will benefit from faster startup times, greater reliability, and improved load-balancing capabilities. For businesses, this means that after a restart, your site will be up and running in no time, ensuring minimal downtime. You’ll also experience improved performance when dealing with large volumes of content on your website, as the memory of your system is being managed intelligently, preventing slowdowns when memory resources are stretched.
One of the biggest changes in Umbraco’s cache strategy is the shift from an eager content cache, where all content is cached all the time, to a more efficient lazy-loaded content cache. Now, your primary content - defined by the new cache seeding feature - is preloaded at startup, ensuring your key pages are always ready. Secondary content is fetched as needed, reducing memory strain and keeping your site fast and efficient, even with a huge amount of content!
Diagram showing Umbraco's NuCache setup from version 8 to 14. INuCache uses an eager-loading approach, where all content is loaded into memory at startup. This ensures fast access to content but can result in slower startup times, especially for large content-heavy sites, and high memory usage.
For businesses with high-traffic websites, this new content caching strategy also supports more effective content load balancing. By distributing requests for information across multiple servers, your site can efficiently manage high-volume traffic. This is especially crucial for e-commerce platforms or extensive content sites, where a single server may struggle.
Umbraco 15 introduces a lazy-loading caching strategy. Instead of loading all content at startup, only essential content (configured by the developer) is preloaded, while other content is fetched on demand. This reduces memory usage and accelerates startup times, making it more efficient for high-content sites.HybridCache manages content seeding from the Umbraco database to the in-memory content cache and optional 2nd-level distributed cache.
HybridCache optimizes caching by managing both your memory cache - where primary and key content is stored for immediate access - and if needed a distributed second-level cache, serving as a joint cache for all your memory caches. What makes this approach particularly powerful for Umbraco users is that it allows for caching configuration via HybridCache, which determines where, and when to fetch content. This ensures you can prioritize content and control resource usage.
For businesses, creating a scalable, efficient, and consistent content management structure in your Umbraco CMS is key to ensuring long-term success. Whether you’re managing a multilingual website or just working with a few language variants, maintaining consistency across pages can be a challenge - but it’s essential for delivering a cohesive brand experience across regions.
That’s where Block Level Variations come in. This powerful new feature allows you to configure a consistent block editor structure across all language variations, ensuring consistency and simplifying content management across multiple languages, ultimately boosting productivity.
With Block Level Variants, the need to painstakingly recreate content structures for each language version is eliminated. Instead of manually adjusting each block of content for every language variant, you now have a tool that allows you to maintain a consistent block editor structure across all language versions, and you can easily vary the property values of individual blocks, giving you the flexibility to adjust specific blocks while retaining the same foundational layout. Whether you’re managing two languages or twenty-seven, this ensures a seamless and unified experience for your website visitors, while also making your website easier to maintain and update.
What’s more, when you make changes - whether adding, moving, or deleting blocks - they will be automatically applied across all languages. This saves time, reduces manual effort, and ensures that your pages are always in sync, delivering a consistent experience for users across different regions. And it’s all configurable - so you can get the balance between granular control and efficient guideline adherence, just right.
Integrating Umbraco CMS with other systems and automating API-driven workflows is now simpler than ever, thanks to the new client credentials support for system-to-system communication.
Instead of relying on manual password entries, your systems can now authenticate securely using client credentials through an officially supported API. This new feature removes the need for manual processes, enabling you to automate workflows, reduce friction, boost operational efficiency, and strengthen security in your integrations with Umbraco’s Delivery- and Management APIs.
Client credentials are available via an API user for both Users and Members in Umbraco, making it easier to manage and secure headless operations and unlock even more value from Umbraco CMS.
The default Rich Text Editor (RTE) in Umbraco is now based on Tiptap! A popular open-source text editor framework, with an impressive amount of freedom and flexibility to craft the RTE experience you need.
What does this mean for editors? In short: almost nothing will change. We’ve designed the new RTE to closely resemble the previous RTE (based on TinyMCE), ensuring that the transition for your team and business is as smooth as possible.
Built from the ground up for Umbraco 15, the new rich text editor gave us the opportunity to revisit how the RTE should work from implementation, configuration, and editing perspectives. It offers all the features you're accustomed to, along with some great improvements. The configuration has been improved and modernized, which is probably the most immediately notable change.
Simply drag and drop the tools you need into the editor toolbar. The new RTE toolbar comes with two extension points: One for media uploads and another for toolbar customization, giving you the flexibility to extend the RTE as your content creators request.
You might be wondering why we're making this change. The current version of TinyMCE (version 6) that we've been using is still under an acceptable license for us to include in Umbraco. However, we are unable to upgrade to TinyMCE version 7 due to a licensing change that doesn't align with our open-source model. Additionally, TinyMCE 6 is now end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives updates or support. Continuing to use an unsupported editor isn't a viable solution for anyone.
This situation presented us with an opportunity to find an editor that aligns closely with Umbraco's ethos. Tiptap's product philosophy is very similar to ours: robust core functionality with powerful extensibility—a great fit. The Tiptap RTE allows for advanced features and customization, making it a highly flexible tool for us at Umbraco HQ and the entire Umbraco ecosystem to build upon. The future looks rich! 😉
For those still using the TinyMCE editor, don't worry - it is still included in Umbraco 15. And here's some more great news: TinyMCE has partnered with our Umbraco Gold Partner, ProWorks, to develop a package that will brings TinyMCE's functionality into future versions of Umbraco. The TinyMCE Umbraco Premium package is available through the Umbraco Marketplace, allowing you to continue using TinyMCE if you prefer. They are aiming to launch further updates before the release of Umbraco 16 in June 2025.
We’re also happy to announce that Umbraco 15, as of today, is available on Umbraco Cloud. That means you get the latest version of the CMS pre-installed and ready to go at the click of a button.
And there are also new version 15 releases of Umbraco's suite of commercial products. These are mostly focused on ensuring compatibility with Umbraco 15 and technical clean-up. In particular, we've followed the CMS pattern of utilizing more asynchronous code, internally within Commerce, Deploy, and Forms and exposed via their APIs.
Umbraco UI Builder was just released for Umbraco 14 earlier this week and is ready for Umbraco 15 as well. Umbraco Commerce is out as a release candidate for Umbraco 15 and will be available when the testing is done.
There are some feature updates that if you are up to date with 13 and 14 releases you'll have already seen, but otherwise will find new in version 15 of the products.
Features for Forms in the 14.2 release include enhancements for multi-page forms, form picker improvements, and the ability to provide themes in a Razor Class Library. You can read about these and other features included in the release here.
The Deploy 14.2 release candidate included more options for exporting and importing content and schema and it’s all summarized here.
Finally, the recent 14.1 release for Workflow added improved support for approving segmented content, content locking options, and a background queue to optimize notification email sending.
We just launched the latest add-on, Umbraco Engage, delivering analytics, 360° profiling, personalization, and more, directly in the backoffice. We’re working on updating Umbraco Engage to utilize the new backoffice and are aiming to ship an Umbraco 15 compatible version in early 2025.
We've updated and expanded our documentation to help you make the most of Umbraco 15's new features and enhancements. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with Umbraco, the guides and tutorials are here to support you:
Tutorial: Extending the Help Menu: Customize the backoffice help menu to include your own resources, making it easier for your team to access important information directly within Umbraco.
Running Umbraco in Docker using Docker Compose: Learn how to set up Umbraco 15 in a Docker environment using Docker Compose, enabling consistent development setups and streamlined deployments.
Creating a Custom Seed Key Provider: Dive into advanced caching strategies by creating a custom seed key provider, allowing you to optimize content loading and improve site performance.
Cache Settings: Explore the new caching configurations, understand how to fine-tune settings, and make the most of the lazy-loaded content cache to enhance your site's responsiveness.
Cache Seeding: Get acquainted with cache seeding, a feature that lets you preload essential content at startup, ensuring your most important pages are always ready for your users.
API Users: Discover how to set up API users for secure system-to-system communication, streamlining integrations and automating workflows with the Management and Delivery APIs.
External Access: Learn how to configure external access to the Management API, enabling remote interactions with your Umbraco installation while maintaining robust security.
Rich Text Editor: Explore the new Tiptap-based Rich Text Editor, including how to configure it and extend its capabilities to meet your content editing needs.
Rich Text Editor Extensions: Learn how to enhance the Tiptap Rich Text Editor in Umbraco 15 by adding custom tools and extensions. This guide covers configuration options for extending the editor’s functionality, allowing you to create a tailored editing experience that meets your team’s specific content needs.
Block Level Variance: Understand how to implement block-level variations to streamline multilingual content management and maintain consistency across language versions.
API Members (Server-to-Server Access): Learn how to authenticate and interact with member-protected content using server-to-server communication, enhancing your site's security and functionality.
Umbraco 15 is a Standard-term Support (STS) version and has shorter support than Umbraco 13 which is the current Long-term Support (LTS) version. For more details on STS vs LTS refer to the Support Lifecycle page, and for details on features available and considerations for new and existing projects see the version-specific upgrades and the new content migration article linked below.
Migrating Content to Umbraco 15: This guide provides step-by-step instructions for migrating content from previous versions of Umbraco to Umbraco 15. Learn best practices for a smooth migration process, including tools and techniques for transferring data, handling compatibility issues, and taking advantage of the new features in Umbraco 15.
By embracing the latest advancements in .NET 9 and Umbraco 15 enhanced capabilities, you’ll ensure that your website and applications are not only up-to-date but also optimized for performance, scalability, and user experience.
Get started quickly:
Spin up a project on Umbraco Cloud: One-click setup and hosting of Umbraco projects. Take a trial or sign in on Umbraco Cloud.
Download Umbraco 15: The latest version of Umbraco is available on Nuget
Explore the documentation: Our comprehensive documentation for Umbraco 15 will guide you through the basics as well as new features, tutorials, and more.
Why Upgrade?
Enhanced Performance: Experience faster startup times and improved responsiveness with the new lazy-loaded content cache.
Greater Flexibility: Enjoy powerful new features like Block Level Variations and the Tiptap Rich Text Editor.
Stay Secure and Supported: Keep your site secure and benefit from the latest updates and support by using the most recent version.
Ready for the new features: In the upcoming minor releases for Umbraco 15 you’ll get access to new clipboard features, keyboard shortcuts, and much more. Note that Umbraco 15.1 will ship two weeks earlier, on December 12, 2024, due to the holiday period.
Don't miss out on the opportunity to enhance your website with the latest technology. Start using Umbraco 15 today! If you want a tour, and see how Umbraco can help you pick a time and let's have a chat:
Umbraco 15 delivers key updates to streamline development, especially for larger content-driven sites. With a new rich text editor UI, client credential support, and improvements like hybrid caching and block-level variants, this release is focused on enhancing performance and flexibility. Developers can also expect upgraded dependencies, including .NET 9, and several experimental features worth exploring.