Codegarden 2024

byte5 has been an Umbraco Gold Partner for years, and every year we look forward to the great opportunity to exchange ideas with other Umbracians and tech enthusiasts.

Wherever the Umbraco community comes together, there is an open and relaxed atmosphere. Be it at the pre-party at the headquarters, at the event opening or during the breaks: there are numerous opportunities to exchange ideas.

As every year, there is also a special recognition of great achievements at the Umbraco Awards: Here, Umbraco honors special Umbraco solutions from the past year in various categories, for example Best Umbraco Cloud Solution, Most Innovative Solution and many more. In 2024, there are also 23 new MVPs (Most Valuable People) who have made special contributions to Umbraco and the community. 

In fall 2023, Umbraco 13 was released, a stable and long-term support version. In 2024, just one week before Codegarden, Umbraco released version 14 with standard term support and some new features. Anyone who has followed Umbraco's history knows that there is more to come and at Codegarden, Umbraco gave an exciting insight into the direction in which the content management platform intends to develop.

For future versions, the focus for both the CMS and the cloud product will be on scaling. The aim is to enable the realisation of larger projects by improving load balancing in the Umbraco Cloud. Some improvements are also planned for editors: Content scheduling in the Umbraco workflow package, easier reuse of content using content blocks and options for editing content together and seeing who is editing which part at any time.

In addition, Umbraco also defines 4 core topics that will be groundbreaking in the coming months and years: Search, Personal Experiences, GenAI and Orchestration. 

Search. Content should be easy for users to find, and users expect not to have to search long for suitable content. AI will also become increasingly important here.

Personal experiences. Personalized experiences leave an impression and are significant to end users.

GenAI. This is primarily about adding Generative AI to Umbraco wherever it makes sense.

Orchestration. Projects require more and more data and data sources. Orchestration is therefore becoming increasingly important for easy management. 

As in previous years, Umbraco is committed to sustainability and put together an extensive program for Codegarden. Green Table Talks with input from the Umbraco Sustainability Team and discussions on how to make web development more sustainable. Practical suggestions on what an environmentally friendly website could look like and which code adaptations could deliver the desired result. And with the Umbraco Award for Best Green Solution, the spotlight will once again be on sustainability.  

Over two days full of exciting talks, we chose various topics that were of interest to us. Particularly exciting: it was the first Codegarden for all three of us. Here we share our highlights: 

If you have to migrate each module individually in a migration project, it is a tedious process that takes a lot of time. Umbraco Deploy rethinks migration and can make our work easier. In "Umbraco Deploy: a deep-dive into migrating between major versions", we gained an insight into how a migration project can be implemented with Umbraco Deploy. 

Louay was particularly excited about "It's a Bellissima Occasion" by Jacob Overgaard. Creating back office previews for custom blocks with AngularJS was challenging, so Louay is happy to see it gone. Jacob Overgaard and his team have completely rebuilt Umbraco's back office, making it bigger and better to give developers as much freedom as possible to edit and extend. Each part of the back office is a separate component that can be extended or replaced as required. 

One talk in particular stuck in Lisa's mind because she found the topic very understandable from an editor's point of view: Heather Floyd's "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Improving the Architecture of an Existing Site". An existing website is usually continuously developed: New design, content elements or functions are added to keep pace with the company's development. For reasons of time or resources, this is implemented as quickly as possible, resulting in a "Frankensite", a site that is dismembered like Frankenstein's monster because, for example, a content element is used in a different, unintended context. In her talk, Floyd shares ideas on how to improve the existing architecture and when is a good time to implement it.