Exploring the latest Umbraco product update

Umbraco HQ continues to invest in and evolve the Umbraco platform with features that appeal to both developers and marketing teams. The latest  product update from Umbraco HQ is packed with a lot of detail about what has just been implemented, and what is upcoming on the platform. The announcement details not only enhancements for the core platform but also improvements across many of the Umbraco Add-ons too. 
There’s a lot to take in on the product update, so in this post we summarised the main changes and also give some overall thoughts on the changes. Let’s dive and explore what’s new!

Umbraco 15 is now available

We previously covered Umbraco 15 in our last blog update on Umbraco and it includes a number of new features including a new rich-text editor (based on TipTap) which will become the default for Umbraco.  Block-level variants make it easier to add multi-lingual blocks for sites in more than one language, and there’s also new support for lazy loaded content caching which can lead to faster load times on larger sites. Meanwhile the new “Client Credentials” feature supports “improved, authenticated and secure integrations.”

Tweaking the backoffice

One of the major recent upgrades to Umbraco (first introduced in Umbraco 14) was a complete overhaul of the administration experience – known as the backoffice. Inevitably some things fell by the wayside on the roll-out, but these are now being implemented on the roadmap to drive coherence and iron out any issues.  One improvement mentioned is providing load balancing to the backoffice.

Improvements to the new editor

Umbraco 15 introduced the new rich text editor. This already offers better pasting from Word – always welcome for more occasional content contributors who still write their copy there. There are more improvements to come which look like they might be rolled into Umbraco 16 – these include more thorough and robust editing for tables, and also improvements to how custom stylesheets are defined and then implemented across the editor.

Other core CMS improvements

The announcement also reiterates some improvements to the core CMS platform that have been previously announced. These are largely aimed for developers and include:

• Better containerization support (covering both Docker and Kubernetes) to support smoother deployments.
• A new “search abstraction layer” which will enable easier integrations with external search providers and adds improvements around areas such as load balancing.

Improvements to Umbraco Cloud

Umbraco Cloud is Umbraco’s managed and hosted environment and is getting an upgrade with a number of new elements on the roadmap which have the potential to contribute to greater take-up of Umbraco Cloud from larger corporates:

• New support for integration with third-party integration systems for more robust backoffice access, covering Microsoft Entra ID, Google and more.
• A new Management API Security feature which allows IP filtering to be applied to accessing the Umbraco backend, again giving additional security control.
• A built-in Web Application Firewall which offers an additional layer of protection and is automatically added to new projects and can be manually implemented for previous ones.
• CDN caching is now enabled for all websites on Umbraco Cloud.
• The introduction of Hostname Monitoring which will allow better performance monitoring.
• Future support for more flexible environments.

Umbraco Heartcore also gets an upgrade

Umbraco Heartcore is Umbraco’s headless CMS, and this gets a number of additions including:

• A new Persisted Enquires which helps to streamline any queries involving the GraphQL API. Temas can now predefine common queries on the server and then refer to them by an alias, rather than sending the entire request, leading to improved performance, enhanced security and less management effort.
• There are also upcoming plans to implement the Umbraco Workflow Add-on for Heartcore which can bring some basic content workflows to the platform for simple editorial tasks, with the potential to upgrade through a dedicated Workflow license for more complex editorial scenarios. 

Umbraco Engage improvements are in the pipeline

We’ve been long-term fans of UMarketingSuite which adds optimisation and analytics capabilities to Umbraco, extending platform capabilities to better compete with other Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs). We were very pleased when it was acquired by Umbraco HQ, rebranded as Umbraco Engage, and offered as a fully supported Add-on.

The acquisition and rebranding coincided with some improvements to the A/B Testing reporting and the analytics offered. However, currently Engage is not fully aligned with the backoffice which was introduced in Umbraco 14; this is now being worked on for the next major release of Engage. This next version should also see:

• Better support for using Umbraco Engage in conjunction with Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Deploy.
• Explicit scoring for persona and journey steps so these can contribute better for personalisation, with more granular scoring at the individual goal level also on the roadmap.
• A range of other improvements including better predictions for A/B Testing.

Even more additions to the Add-Ons

In this extensive product update the other Add-ons also don’t get left out, with a sprinkling of improvements right across the suite of offerings:

• Umbraco Commerce: Version15 has been released with performance improvements and new easy-to-deploy shopping cart. Further improvements are in the pipeline including support for partial refunds, analytics for abandoned carts, and the ability to create links to order payments, 
• Umbraco Workflow: New capabilities around enabling alternative versions of a document to be available concurrently, as well as the ability to schedule the release of a set of documents as part of a campaign, are due for availability in Q1. Further enhancements on both these new features are also on the roadmap.
• Umbraco Forms: There are some enhancements to allow more sophisticated forms and workflow, for example validation criteria involving more than one field, and better page numbering across multi-step forms to indicate progress for the user. An additional welcome feature on the roadmap is the ability to test forms in the backoffice.
• Umbraco UI-builder: This Add-on allows teams to configure a custom backoffice experience and will now be compatible with Umbraco 14 and 15; this will be very useful for anyone who has previously customised the back-end experience and is now looking to upgrade to the latest versions of Umbraco.
• Umbraco Deploy: Umbraco Deploy has improved performance for Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Heartcore customers. Additionally, as mentioned above, Deploy will soon be compatible with Engage. 

Umbraco 8 reaches end of life

Finally, Umbraco 8 has reached end of life and is out of support. This does not mean it will stop working but there will not be any security patches. If you are on Umbraco 8 and have not yet done so, you will need to plan your upgrade as soon as possible.  Do get in touch if you would like to discuss this.

Our view on the product update

Phew! There’s a lot to take in on this extensive and detailed list. Much of it is follow-ups on Umbraco 15 or that will be released in Umbraco 16, which is due for release in June, including elements which help to smooth out performance. It is good to see that the Umbraco roadmap remains highly active.

There is also work to bring all the products including Umbraco Cloud and Heartcore, as well as all the Add-ons up to speed so everything is compatible with the core platform. There is still a bit of work to go on this with Umbraco Engage, but that’s coming soon. Overall, this shows the continuing commitment to position Umbraco as a fully featured platform that can compete with its competitors. 

There’s also more support here to continue to make Umbraco a viable choice for enterprises with a more complex digital footprint, for example with multi-lingual sites, or those who want to use Umbraco Cloud but require Microsoft Entra ID access for administrators to tick the box on security.

If you’d like to discuss the product update or anything else to do with Umbraco, then do contact us.