Umbraco update: From the release of Umbraco 15 to the launch of Umbraco Engage
Last week we attended the Umbraco partner event in London. This proved to be a great place to learn about what’s coming up with Umbraco, meet people from Umbraco HQ and reflect on the changes that are happening on the platform.
Umbraco’s recent evolution has been something to admire. While Umbraco has successfully continued to grow – adding a range of additional features to help it compete in the market – it has still been able to maintain its core USPs of being a CMS that’s really easy to use and having a lively and supportive professional development community.
In this latest Umbraco blog, we cover some of the latest updates from the platform, both from the partner event and recent news.
- Launch of Umbraco Engage
Umbraco includes a number of “add-ons” which extend the power of the CMS with additional capabilities that bring the platform closer to a DXP. Most of the add-ons are the result of acquiring Umbraco partners who have products that are already being used by the community. The latest of these to launch is Umbraco Engage, which is basically a rebranding and upgrade of the existing UMarketingSuite product which was acquired in the Summer.
Umbraco Engage brings analytics, customer profiling, A/B testing and personalisation to Umbraco and will appeal to marketers, particular from larger enterprises. 3chillies was already an UmarketingSuite reseller and it is great to see this now supported by Umbraco HQ. Umbraco Engage can be used on Umbraco 13 and will be upgraded to compatibility with the new backoffice on the release of Umbraco 15. Existing UMarketingSuite users will have to do a little work to upgrade, but there is documentation available. Of course, this is something we can help you with.
- Umbraco appoint Matt Persson as CEO
It didn’t really make headline news, but back in August Umbraco appointed Matt Persson as new CEO, with the new tenure starting in September. Persson has a seasoned technology sector track record having worked at companies including IBM and Adform. We were able to meet Matt at the Umbraco partner event in London and here what he had to say. The appointment doesn’t feel like it will herald a change of strategic direction, but Persson’s experience will help continue to steer Umbraco further on the growth path that started with the injection of funds from Nordics technology investor Monterro.
- Umbraco’s product strategy update
At the Umbraco Codegarden event in June Umbraco’s CTO Filip Bech-Larsen gave a keynote product strategy update, where he talked about four “lighthouses” that are guiding the future of the platform; search, personalisation, generative AI and orchestration. Since then, Bech-Larsen has written a blog post which explores this future strategy in more detail and includes some interesting insights.
Bech-Larsen certainly seems less enthusiastic about generative AI compared to other providers like Sitecore who have put AI at their centre of their roadmap. Bech-Larsen not only acknowledges the “trough of disillusionment” and AI’s unacceptable carbon footprint, but suggests AI is only good for the 15% on top of the CMS. The strategy or AI and Umbraco looks like it is still being thought through, but fundamentally will be more about supporting AI through APIs so organisations can bring-their-own-AI into the platform.
Since the update, the personalisation capabilities within Umbraco have already been increased through the launch of Umbraco Engage, but Bech-Larsen also acknowledges that AI can be used to make personalisation more scalable.
For orchestration, Bech-Larsen says he sees a need for a “dedicated orchestration product” that “allows for the promises of composable DXP to finally be a reality.” Although he doesn’t give much more away than this, he also remarks that orchestration should be “dealt with in a low-code SaaS way.” He also says that is also important that orchestration covers the experience for content editors within the CMS so they can have one focused editing experience.
Finally on search, Bech-Larsen says the future of search in Umbraco has two faces. The first is more support for structured search across multiple sources, not only for users but also for editors. The second is AI-powered search, which has a range of interesting possibilities. While no other details are given, one future roadmap item mentioned at the partner conference is support for integrating external search providers into Umbraco.
- The Umbraco 15 release candidate is with us
At the partner event there was some coverage of the upcoming Umbraco 15 which will be publicly released in November, although the release candidate is already with us. Umbraco 15 is not a long-term supported release but does include a number of new features, most of which have been mentioned in previous roadmap updates. Three of the major components of the new release is an updated rich text editor, block level variants and lazy loaded caching. The latter two will appeal more to larger enterprises with more complex digital footprints.
Umbraco 15 includes a new alternative AI for the rich text editor (RTE). This is being introduced partly because of a licensing change with TinyMCE, which the last editor was based upon. The new RTE, based on TipTap, does include better support for copy and pasting from Word or Google Docs.
Block level variants is essentially a way for editors of multi-lingual sites to manage blocks of content that are translated into different languages. Blcok lists or block grids of content maintains its structure, but can be more easily customised for each language.
Umbraco 15’s support for lazy loaded content caching allows for more efficient caching for large sites with extensive content. The lazy load means that not all content is cached at the same time; instead, a smaller amount is cached during start-up, with the rest coming on-demand and staying in the cache for shorter periods. This means less take up of space for memory and also faster load times.
- There’ s even more on the product roadmap to come in 2025
Umbraco certainly never rests on its laurels and at the partner event we got some of the details on what’s coming up in 2025. Umbraco 16, which is due for release around June, will include support for containerization and reusable content, amongst other features. The different product add-ons including Deploy, Workflow and Commerce will also get some attention.
There is also some a swathe of improvements coming to Umbraco Cloud, including most significantly:
- the introduction of load balancing to support better performance
- support for continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/ CD) flow which allows for a more efficient and automated approach to deployment.
Both these again are features that will make Umbraco Cloud potentially more attractive to larger organisations who want to ensure there is an optimised performance for visitors, and also follow a more robust DevOps approach in the background.
2025 will be another good year for Umbraco
We’re sure 2025 is going to be another great year for Umbraco. It feels like there is quite a lot upcoming on the roadmap, but also for the longer term too. Umbraco continues to feel like a viable choice for organisations of all sizes, and we’re excited to keep on working with the platform.
If you’d like to discuss any of the above points or a potential Umbraco project, then get in touch!
