Umbraco 9, the latest and greatest version of Umbraco and the market leading open source .NET content management system (CMS) is now our CMS of choice.

The release moves the underlying platform to Microsoft’s latest framework for building web applications, .NET 5. This change future-proofs the project and gives clients and developers confidence in the long term support.

The new framework improves the patterns and practices that are used to build sites and applications. This means solutions will be easier to maintain and extend. Furthermore there are major performance improvements with Umbraco 9 and so both the CMS and front-end sites are much faster than older versions and other popular content management systems.

The change also means that Umbraco is now truly cross platform.

You can host sites on Linux (which can help reduce the cost of and increase the range of hosting options) and developers can work with Linux or Mac based machines. This opens the CMS to a wider audience than before as previously only Windows machines were supported.

developments with Umbraco 9

Another exciting development with Umbraco 9 is the move to a steadier release cadence, set timelines for releases and a clearer roadmap on long term support (LTS).

Major Umbraco releases will now be aligned to and shortly follow the main .NET release. Minor releases will happen every six weeks and will not contain breaking changes. This makes upgrading Umbraco predictable and allows clients to plan budgets better.

Officially directly upgrading Umbraco 7 and 8 to Umbraco 9 isn't possible due to the fundamental changes that have occurred as part of the move to .NET 5. But, the database hasn't changed between the versions, meaning it is possible to point a vanilla Umbraco 9 solution at an Umbraco 8 database and the CMS will work. More serious development comes in when migrating any custom code. And in true Enjoy fashion, we've already migrated Umbraco sites to version 9 and can assist with audits and upgrades.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Umbraco 9 release is how quickly packages have been migrated. With its ability to integrate with other platforms, the fact it is multilingual and multi-site and coupled with award-winning packages such as uMarketingSuite, Umbraco 9 goes beyond just being another CMS. It's a fantastic platform for delivering a modern composable digital experience platform (DXP).

Both uMarketingSuite (digital marketing, marketing automation and personalisation) and Vendr (ecommerce) are available for Umbraco 9. We've currently got numerous Umbraco 9 builds in development and you're currently reading this on our new site on the platform.

Umbraco 9, 9.4

The release candidate for the latest version of Umbraco 9, 9.4 is out now and is due for public release on 24th March. Read more from Umbraco: https://umbraco.com/blog/umbraco-94-release-candidate/