Umbraco 10 Release
What’s in the new Umbraco 10 release?
At 3Chillies, we use Umbraco as the content management system (CMS) behind many of the websites and digital products we deliver for our clients. Umbraco is open-source and highly flexible, but allows you to build complex and immersive digital experiences while being easy for admins and publishers to use. There’s also a wide and loyal developer community that helps to power and improve Umbraco. This means it is a great platform to keep costs relatively low while creating high-quality, sustainable customer experiences.
In mid-June, the latest version of the platform &; Umbraco 10 &; will be released, although many people are currently evaluating the Beta version. In this post, we’re going to explore what to expect from the new release.
Context for the new release
Back in January, we explored Umbraco’s current strategy in detail and discussed how the platform is at the beginning of a new phase in its history. On the back of a 2021 investment from Monterro (who has previously invested in Optimizely), Umbraco is making changes that will help it compete against other leading CMSs and Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) over the next five years. These include beefing up support for headless publishing, and using Umbraco within a composable architecture. At the same time, they are also continuing to play to the strengths of the platform, such as focusing on the developer community and its traditional customer base of mid-market organisations.
The release of Umbraco 9 in 2021 also helped underline the idea of a fresh start. This marked the first in a new release cadence and made sure the platform was based on .NET 5 (.NET Core), providing a clear path forward which has not been the case with every Umbraco release. Umbraco 10 is the first major release in the new phase for Umbraco. Similar to Umbraco 9, it is more of a technical release with back-end improvements rather than new features aimed at marketing teams or admins.
Let’s look at some of the notable elements of Umbraco 10.
1. Easier upgrades
One of the major pain points in any DXP is the upgrade path, which can prove costly and require a lot of effort. Upgrading from Umbraco 8 to 9 required significant effort, but a primary aim of that release was to try and get more organisations to adopt Umbraco 9 to establish a far easier upgrade path for each release going forward. Upgrading from 9 to 10 looks set to be far easier, and may require much less planning and resources. This is welcome news for digital marketing teams, IT functions and digital agencies alike.
2. A new release cycle
A big part of the release in Umbraco 9 was the promise of a new support release cycle. Umbraco 10 is the first in this new cadence,promising:
- Twice-yearly major releases
- Minor releases every six weeks
- A long-term supported version roughly every two years (or fourth release), starting with Umbraco 10
- A well-defined “support” and “security” phase for each major release.
This cycle provides stability and confidence, and aids long-term planning as teams can plan their upgrades better and ensure there is less disparity across the customer base in terms of releases deployed. It also provides greater confidence, particularly to enterprise customers who want to see a more future-proofed platform to justify the investment in digital experiences based on Umbraco.
3. Latest version of .NET and C
The new release brings Umbraco up to date with the latest version of .NET, as well as the C# programming language. This helps ensure cross-platform compatibility, and opens up more opportunities for developers and more options for hosting. The need to update has also triggered a number of other changes, some of which are mentioned below.
4. New back-end features
In advance of the release, Umbraco themselves has listed a number of different features that will feature in Umbraco 10. Note that most of these are highly technical in nature, so if you’re a digital marketer, look away now.
Changes include:
- Improved cross-platform support, achieved by replacing support for SQL CE with the more popular SQLite - a requirement driven by supporting the latest version of .NET
- A new MainDom lock based on the filesystem that can be used across all platforms, although Umbraco 10 still supports semaphore and SQL-based MainDom locks
- Nullable reference types have been enabled in Umbraco 10
- Configuration reloads without the need to reboot were introduced in Umbraco 9, and have been extended to more scenarios in the new release
- Although distributed locking was already enabled, Umbraco 10 introduces a new IDistributedLockingMechanism abstraction which is decoupled from the scope
- There are a number of updates to third-party dependencies, the main one being an update for the latest version ImageSharp; others include Examine, NPoco and Backoffice.
Need help with Umbraco 10? Get in touch!
We love working with Umbraco, and we’re glad to see the platform moving forward in a more sustainable and predictable way. The idea of easier upgrade paths alone is music to our ears! If you’d like help with upgrading Umbraco or want to discuss use of the platform,then talk to us.
