“Fresh” is a fun word. It just rolls off the tongue. Sure, it's most often associated with flowers, or maybe clean shirts drying on a clothesline in the warm breezes of a June afternoon. But sometimes, it’s a perfect fit for describing technology.

And why not? Who doesn’t like that “fresh car smell” when they crack open a new dashboard or peruse the updated UX in their CMS?

When the availability of Umbraco 14 was first announced, I didn’t expect the words “fresh” and “flourishing” to appear in a press release headline. But there they were. And with so many cliché modifiers clogging the wire, it caught my attention.

So what makes this upgrade so fresh?

The answer lies with its focus – and that’s why I scheduled a “fresh” conversation with Umbraco’s CTO, Filip Bech-Larsen, who is absolutely flourishing with passion and zeal about this new version of his software.

As he noted, Umbraco is building more than robust and innovative CMS solutions. It’s committed to supporting meaningful relationships with its customers, an approach that goes beyond the numbers.

This is apropos of the company’s culture, which is deeply rooted in people, not just products. Rather than focusing on revenue, Umbraco opts to shift the conversation, reinforcing its core values around transparency, user inclusion, and attracting customers through genuine engagement. The company has also been a vocal champion of diversity and sustainability, which bookends its holistic attributes.

Umbraco 14 officially hit the streets on May 30th, so it’s been marinating in GA for a couple of weeks. That said, many of the first steps were documented in a series of blog posts back in 2023, when it was revealed that a new backoffice would power productivity for both internal and community users. But that was just scratching the surface.

“It's very much an enabling release for us,” said Filip, beaming across our Zoom call. “It enables a lot of what we want to do in the future. That's been one of the strongholds for Umbraco – developers really like that everything's flexible, like the Lego metaphor, and you can build anything exactly how you want it. But also the fact that editors understand and intuitively know how to use it is a big unique selling proposition for us. I think Umbraco 14 is a lot about doing what our competitors wish they could do.”

That competitive field he spoke of is getting denser by the second, but Umbraco continues to sing through the CMS chorus with a clear voice – one that is lifted by an allegro of loyal contributors in its open source community. We talked about that and more in our conversation.

So what else is Umbraco 14 “freshening” up? Here's a high-level snapshot – and some perspective on what it means.

Built for exponential growth

Over the past twenty years, the Umbraco open source community has grown to a staggering quarter of a million contributors and users across the globe – augmented by 1,500 partners developing websites and digital experiences on the platform.

During this impressive ramp-up, an increasing number of agencies have been building enterprise solutions that require considerable integration, extension, and customization to support the growth of omnichannel and e-commerce strategies. The pandemic accelerated this, as every organization on the planet sought to transform its digital presence in a matter of months or even weeks.

"I think Umbraco 14 is a lot about doing what our competitors wish they could do.”

Umbraco 14 was developed as an answer to these pressures, facilitating the building, extension, and customization of digital experiences – particularly those that are likely to grow and scale exponentially. As Filip noted, the gains made in the software have been significant, reflecting a deep investment in an entirely new and (wait for it) fresh architecture.

“We've been able to clear out all of our old dependencies and really take a modern approach,” he explained. “The current one was started almost 10 years ago, so there was a lot of legacy stuff that's hard to replace. So we took the big leap and started over."

There's a great video review of Umbraco 14, courtesy of Filip's team (you can watch it below). I recommend checking this out for a more detailed tour of what's been added, but if you keep reading, I fire through some of the standout features.

Going big with the backoffice

With its new extension API, Umbraco 14 offers a formal way to extend pretty much any part of its backoffice experience. That means adding your own customizations and replacing Umbraco’s. Filip explained how powerful this is from a user's perspective.

“If you don't like how our Save button works, or how our preview functionality works, or how anything inside of the backoffice implementation works, you can replace it with your own and build on top in a developer-focused way with your end users or editors in mind.”

As Filip also pointed out, this is a tag-independent API, so you don't need to learn any specific framework or use React or Vue. The API is based on web standards and something they call an “extension-first” approach. Aided by the new API layer, developers will find it easier to extend the backend and comply with best practices.

To facilitate customization of the CMS user interface, Umbraco 14 is leveraging this extension-first approach via Web Components and a RESTful Management API. Package developers can now use any frontend framework that supports Web Components, allowing them to combine preferred tools and technologies with the new Management and Extension APIs when developing on Umbraco. This use of Web Components also saves developers time through the reuse of code.

A schematic of Umbraco 14's management, content delivery, and media delivery APIs

“And then of course, everything's built in a modern way with TypeScript, so even though you don't have to, that means when you're building extensions on top of Umbraco, you get great IDE [integrated development environment] support right out of the box. So that's super powerful.”

To that end, the adoption of TypeScript – an established programming language that improves tooling at almost any scale – promotes safer JavaScript development with better IDE integration and IntelliSense support (like code completion, parameter info, and member lists in Visual Studio). This enhances the developer experience by offering static typing and reducing potential errors.

Full implementation of the Umbraco UI Library also ensures UI consistency across the backoffice, aligning the user experience more closely with enterprise standards and reducing the effort required for user interface creation and maintenance.

For web developers taking on new projects, this fresh architecture provides a lot of critical reassurances – namely, that they can build the way they want and continue extending and customizing their web platform to meet changing business requirements.

“We built the backoffice APIs to facilitate extensions, inspired by how package developers already work, and to expand the options and tools available to them,” Filip explained. “We’re excited to see what businesses will create with the new platform.”

It’s important to note that the backend remains largely unchanged. Umbraco is still running the latest and greatest version of .NET with all the stability and performance that comes with it. The updates to the backoffice capabilities will enable it to evolve alongside modern, client-side technology – allowing organizations to gain added flexibility to work the way they want to, without being tied to any specific framework. This aligns with the tenets of composable systems that afford greater choice and control.

A fresh bouquet of capabilities

Umbraco 14 is a big milestone for the Umbraco ecosystem. Along with the future-proof backoffice capabilities, the update also includes enhanced tooling, testing, performance, and scalability.

There have also been significant enhancements in API stability, offering more reliable performance under variable loads – and the re-architected CMS is designed to handle traffic and content volume without any degradation in performance.

From a UI perspective, there’s also been a concentration on maintaining consistency and enhancing user accessibility. This is part and parcel of its focus on rebuilding the UI to be extension-first, and providing a centralized way for developers to build more efficient extensions. The upgrade also embellishes things like iconography by including a new pack, Lucide, in the build.

Umbraco 14 includes a new icon pack (Lucide).

Umbraco 14 is also as “headless as you need.” The new build augments native headless capabilities for content and media with its Management API, allowing for seamless and secure content management integrations. Everything that’s available in the backoffice is available in an authenticated and conventions-based way, just as it is for content and media delivery.

Content Management functions are also exposed via the Umbraco 14 Management API, allowing developers to integrate create, edit, publish, and schedule capabilities into their app or system without having to create their own API.

Umbraco Cloud and add-on features

Along with the announcement of the “fresh” new version, the company has also made Umbraco 14 available on Umbraco Cloud. Users will have access to the latest version of the CMS pre-installed and ready to roll – all with a single click. This includes new releases of Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy.

Several other additions coincided with the release, including Umbraco Commerce and Umbraco Workflow. These were furnished as alpha releases in Umbraco 14, with GA announcements expected in the coming weeks and months.

The impact of creating through collaboration

As Filip reinforced, the foundation for Umbraco’s product development strategy has always been simple: listen to users and incorporate their feedback at every step. This was a handy mantra that resonated throughout the building of Umbraco 14.

“I’m reminded of our journey that started as an RFC (Request for Comments) in December 2020,” he reminisced in a previous LinkedIn post. “This version is not just another update; it’s a testament to our commitment to our community and partners. We’ve designed it with enterprises in mind, and with content editors and developers at heart.”

To help support the journey, Umbraco has established specific “Ecosystem Advisory Teams” that proactively engage with customers and partners. This structured yet organic approach ensures that Umbraco’s solutions are directly aligned with the needs and aspirations of its users.

“By not forcing our customers into rigid products or business models, we let the intrinsic value of our offerings drive user adoption and satisfaction.”

Why it matters

The word “fresh” can imply a simple “tidying up” of things as opposed to something entirely new. In the case of Umbraco 14, the use of “fresh” is an important distinction – and one that fits quite elegantly.

Users will find the backoffice enhancements reassuringly familiar, even though it’s been rebuilt from the ground up. It will sport that “fresh” feeling, but there's clearly a lot more going on behind the scenes, tethering it all together. If the key is to deliver an experience that builds on trust, then Umbraco has exceeded expectations by testing thoroughly and leaning on its community for input and validation.

To that end, I think it’s important to focus on the amount of choice and flexibility that an open source ecosystem like Umbraco provides, making it an increasingly more viable solution for building enterprise-grade projects. Given this posture – and the continued hype around composability that’s consuming the market – I asked Filip where he believes Umbraco fits in the mix.

“I think with the new backoffice and a complete management API on top of it, Umbraco really fits well into that ‘Composable World,’ where we need to be able to not only read content from your CMS but also all of the other parts of CRUD,” he said. “Updating and deleting and creating new content, you want to do that be able to do that in a scalable way. Also, with external services, having your system automatically put something back or having your commerce system automatically publish stuff when things go out of stock. And just being able to manipulate content as well. I think those are pretty important features that we’ve added to [Umbraco] 14 as well.”

It was actually refreshing to not focus on AI in this conversation. While other platforms are bolting on generative services and automated features, Umbraco has been offering integrations with Recombee and other open source plugins like allyyio for quite some time, providing builders with choices around their AI/ML tooling. As Filip noted in the past, the open source community also has a critical role in shaping the ethical considerations around AI.

That's not to say the company isn't planning new AI-powered features on its roadmap, but elevating the promise of Umbraco 14 around its core capabilities – which revolve around freedom and control – was a breath of (I'll say it again) “fresh” air.

Perhaps Umbraco’s most important asset is its community. Having amassed such a significant following over the last two decades is nothing short of miraculous. But keeping those users engaged and staying relevant amidst epic competition and shifting market dynamics? That’s a testament to the company’s perseverance, its commitment to culture, and its unshakable moxie. All reasons why we can expect more thoughtful innovation from Filip and his cohorts well into the future.

“I couldn’t be prouder of our team and the incredible Umbraco community and partners,” he said, noting how the company’s success had been a shared journey, achieved only through the continuous support, feedback, and collaboration of its users.

I’d say that’s a “fresh” perspective we can all learn from.

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Umbraco 14 Blossoms with a Fresh Architecture, Delivering Enhanced Customization and Extensibility