OUR BLOG

The Umbraco ecosystem has seen an unprecedented amount of change in the past few years. Changes in ownership of the platform, has injected capital and changed ways of working so we are now seeing a regular release cadence for the core CMS. This brings great benefits, like new features and better support for the underlying Microsoft .NET platform. But, as a Marketing Manager or project sponsor, it can be difficult to know which version of Umbraco you should use right now. Should new projects be built on the latest version of Umbraco, or should you chose the latest Long Term…

Integrating Umbraco with other systems can bring numerous benefits to your organization. Some of these benefits include improved efficiency, enhanced collaboration, better data management, increased security, and greater flexibility. Traditionally integrating Umbraco with other systems typically required the expertise of a developer or IT professional with experience in both Umbraco and the other systems you were integrating with. But more recently Umbraco has released a number of out-of-box integrations that can integrate with leading CRM and marketing system. So the specific skills and experience needed may vary depending on the complexity of the integration project. Overall, it is important to…

Last week I wrote a LinkedIn post about ChatGPT and how it could soon replace me in my role as a marketer, copywriter and technical sales person.  But how practical was that idea?  I've spent the intervening week trying to use ChatGPT in my everyday work life, and I'll share some observations about why I think it's ready for the mainstream. What is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is a cutting-edge natural language processing technology - a form of Artificial Intelligence - developed by OpenAI. It uses a powerful deep learning algorithm to generate human-like responses to text-based queries in a conversational manner.…

When developing a new website or making a major amendment to a site, a key decision that needs to be made is which version of Umbraco to use.  While this is a technical decision, we think that this has to be a business made by the client. Now more than ever this is a complex decision.  Just this week we’ve seen Umbraco Partners on the horns of a dilemma – they started a project a year ago on Umbraco 8, and now the site is ready to launch the client is asking why it is not on Umbraco 9.  With…

Azure is our preferred platform for secure, reliable and scalable hosting of Umbraco base websites, but for many clients it can be challenging to budget for, as one size definitely doesn’t fit all, and so pricing can vary quite considerably. The Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator can help, as it enables you to model the costs of different Azure components but it does require technical expertise to build the right model. In this article we’ll look at some of the factors affecting the price of Azure hosting for Umbraco. Simple single instance hosting The simplest Use Case for Umbraco hosting on…

There are lots of options when it comes to hosting an Umbraco site, and considering the benefits of website hosting infrastructure isn’t the most exciting subject for many Marketing Managers, it’s important to ensure that you have hosting that meets your needs. In this post we’ll take a look at 5 of the most common hosting platforms available for Umbraco. Umbraco agency managed hosting platforms Many specialist Umbraco agencies and Gold Partners provide their own managed hosting platform.  This can provide you with a one stop solution for your hosting needs, taking away the headaches associated with setting up your…

The start of October saw the release of Umbraco 8.8 offering both developers and content editors improved accessibility with a host of new features and developments. Here we take a look at what you can expect from the latest version.  Cropping images to the Grid Umbraco 8.7 introduced a game changer with the Block List Editor - a new tool for editing flexible grid-based layouts now commonplace in modern responsive design. Version 8.8 builds on this by using the Grid Media Picker but with added functionality allowing cropping and previewing of images directly in Grid Layouts. This means that Content…

Today saw the production release of a significant new version of Umbraco CMS.  Umbraco 8.7 releases a number of much anticipated new features for the .NET based CMS, including a new Block List Editor, segmentation of content as well as many performance improvements and bug fixes. Block List Editor The Block List Editor is a new tool for editing flexible grid-based layouts which are now commonplace in modern responsive design.  Whereas in earlier versions of Umbraco we have used a number of external packages, including Stacked Content and DocType Grid Editor, it is now possible for us to design editing…

Website performance is critical to all our clients at Carbon Six Digital, and we work hard to simulate and monitor real world performance during development, then we setup monitoring tools to make sure that we maintain great performance in production. In this article on monitoring website performance for Umbraco HQ our Technical Project Manager Alex discusses some of the tools and techniques we use to ensure that websites we build are highly performant, and stay that way.…

For a recent article in Skrift magazine, Gareth and Paul spent time, comparing and contrasting the different Umbraco ecommerce packages for version 8. Traditionally on Umbraco 7 brands have been left to integrate Umbraco with an off-platform solution such as Shopify, or to use one of three third-party Umbraco packages, Tea Commerce, UCommerce and Merchello. There are substantial differences between each of them, but chiefly Tea Commerce and UCommerce were paid-for proprietary systems and Merchello open source. With the launch of Umbraco 8 and it’s substantially rewritten API, a lot of work was required by most package vendors to enable…