SaM Solutions Visited Umbraco Codegarden 2022 in Denmark

On June 15–17, 2022, SaM Solutions participated in Umbraco Codegarden in Odense, Denmark, which was held with the aim to share knowledge on the latest trends in the technology. This year, the participants could take part in the event either offline or online. Read on to learn more.

Event Overview

Codegarden is a unique conference for an active Umbraco community to gather, share and improve their skills. For more than ten years, this has been an exclusive opportunity for the experts of Umbraco technology to tell the community about innovations in the industry, recent changes and upgrades.

Participation in the event is an opportunity to take part in the multitude of activities such as connecting with fellow Umbraco developers, building new contacts, learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge and sharing expertise. With a lively and friendly vibe, the event is a great opportunity to grow one’s professional network, discuss technical problems, interact with Umbraco colleagues and find inspiration for future endeavors.

Source: Umbraco.com

Umbraco is a free CMS available as open-source software that helps engineers create flexible, secure and scalable solutions varying from small applications to large sophisticated websites. The most notable characteristic of Umbraco is its user-friendliness, which allows quick and easy management of the system.

Along with the CMS, the company offers Umbraco Uno, Umbraco Heartcore and Umbraco Cloud solutions. At the moment, there are more than 700,000 websites using Umbraco, and the active community of users amounts to around 200,000 loyal adherents who always strive to make valuable contributions and improve the quality of the software.

Codegarden 2022 was an outstanding event, which helped us acquire new experience in Umbraco and hone our expertise. In addition to upgrading our skills in the technology, we also got acquainted with Danish culture and humor, learned numerous jokes about the Easter Bunny, and discovered that Shakespeare’s story about Hamlet is based on real events that took place in Denmark.

We were glad to see a venue full of people who are interested in this technology and support its further enhancement. It’s nice to realize how large the community is, how many people from all over the world work on it, develop it, help each other and share the knowledge.

Insights from Umbraco Developers

During the conference, Umbraco developers shared their vision of product development for the upcoming five years. Among the most impressive plans are the ambitions to:

• become the number #1 cloud CMS in the world
• ensure the growth and development of the Umbraco community
• increase the number of websites using Umbraco to two million
• provide technical support for all regions of the world 24/7/365
• improve the API and carry out a complete update of the backoffice
• develop the UI component library and add Headless features for all products.

Besides, there are plans to transform the CMS into a full-fledged DXP system, while still maintaining Umbraco use for free for small- and medium-sized projects.

Also, the concept of Umbraco remains a symbiosis of commercial cloud and open source solutions. Features implemented in cloud solutions are also later implemented in free solutions and everyone benefits from it as the product becomes better.

A new LTS master version of Umbraco 10 was introduced. It runs on Dot Net 6.0, ASP.NET Core 6 and C# 10 — the latest version to date. Additional support for a new type of SQLite database was introduced as well, which is great for small projects. All these changes make Umbraco the ultra-modern CMS today, which supports all the features of the C# language, being cross-platform and able to run in a container.

Many libraries used by Umbraco have been updated. The structure of the project has been changed, and plenty of files and folders have been moved outside of it, making the project cleaner and clearer. The following substantial features were added: history cleanup, item relations, two-factor authentication, external logins for members, telemetry.

A new approach to the updates was also presented. From this time onward, a minor version will be released every six weeks, and a major version every six months. This is an important announcement as it will make it more convenient to upgrade between versions — there will be fewer changes, so planning for an upgrade will be easier.

Moreover, the update of Umbraco will be tied to the update of .NET, which also releases a major version every six months. This means that the product will not become obsolete and will support all the latest features of both .NET and C#.

Reports of the Speakers

At Codegarden 2022, many speakers devoted their presentations to the additional extensions for Umbraco. Products such as Heartcore (Headless CMS), Umbraco Deploy (used for transferring/restoring data), Umbraco Form (service for creating forms) and Umbraco Cloud can make product development easier. These products are constantly updated, are well-supported, extremely user-friendly and, moreover, they have an amazing look.

There were also speakers from the community who have developed their own packages, many of which are alternatives to the paid solutions. The developer of the well-known packages uSync and Starter Kit also delivered a speech. uSync is a package that provides an alternative to Umbraco deploy. It is used to transfer content between environments. The speaker shared his insights into developing one’s own extensions, and provided useful statistical data on the topic.

I was excited by reports about the implementation of Blazor component and deploying Umbraco with the help of Docker and Azure. We are currently deploying an Umbraco project in Azure using containerization. The tips in the reports were very helpful. It was interesting to learn about options for implementing Blazor — when and how to do it, and when not to.

Since Umbraco is part of the .NET ecosystem, some speakers presented the latest features of the language in addition to the latest Microsoft developments. Speakers also devoted time to talking about the soft skills developers need to have.

They shared their views on how building habits can make you a better developer, how to improve your code using the documentation, on the difference between process and goals; they discussed how a systematic approach often leads to a better result, and talked in detail about how productive habits can be obvious, attractive and satisfying.

I liked the conference and the speakers very much. I hope Umbraco continues to grow and thrive, that it remains the same fast, flexible and stable CMS it is now, and that all the ambitious plans of the developers come true.