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…

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…

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…

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…

E-commerce is a critical part of many websites, but it’s not something that is served by the Umbraco core, instead Umbraco HQ have focussed developer resources on building the CMS product, and developing cloud and headless options. Vendr from Outfield Digital is a new e-commerce package for Umbraco, and we've chosen it for our next major e-commerce project for Nextbase. In a new article for Skrift Paul and Gareth introduce Vendr, compare it against the key competition, and then demonstrate how to build a simple webshop using Vendr.…

Fine grained management of Users’ permissions isn’t an exciting subject for a blog post, but for websites managed by anything more than one or two people, knowing who does what can be critical. We’ve worked on a number of websites and content management systems where Editors bemoan how locked down the system is, and as a result everyone uses the same super-user login. But with a little thought and effort, tweaking the permissions settings in Umbraco can mean that the right people can do their job with the minimum of effort, and still remain compliant with security best practice. Permission…

Onsite or internal search is often a poor relation to other sexier features of a site such as the primary navigation or rich integrations with external systems such as CRM. On average 30% of users will do an onsite search, and doing so is a strong predictor of likelihood to convert (see Moz).  Onsite search is challenging though, internal search engines can never rival Google for quality and accuracy of results - because they can't rely on the many ranking factors that Google uses.  However, the Lucene search engine which forms part of the core of Umbraco does provide a…

With the advent of Umbraco 8.1.0 it is now possible to upgrade a site from a previous version to Umbraco 8.  However, this is by no means an automated process. The new upgrade feature in 8.1.0 works similarly to previous Umbraco upgrades - they upgrade content stored in the database, but don’t provide provision to upgrade custom code written in Templates, Partial Views or Controllers. Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change from Umbraco 7, and so the effort needed to upgrade an existing site shouldn’t be underestimated.  Critically the code used by Umbraco Developers to create Templates, Partials and…

This is the million-dollar question for many businesses that use older versions of the Umbraco CMS.  There are substantial business benefits to Umbraco 8: specifically around improvements to editing features for Multilingual sites; and improvements in site speed introduced by Nucache.  And of course Umbraco 8 has a longer shelf life - the retirement of Umbraco has been announced, so while Umbraco 7 continues to be patched for security reasons it isn’t benefiting from future product developments. However, there is a cost to upgrading a site to Umbraco 8.  Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change (hence the major version…

TL;DR For most scenarios yes.  #YMMV Umbraco 8 was launched with much fanfair in Feburary 2019, and as with most software there were some initial teething troubles which were quickly fixed.  But with 6 months passing, we began to wonder was Umbraco 8 ready for use in production environments. After much research and testing, including a practical Proof of Concept, we feel that without a doubt the core CMS is ready for use for most production scenarios.  However, there are some scenarios where you should be cautious before continuing, and some where Umbraco 8 is not production ready. One area…