Umbraco has unveiled its newest web content management system (CMS), Umbraco 14, which has been redesigned with a focus on scalability for enterprise-level digital solutions, alongside ease of use for web editors and developers. The Denmark-based firm announced the general availability of Umbraco 14, marking a significant evolution for its widely-used open-source .NET CMS.
The release aims to meet the growing demands of digital agencies that increasingly require robust integration, extension, and customisation options to support complex omnichannel and ecommerce strategies. Over its two-decade lifespan, Umbraco's community has grown to over 250,000 contributors and users globally, with around 1,500 digital agency partners developing on the platform. Umbraco 14 has been specifically developed to cater to these evolving requirements.
Filip Bech-Larsen, Umbraco's Chief Technology Officer, highlighted the system's improved performance capabilities, noting that during testing, a site with 25,000 webpages and support for 24 languages saw enhanced backoffice performance without additional optimisations. This signifies that Umbraco 14 is capable of handling large-scale projects efficiently, offering substantial reassurance to developers embarking on new digital ventures.
Bech-Larsen stated, "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." He also emphasised that dependency on older frameworks has been removed, allowing Umbraco to evolve alongside modern client-side technologies.
Among the key features introduced in Umbraco 14 is an extension-first approach, utilising Web Components and a RESTful Management API to facilitate customisation of the CMS user interface. Package developers now have the flexibility to use any frontend framework that supports Web Components, enabling them to integrate preferred tools and technologies with the new Management and Extension APIs.
"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," Bech-Larsen added.
Umbraco 14 continues to ship with the latest .NET framework, razor templating, and headless capabilities. Important enhancements include a clear separation of concerns between backoffice and backend, supported by a robust API layer, making it easier for backend developers to rely on existing services when creating additional controllers. The adoption of TypeScript bolsters JavaScript development, offering better IDE integration and reducing potential errors through static typing.
The use of Web Components aims to save developers time by allowing code reuse, while the comprehensive implementation of the Umbraco UI Library ensures interface consistency across the backoffice. This not only aligns the user experience more closely with enterprise standards but also reduces the effort required for UI development and maintenance, integral for user accessibility.
Additionally, Umbraco 14 enhances native headless capabilities for content and media with the Management API, which allows for seamless and secure content management integrations. The Management API provides developers with built-in functionality for Create, Edit, Publish, and Schedule capabilities, eliminating the need to construct their own APIs.
The re-architected system is designed to handle varying traffic and content volumes without a decline in performance, offering significant improvements in testing and API stability. This makes Umbraco 14 a robust solution for enterprises looking to scale their digital operations without worrying about performance degradation.
