Umbraco 8: What We're Most Excited About

If your website is on the Umbraco CMS (dubbed "The Friendly CMS" by Umbraco HQ and validated by being Microsoft's #1 open source installation), you've by now no doubt heard about Umbraco 8 - the freshly released latest and greatest in Umbraco versions! Lots of exciting things are on the way for Umbraco in 2019 (should be a pretty Umbraco 8 heavy Codegarden!), and to share in the excitement, our office full of Umbraco Masters and nerds wanted to share with you what we are most excited about in Umbraco 8! Here we go!

Variants

It's 2019 and these days it's no secret - consumers and website visitors want a browsing experience that is relevant to their specific needs and search intent. In fact, according to a study conducted by Infosys in 2017, 31% of consumers wish their shopping experience was far more personalized than it currently is, while the 2021 State of Personalization Report found that 45% of those surveyed expressed less interest in purchase from a brand if they have an impersonal experience. A quick couple of other key findings include:

• 44% are likely to become a repeat buyer after a good personal experience
• 37% will be less likely to make a purchase from a brand if they get information wrong about them

Pretty telling stuff. How does Umbraco 8 help here? With the introduction of Variants. Variants allow properties of content on your website to change based on a set of rules about your visitors and their behaviors. For instance, you can show different pieces of content based on rules like:

• Language
• Location
• Campaign
• Channels

And more!

Bottom line: Variants allow you to provide your website visitors with a more relevant and personalized browsing experience that leads to higher website engagement, including leads and sales.

Infinite Editing

Ever spend a lot of your time and (slowly boiling over) patience clicking around your CMS to edit a piece of content or media (like an image) that lives on a page, only to have to click all the way back to the page you were just editing afterward? Umbraco 8 is going to change that with the introduction of Infinite Editing. Infinite Editing is a frictionless editing experience that allows you to edit pieces of content and media in once place without clicking around your CMS, costing you time and sanity. This means you can be editing a page on your website, click on a piece of content or media on that page, make specific changes to right there in your window (which are then effective across the website), and get back to creating or editing your page!

Here's a great explainer video from Umbraco:

Bottom line: Infinite Editing gives you the ability to edit pieces of content and media without losing your place in the Umbraco CMS, reducing time spent clicking around trying to find content and media, and putting your time where it matters most - creating great content that engages and converts your website visitors, all in one place.

Content Apps

In the most simple of terms, Content Apps are a new feature in Umbraco 8 where a website owner or content editor can add a tab to a piece of content or media items in the editing interface of Umbraco. These tabs allow you to create tabs, or apps, that are specific to the piece of content or media item that they live on. These apps can be anything you want them to be. Here's a screenshot from a great blog post at Codeshare called What are Content Apps in Umbraco v8:

In this blog post, you'll also see a few potential ideas for Content Apps:

• Scratch pads
• Site previews
• Live chats
• Search results

Now, all of these ideas are just a few of the things that Content Apps could potentially do for you, but it's important to remember that whatever you create Content Apps for that you're doing so in a useful and helpful way, and not just creating apps for the sake of apps.

Here's a great explainer video from Paul Seal: