Codegarden 2023 Recap

Hey everyone! Kyle here at Marcel Digital. We just wrapped up Codegarden 2023 and we have a few updates for you.

This year there is a big emphasis on the new back office set to be released in Umbraco 14 around this time next year. The new office is going to be built on web components, replacing AngularJS. And, the good part about this is it should future-proof the back office for years to come and also let developers bring their own front-end frameworks when they’re building packages for Umbraco. 

Although there is a lot of talk about Umbraco 14 and the new back office, we also have Umbraco 12 around the corner, and with Umbraco 12 they will be releasing the content delivery API which will allow you to access your content via APIs which will give you back in JSON which is very helpful for single page applications or multi-channel implementations. We’re also going to get an implementation of Entity Framework, so if you have any custom database tables within your Umbraco implementation, you will be able to use Entity Framework to set up those migrations or make any queries that you need to do with that data. 

Another great addition to the Umbraco family is Umbraco Workflows. Umbraco Workflows allows you to create approval steps for content. You can assign Umbraco users to those steps so that they can evaluate content for things like compliance or governance, and this is great for larger teams to be able to take a piece of content that somebody writes and run it through all of those steps before going live. 

Another interesting talk that we attended was about a piece of software called Playwright. It was how Umbraco actually uses this for end-to-end testing when making changes to the Umbraco CMS itself, and how we can use it as developers to do front-end development testing, which will actually simulate users clicking around the website and validating that everything looks how it should.

A couple of exciting features coming to Umbraco Cloud in the next year. One will be load-balancing, which will allow for larger website implementations to be deployed to Umbraco Cloud, either within the same region or across multiple regions, so you will be able to deploy a website in the U.S. and in Europe at the same time. Another really great feature is that you will be able to bring your own repository and build processes to Umbraco Cloud, and you will be able to do all those kinds of pieces of work on your own workflow and then push the end result into Umbraco Cloud, into each environment that you’ve set up.

At the end of the day, there were a lot of really talented Umbraco developers and partners all in the same space, all sharing ideas, all finding ways to make Umbraco the most amazing CMS that anybody can use. We were happy to be a part of it, happy to see all of those really creative ideas, and can’t wait to bring them back to the United States of America. It was a really great code garden, thanks for watching, and excited for the next one!