Creating a website in today’s digital era is one of the most crucial factors in becoming a successful business within your industry. A website is your central hub for all of your marketing efforts and will give you unrivalled opportunities to sell your products and services.
No matter whether you’re a brick-and-mortar business looking to just start your website, or you want to change your CMS to an upgraded alternative, downloading a CMS to showcase your company will always be beneficial.
In today’s blog post, we’re going to run through the Umbraco CMS and what Umbraco version you should use in the current climate. Read on as we get ready to help you make an informed choice using our expert insights!
A brief history of Umbraco's starting years
Since Umbraco was first created in 1997, it has taken the digital landscape by storm and, as of today, is still a preferred CMS to use for businesses around the world, whether they are start-ups or established businesses.
Yet, it wasn’t always smooth sailing in the beginning, as Niels Hartvig tried and tested many other CMS sketches before he finally hit the ground running with Umbraco. The name ‘Umbraco’ originally came into fruition when the founder used an Allen key—known as an Umbraconøgle in Denmark—to assemble, build, and fix problems all at once.
Thus, his passion for handy work and his passion for building websites went hand in hand, and he created Umbraco as a metaphor, relating to the Allen key. Finally, in 2003 and 2004, the company began to take shape.
Finally, on February 16th, 2005, this release cadence began gaining traction due to the opening of an open-source platform for all users to use when building their website for the first time (meaning anyone publicly has editing rights to provide code that will be effective for the particular website). This is why today's Umbraco Community is as strong as it is!
The latest updates since 2019 until present: An overview of each Umbraco Version
In terms of the different Umbraco Cloud projects that have been released over the years, there have been noticeable signs of added features and improvements each time.
However, along the journey to where Umbraco HQ is today, there is some key information you need to know in detail about the previous and current Umbraco versions so you can get a better understanding of what has happened in recent years:
Umbraco 8
Since ‘Umbraco 7’ was so popular and a major version within the growth of the company, reigning for six years, Umbraco finally made the decision to upgrade from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 8. During this transition period for the Umbraco site, they made some noticeable changes:
- Content Editing: In this version, Umbraco released an ‘infinite editing’ feature, allowing Umbraco content creation and management to feel more intuitive.
- Content Apps: Umbraco added this feature to help gather information and learn from your content instead of going to other social media sites—as part of an integrated experience.
- Language Variants: Umbraco 8 provided support for websites wanting to add a multilingual translation, allowing users to create and manage content in multiple languages.
Umbraco 9
In September 2021, Umbraco 9 was released to the Umbraco community after two years of the previous version playing a major role in many different businesses around the globe. Here is what came from this project on Umbraco:
- It became a complete .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core, unlike many other CMS’
- Website developers had the freedom to choose their favourite tool for hosting
- Unlike previous Umbraco versions, Umbraco 9 gave you the chance to use cross-platform compatibility with macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux
- Version 9 used Umbraco deploy to help with many bug fixes that users were experiencing
- More resources to learn and understand the CMS while making it even more developer-friendly
Umbraco 10
Just under a year later, in June 2022, Umbraco released another key update in the evolution of this content management system. With times changing quickly, the Umbraco HQ decided to add the features below to the new and improved CMS:
- .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core 5 were upgraded to .NET 6 and ASP.NET Core 6 with all the latest versions of C#
- There were some noticeable bugs in the code of many developers, and in this Umbraco version, they reduced the chances of your code triggering problems during runtime.
- They offered long-term support using SQLite to help you use a database that works on different devices, making it simple to begin on Windows.
Umbraco 11
Even with an extremely strong foundation in place, Umbraco 11 was released in December 2022. The Umbraco team looked for systems they could put in place to improve user experience. Here’s what they changed:
- .NET7 and .ASP.NET Core 7 were integrated into everyone’s Umbraco site
- They improved and separated the relationships between different components of the software that a programme relies on
- The all-new block grid editor gave editors the chance to structure content on the CMS more effectively, increased flexibility in settings, and a host of new features.
Umbraco 12 (latest version)
Umbraco 12 is the latest version available to the public, released in June 2023. Here's what you can expect from the current Umbraco CMS updates:
- The all-new content delivery API allows you to deliver content from Contentful to your Umbraco site and any other media platforms of your choice
- It runs on the latest version of .NET Framework, along with the latest version of C#, meaning that the speed, functionality and performance can be of the highest quality
- EF Core removes the need to create repetitive database access codes
- They updated ImageSharp to update the image processing library
What Umbraco Version should you choose?
As of right now, in regards to what Umbraco version you should choose, we would recommend that you use Umbraco 12 (the current updated version). However, if there are any future updates to the Umbraco platform, we would advise you to update your version each time for the best results.
If you’re looking to get started with Umbraco CMS or want to switch up your content management system for your business, Fuelius has been yielding positive results while working with Umbraco for clients, allowing us to continue to enhance their online presence, no matter the niche. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help!
