The Umbraco Roadmap

Managing content at scale can be a headache, especially when keeping it in sync. Elements will allow editors to create content once and reuse it across as many pages as needed, instead of having content replicated on a per-page basis. Elements can serve as a single source of truth, enabling editors to manage content updates at speed and with confidence. This is ideal for footers, call-to-action blocks, banners, and other shared content that appears across multiple pages.

Elements will be introduced as a new content type in the backoffice, alongside documents, media, and members. They'll be managed from a dedicated section with their own tree, where editors can create elements at the root or organise them into folders. The experience will feel familiar to anyone working with documents today, including support for variants, versions, and caching. Elements have no templates or routable URLs of their own, they're designed to be embedded into other content rather than served as standalone pages.

To make it easy to reference elements from existing content, we're also introducing a new element picker property type, which works much like the content picker but is scoped specifically to elements.

Target release: Q2 2026, supporting Umbraco 18+

We’re introducing a new search abstraction layer as a separate package, designed to make it easier to integrate your preferred search providers with Umbraco. This new layer will enable flexible, developer-friendly search solutions, supporting both backoffice content search and server-side website search. 

The package will ship with example implementations to help developers connect Umbraco with external search engines such as Elasticsearch. By releasing the abstraction as a standalone package, we can deliver improvements and updates independently of core CMS releases, allowing for faster iteration based on community feedback.

We expect to include the abstraction into Umbraco at some point in the 18 to 21-cycle of releases. See the The Future of Search RFC for more information.

Target release: Q2 2026, supporting Umbraco 17+

We plan to gradually transition Umbraco’s data access layer from NPoco to Microsoft Entity Framework Core (EF Core). EF Core is a widely adopted and well-known Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) in the .NET ecosystem, and moving to it will make Umbraco’s data access layer more familiar and approachable for many developers.

As part of this process, services and repositories will be aligned with modern .NET patterns, including async/await throughout and more consistent use of identifiers.

This is a large change that will aim to deliver in smaller, incremental steps. We’ll introduce these refactorings a vertical slice at a time, implementing end-to-end from controller to database.

The long-term goal is to have all core services and repositories fully async and backed by EF Core, replacing NPoco across the platform.

Target release: Q4, 2026, supporting Umbraco 19+

We’re bringing the power of Umbraco MCP to editors in a more targeted, workflow focused way. The Editor MCP provides a narrow, purpose-built set of AI capabilities designed for editorial and content teams, fully hosted by Umbraco and ready to use without any setup or developer involvement.

The Editor MCP is optimised for real content tasks, such as drafting, rewriting, translating, analysing, improving SEO, generating metadata, and working with media, all without technical steps or configuration. The Editor MCP is optimised to handle all underlying steps in one action, instead of requiring multiple technical commands like “get content by ID”, “update property,” and “save node”. Instead, editors simply describe what they need, and the MCP handles the entire process behind the scenes. Examples of editor prompts include:

• “Create a new landing page for our autumn campaign, draft the hero copy, and pull in the latest product images from the media library.”

• “Rewrite this page to match our tone-of-voice guidelines and generate a meta description under 150 characters.”

• “Review this page, highlight potential accessibility issues, and fix any missing or weak alt text.”

• “Translate this page to Spanish and adapt culturally sensitive phrases for a Latin American audience.”

The result is a powerful, approachable AI assistant that feels natural, secure, and fully integrated with Umbraco (roles and permissions) — enabling editors to get high-quality results quickly without needing technical knowledge.

Target Release: Q2 2026, supporting Umbraco 17+

We’re building a base implementation for MCP to help developers and Umbraco Partners get started faster when connecting Umbraco to external AI tools and agents. Instead of rebuilding the same foundations for every project, teams can start from a proven, opinionated template that reflects best practices for working with Umbraco.

The base implementation provides a consistent structure, patterns, and examples that make Umbraco easier for AI systems to understand,  whether you’re building developer-focused tooling or editor-facing workflows. With ready-made project structure, guidance, and testing baked in, new MCP servers start production-ready by design, reducing time to first value while improving quality, consistency, and long-term maintainability.

The result: less boilerplate, fewer surprises, and a faster path from idea to working AI-powered solutions on top of Umbraco.

Target Release: Q2, 2026, supporting 17+

Agent Skills are packaged bundles of Umbraco expertise that both developers and AI coding tools can draw on to make better, more consistent decisions when working with the CMS. Content modeling is one of the most critical parts of any Umbraco project, and paradoxically one of the least formally taught, the strategy questions (composition versus inheritance, when tabs add clarity versus noise, how to structure block grids that hold up over time) usually only get answered through years of building, inheriting, and fixing sites.

The Content Modeling Agent Skill turns that lived experience into reusable guidance for shaping content structures that scale, support editorial workflows, and stay maintainable over time.

We're developing this Skill in close collaboration with the Umbraco in AI Community Team throughout 2026, drawing on patterns from Umbraco Partners and practitioners across the ecosystem.

Target Release: Q4, 2026 (not version specific)

Agent Skills are packaged bundles of Umbraco expertise that both developers and AI coding tools can draw on to make better, more consistent decisions when working with the CMS. A lot of Umbraco's hard-won implementation wisdom lives quietly inside agencies and the heads of experienced developers. The Implementation Agent Skill aims to surface those "quiet standards" (patterns for structuring solutions, writing controllers and services, configuring Models Builder, handling composition and dependency injection, and working with Razor, block grids, and block lists in views) and make them accessible to anyone starting or inheriting an Umbraco project.

The scope stays deliberately focused on Umbraco. Adjacent topics like general MVC patterns or front-end frameworks are out of scope, but headless implementation on the Delivery API side (configuration, routing, webhooks, caching) is included, as is a testable-by-design approach to architecture. Skills will be anchored to official documentation wherever possible, so they stay accurate as the platform evolves.

We're building this in close collaboration with the Umbraco in AI Community Team to bring together patterns from across the ecosystem, with work continuing throughout 2026.

Target Release: Q1, 2027, supporting 17+

Umbraco Cloud's load-balancing capabilities help distribute website traffic across multiple servers. This optimizes performance, enhances scalability, and improves the overall user experience, ensuring your site can easily handle high volumes and scale to meet demand.

Target release: June 2026

Umbraco Engage will be extended with MCP capabilities that support both working with Engage data and managing Engage configuration. This includes the ability to create and maintain personas, journey steps, content scoring, goals, segments and A/B tests. The result is a more efficient way for marketers, editors, shop owners and developers to set up, adjust, and automate personalization strategies.

Target release: H1 2026

A new Customer Management area will give you a clear overview of all shoppers interacting with your store. You will be able to review customer details, order history, and engagement patterns in one place. This provides better insights into buying behavior, helps you support customers more efficiently and forms a solid foundation for future features.

Target release: June 2026

The Deploy interface will be updated to offer a clearer and more intuitive workflow for transferring content and schema changes. This includes improved visibility of deployment states, better guidance during conflict resolution, and a more streamlined experience for editors and developers working across environments. The goal is to make deployments easier to understand, faster to execute and more predictable for all users.

Target release: June 2026

Deploy will be improved to allow content transfers even when schema differences exist between environments. This gives editors more flexibility to move content without being blocked by structural changes in progress. The system will provide clear guidance about mismatches and handle transfers safely, helping teams maintain momentum while developers work on updates.

Target release: August 2026

An Audit Trail will be introduced to provide a clear record of deployment activity across environments. This will show who initiated a transfer, what was moved, and when it happened. The improved visibility supports better collaboration, easier troubleshooting, and stronger governance for teams working with multiple environments.

Target release: August 2026

With Ingestion Functions, you can transform webhook payloads into the ingestion format used by Umbraco Compose. This is done using JavaScript snippets that are saved via the Compose Management API. Since these functions are defined as JavaScript, they can be challenging to work with directly. To improve the developer experience, we plan to introduce a dedicated UI for managing ingestion functions, including logs to make iteration and troubleshooting easier.

Target Release: Q2 2026

Building on the introduction of Elements, the next step is bringing them into the Block Editor. Editors will be able to select and reuse elements directly within Block List and Block Grid editors, with shared elements and local blocks living side by side in the same editor. Each block editor data type can be configured to control which approach is allowed, giving developers the flexibility to match the needs of each project.

To keep editorial workflows fluid, editors will be able to convert between local and shared content at any time. A local block can be promoted to a reusable element, adding it to the element library so the same content can be used across the site. A shared element can also be converted back to a local block, breaking the link to the library and allowing the content to be edited just for that page.

Note that only the "content" part of a block can be a shared element; the "settings" part will remain local to each placement.

Improve collaboration for editors working in the Umbraco backoffice. Editors will be able to see when others are active on the same document, helping avoid conflicting changes.

This work also aims to introduce better support for comparing changes and offering options for resolving or merging edits when multiple people work on the same content. The goal is to make team-based editing clearer, safer, and more efficient.

Following the initial release of the search abstraction as a package, we plan to integrate it directly into the core Umbraco CMS. This will make the search abstraction a first-class part of the CMS, simplifying project setup and ensuring consistent support across the platform.

This core integration will make it easier for developers to swap out Examine for an external search engine without needing to install additional packages or manage separate dependencies. Examine will remain the default search provider, but replacing it will be far cleaner and more maintainable.

The integration is expected to be released after Umbraco 17 in a subsequent major release in 2026.

Throughout 2025, we’ve been working with an external accessibility consultant to review editor-facing workflows in the Umbraco backoffice against WCAG standards. Most audited issues have now been resolved and will ship in 17 or 17.1, making day-to-day editing more consistent and predictable, including for users of assistive technologies.

You can track the current accessibility status in our continuously updated Accessibility Conformance Report.

A smaller set of system-level improvements, such as enhanced keyboard movement and support for text spacing, remains in progress and is planned for completion in 2026.

The Content Delivery MCP Server gives LLMs fast, safe, read-only access to your published Umbraco content and media. This means AI tools can understand what’s live on your site, without touching or modifying source data.

Because it works with the Delivery API, AI assistants can retrieve pages, blocks, and media exactly as they appear on the live site, perfect for content-aware features without any editorial risk.

Marketeers can use AI to analyze, search, or understand the site’s content structure, enabling scenarios like:

“Scan all articles and cluster them into topic groups, and suggest a new navigation structure.”

“Generate a structured AEO report for all my pages.”

“Generate a consistency report across descriptions, specs, and imagery for all my products.”

“Scan all media and identify missing alt text or metadata for optimization.”

The read-only surface makes it ideal for content analysis, AI chatbots and assistants, search, and personalisation logic.

As an addition to the AI capabilities in the Umbraco backoffice, we’re exploring automated content workflows, a way to chain together AI actions and rules to support repeatable editorial work. Instead of running AI actions one at a time, teams can define when something should happen and what sequence of steps should follow.

These automated workflows can support a wide range of editorial tasks: structuring and organising newly uploaded media, preparing content for publishing, reviewing structure and tone, keeping content up to date throughout its lifecycle, and much more. 

The goal is to help editors and teams reduce repetitive work, improve consistency, and focus more on content quality, while always keeping humans in the loop where it matters.

Umbraco Engage will be enhanced with additional optimizations for Headless implementations. This builds on the headless capabilities already available today and improves how personalization, A/B testing, tracking, and visitor insights can be used across modern frontend frameworks and custom delivery channels.

Analytics are shown directly in the backoffice on both generic and page level. Want to have custom insights with multiple dimensions in it? Simply connect the reporting API to your dashboard application and create the insight you need.

The extended MCP will make Commerce data more accessible and actionable for marketers, editors, shop owners, and developers. It will support deeper insights into products, customers, orders, and store performance, enabling smoother integrations, better reporting and more efficient day-to-day management of your shop.

Umbraco Forms will gain the ability to use data from logged in Umbraco Members. This makes it possible to prefill fields, personalize form experiences, and link submissions directly to Member profiles. The improvement supports smoother user journeys, reduces friction in form completion, and creates a stronger connection between membership data and form activity.

Umbraco Compose is built with regional hosting in mind. At launch, the infrastructure is hosted in Europe. To better serve our US-based customers and meet data residency requirements, we are introducing a dedicated US region.

We want to provide access to an MCP server for Umbraco Compose to help you create GraphQL queries based on awareness of the domain model via introspection. This will allow you to design advanced GraphQL queries and explore your domain model using natural language in your preferred AI tooling.

Umbraco Cloud will introduce alerting to help you respond quickly when important platform events occur on your project. You will be able to subscribe via email or webhook to alerts such as hostname monitoring failures or Cloudflare DDoS mitigations, and route them into existing tools like Slack. The set of supported events will grow over time based on customer needs.

Allows you to schedule automatic upgrades of Umbraco CMS, Forms and Deploy. You will be given a timeframe in which you can schedule the upgrade to ensure better planning and handling of automatic upgrades.

The Visitor Profile will be enriched with properties like name, email address, organization, and custom properties. These properties can be set by a Form submission, an Umbraco Member registration, an Umbraco Commerce order, or by calling the API.

Umbraco Engage will improve support for client side analytics tracking using a CDN based solution. This will provide a consistent and performant way to collect visitor data for analytics, personalization, and A/B testing. The improvements will reduce implementation effort and ensure tracking can be enabled and maintained with minimal complexity.

We are investigating support for block level and property level variations based on Segments. This would make it possible to personalize specific content blocks or individual properties without creating a full Page Variant. Editors could define alternative content for selected segments directly within the existing page, enabling more flexible personalization and faster experimentation while keeping content management simple.

Support for integrating external product review data will make it possible to display ratings and review summaries directly within your store. This allows you to connect trusted third party review platforms and surface social proof where it matters most. The result is a richer product experience that helps customers make informed decisions and increases conversion potential.

A new Product Recommendation feature will make it easy to present relevant products to shoppers based on behavior, popularity, or curated rules. This helps guide customers toward items they are likely to be interested in and supports increased conversion and average order value.

Umbraco Compose supports multiple environments. In the future, we want to add basic environment synchronization capabilities, allowing you to easily push incremental changes to one environment based on the work already done in another environment.