Umbraco 14 introduces fresh architecture for flourishing digital businesses

Umbraco, has announced the general availability of Umbraco 14, its open-source .NET web content management system (CMS), which has been re-architected for enterprise-level scalability and ongoing digital transformation.

Over the past two decades, the Umbraco open-source community has grown to quarter of a million contributors and users worldwide, with 1,500 digital agency partners developing websites and digital solutions on the platform. An increasing number of agencies are building enterprise solutions that require considerable integration, extension, and customisation to support omnichannel and ecommerce strategies. Umbraco 14 was developed to facilitate building, extension and customisation of digital experiences that are likely to see exponential growth. Commenting on the scalability of the re-architected CMS, Umbraco CTO, Filip Bech-Larsen said, “During Umbraco 14 testing, the new client-side architecture improved backoffice performance for a very large site with 25,000 webpages, supporting 24 languages, without making any other optimisations.”

For web developers taking on new projects, the fresh architecture provides reassurance that they can build the way they want to and continue extending and customising their web platform to meet changing business requirements. Dependency on older frameworks has been removed. Umbraco will continue to keep pace with Microsoft .NET and can now evolve alongside modern, client-side technology.

Filip Bech-Larsen, comments, “Umbraco 14 has been designed for extension and customisation, empowering developers to seamlessly tailor the CMS for individual business needs. With the new architecture, organisations gain added flexibility to work the way they want to, without being tied to any specific framework.”

To facilitate customisation of the CMS user interface, Umbraco 14 introduces an extension-first approach using Web Components and a RESTful Management API. Package developers can now use any frontend framework that supports Web Components, allowing them to combine their preferred tools and technologies with the new Management and Extension APIs when developing on Umbraco.

“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. We’re excited to see what businesses will create with the new platform.” enthuses Bech-Larsen.

Umbraco CMS continues to ship with the latest .NET framework, razor templating, and headless capabilities. Key features of Umbraco 14 include:

• A clear separation of concerns between backoffice and backend, with a powerful API layer, makes it easier for backend developers to rely on existing services when creating additional controllers.
• Aided by the new API layer, developers will find it easier to extend the backend and comply with best practices.
• The adoption of TypeScript promotes safer JavaScript development with better IDE integration and IntelliSense support, enhancing the developer experience by offering static typing and reducing potential errors.
• Use of Web Components saves developers time through reuse of code.
• Full implementation of the Umbraco UI Library ensures UI consistency across the backoffice, aligning the user experience more closely with enterprise standards and reducing the effort required for UI development and maintenance.
• UI consistency facilitates inclusion of features such as user accessibility.
• Umbraco 14 augments native headless capabilities for content and media with the Management API, allowing for seamless and secure content management integrations.
• Content Management functions are exposed through 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.
• Extension points in the new backoffice allow developers to be more creative.
• Anyone making extensions, packages, or integrations has access to the same APIs used to build the backoffice, removing the requirement to create RESTful APIs.
• Umbraco 14 introduces significant enhancements in testing and API stability, offering more reliable performance under varying loads.
• The re-architected CMS is designed to handle traffic and content volume, without degradation in performance.

For further information, visit the Umbraco blog, https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-14-release/.