Umbraco Spark brings world-class web developers to Bristol

We The Curious on Bristol’s harbourside, is the new venue for the 5th annual Umbraco Spark Innovation Conference, taking place on Friday 7^th March 2025. The event is organised by Bristol digital agency, Gibe Digital to bring together the most prominent thinkers, coders, and creatives in the open-source .NET development community.

Web developers, designers, and online user experience (UX) professionals travel from all over the UK and Europe to discuss ideas, showcase projects and share best practices when building digital experiences on the Umbraco CMS platform.

Steve Temple, technical director at Gibe Digital comments, “Umbraco Spark brings developers together for a day of learning and inspiration. In previous years speakers have addressed issues such as sustainable and accessible development, which have helped shape the platform. This year the presentations cover technical, innovation, and developer-focused topics. Our conference is where innovation meets expertise, and where the future direction of the Umbraco platform is revealed.”

Hundreds of thousands of public and private sector organisations have built their websites on Umbraco’s open-source .NET content management system (CMS) platform over the past twenty years. It is now the largest open-source .NET CMS in the world, with more than a quarter of a million active contributors, backed by a commercial organisation that provides support, training, and ongoing maintenance of the platform.

Conference attendees will hear presentations from a range of influential thinkers from the open-source developer community, and Umbraco employees, on topics including:

• How to avoid Technical debt
• Using OpenTelemetry to gain app visibility
• How to use HybridCache
• Tips on using Azure Container Apps for a greener, cheaper, safer hosting solution
• Understanding binary basics
• Using Semantic Search to improve responses
• How Mermaid allows developers to author processes as code for rendering into shareable business visualisations.
• New features in the Umbraco CMS platform
• The benefits of Microsoft Fabric for integrating data with AI and machine learning

“Our open-source community is our super power and Umbraco Spark provides an opportunity for ideas to be explored and fresh projects initiated,” comments Umbraco CTO, Filip Bech-Larsen. “Conversations at this conference help us to continue to make Umbraco the most flexible, extensible, customisable, and scalable platform, so that developers have freedom to be creative and build digital experiences that wow their clients.”

Umbraco Spark is a UK Umbraco Foundation event organised by Gibe Digital and the 2025 conference is sponsored by Moriyama, Crumpled Dog, Rock Solid Knowledge, Mentor Digital, Gibe Digital, and tinyMCE.