Improved Performance and Development Experience

In accordance with the new release cycle, which was introduced from Umbraco 9 2021, it was once again time for a new major version of the CMS in December.

The biggest advantage of the update for users is an improvement in performance and development experience. The basis for this is the switch to .NET7 and ASP.NET Core7, the latest versions of Microsoft .NET technologies. Users now benefit from many new features and improvements that simplify and accelerate development. Better and more performant code is also provided by support for the latest version of C# - V11.

The second major innovation is the Block Grid Editor. Originally planned for Umbraco 10.3 in October 2022, its introduction was postponed to V11 in favour of further testing. It replaces the Grid Layouts Editor, which had been in use since V7 but was in need of modernisation. With an improved ability to structure layout and content for editors, the Block Grid Editor is now fit for the future and developers can enjoy an optimised development experience.
As its name suggests, the Blog Grid Editor is all based on the Blocks element type. These allow developers to create customised editing experiences and content structures based on familiar conventions such as the Block List Editor or Nested. With the use of Blocks, a wide range of unconventional editors is available, more flexible settings and of course new functions. More about the use of the Blocks can be found here.

Umbraco 11 is probably the easiest major update to handle so far. Breaking changes mainly result from the changes related to the migration from .NET 7 and ASP.NET Core 7. Microsoft provides detailed documentation on this. This makes the migration to Umbraco 11 particularly easy, especially for users who already use version 10. Umbraco itself also offers a detailed overview of the breaking changes in the release notes and the version-specific documentation.

Of particular importance for developers is the new documentation platform, which will also be switched to from December 2022. While the documentation was previously available at our.umbraco.com, it is now available at docs.umbraco.com. The new platform is intended to provide users with better findability and search.

Special extensions from Umbraco 8, integrations and profiles of technology partners have been offered since December in the new Marketplace, which was previously also available at our.umbraco.com.

Since December there is also something new for editors: the Umbraco Workflow Package. This enables them to build freely definable release workflows for content, which was only possible in a very rudimentary way in the past. This package is based on the already existing package Plumber.