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Umbraco

Umbraco is a fully-featured open source content management system with the flexibility to run anything from small campaign or brochure sites right through to complex applications for Fortune 500’s and some of the largest media sites in the world.

Umbraco is easy to learn and use, making it perfect for web designers, developers and content creators alike.

Umbraco is strongly supported by both an active and welcoming community of users around the world, and backed up by a rock-solid commercial organization providing professional support and tools. Umbraco can be used in its free, open-source format with the additional option of professional tools and support if required.

Why Should You Use Umbraco?

The award winning, responsive CMS

Umbraco  is one of the most deployed CMS systems on the Microsoft stack.

Umbraco CMS offers the power and flexibility to run anything from pure publishing sites and large media sites, to complex applications for Fortune 500 companies. Massively extendable, there is no limit to what you can do.

It’s FREE & Open Source

Umbraco is a completely free and Open Source CMS built upon Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

With no ongoing license fee Umbraco is both a powerful and cost effective CMS solution.

Umbraco Cloud Hosting

Umbraco can be hosted on any Windows Server but if you’d prefer to remove the stress of managing and setting up your own website hosting then Umbraco offer an amazing hosting solution called Umbraco Cloud.

Let Umbraco manage your website hosting so you can concentrate on your website and business.

Website Owners

Managing your website couldn’t be easier than with Umbraco CMS.

  • Multiple Site Management, run and manage multiple websites from a single Umbraco installation.
  • System Integration, easy integration with any 3rd party tool.
  • Cross-Platform, manage not only websites but also mobile apps, intranet sites, rich-media and e-commerce.
  • Responsive CMS, manage content on the go with your smartphone, tablet or laptop.
  • Out-The-Box Features, 301 redirect management, health check dashboard, device preview and lots more features to help you with your website.

Content Creators

Creating content couldn’t be easier than with Umbraco CMS.

  • Easy to Learn & Use, super simple CMS interface, a wealth of documentation, training videos and the famously helpful Umbraco community.
  • Multi Lingual, in built support for multi-lingual sites.
  • Role Based Access Levels, easily assign different publishing rights for your website administrators.
  • Media Library, manage all your media assets from a single location. Scale and crop your images directly within Umbraco.
  • Schedule Content, automatically publish and unpublish content whenever you want.

Designers & Developers

Extending your website couldn’t be easier than with Umbraco CMS.

  • Integrate with Business Systems, open and flexible architecture allows for easy integration with any existing system.

  • Easy to Use API’s, Umbraco API gives you programmatic access to everything in the Umbraco CMS.

  • Performance Boosts, with image and content caching built in, your Umbraco powered websites will be lightening fast.

  • Custom Code, using Razor, User controls or XSLT you can develop with whatever approach you prefer.
  • Design Freedom, Umbraco places no restrictions or set frameworks to your front-end giving designers maximum freedom for their design creations.

Umbraco 11 Release

Umbraco CMS is now running .NET 7 with all the features and improvements the new framework brings. On top of that, you get a brand Block Grid Editor, that is sure to delight developers and content editors alike. With a new marketplace for packages and integrations, overhauled documentation, and updates for both Umbraco Forms and Deploy, there’s plenty to be excited about for Umbraco 11 and beyond.

Umbraco 11 – not just a CMS release

Another milestone can be checked off the list with today’s release of Umbraco 11. Numerous updates, improvements, and new features for developers and editors alike help make this another solid major release for Umbraco.

This time it’s not just the CMS that is getting updates though. Along with version 11, you also get a shiny new Umbraco Marketplace, for browsing packages, integrations, and Tech Partners, directly from the backoffice or the new website. Documentation for Umbraco 11 is also found a new home, with much-improved discoverability, search, and more.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, first up is a look at the new features and improvements in Umbraco 11.

On the latest version of .NET

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s release of .NET 7, Umbraco CMS is ready with full support for the new version of the framework. And there are plenty of things to be excited about.

By starting new projects, or upgrading existing ones to Umbraco 11, everyone gets to enjoy the benefits of the new version.

Powerful improvements for developers

Both .NET 7 and ASP.NET Core 7 contain a long list of new features and improvements that make development easier and faster, and – just like with Umbraco 10 – you get access to the latest C# version. C#11 adds many new features, not least new functionality for working with raw string literals, meaning you can write much cleaner and more readable code, without having to escape special characters.

Yet another massive performance boost

One of the big benefits of being on the latest framework version is that we get to inherit a very long list of performance improvements. Or as Stephen Toub from Microsoft puts it:

“TL;DR: .NET 7 is fast. Really fast. A thousand performance-impacting PRs went into runtime and core libraries this release, never mind all the improvements in ASP.NET Core and Windows Forms and Entity Framework and beyond. It’s the fastest .NET ever. If your manager asks you why your project should upgrade to .NET 7, you can say “in addition to all the new functionality in the release, .NET 7 is super fast.”

What’s new in Umbraco 11

New Property Editor: Block Grid Editor

The Block Grid Editor is a new Property Editor focusing on bringing better layout and content structure capabilities to editors. Taking a cue from the popular Grid Layout editor that has been delivering layout capabilities for content editors since Umbraco 7, the Block Grid Editor is built on modern and future-proof technology and provides a vastly improved developer experience on top.

Building Blocks

As you might have guessed from the name – Block Grid Editor – everything is now based on Blocks (Element Types) which allows developers to craft tailored editing experiences and content structures using known conventions. If you’re at all familiar with the Block List Editor (or Nested) you’ll be right at home.

Using Blocks and Element Types allows you to configure content and settings in a much easier way than with the old Grid Layout editor. You can now use Property Editors to create the Blocks. This means you have many more options and tools available out-of-the-box to tailor the editing experience.

Laying out a Grid

There are two different ways of controlling the layout in the Block Grid Editor. Size Options for individual Blocks, and Areas that create predefined content areas, essentially allowing you to nest your grids and control the functionality of these nested grids. This is done to give flexibility in how you work with layout and allow for varying degrees of freedom and creativity.

Screshot of resizing content in the new Block Grid Editor for Umbraco 11

You can use predefined layouts or a more free-form layout experience where you can resize individual elements.

And you of course get all the features you’re used to from the Block List Editor such as adding Settings, drag and drop re-ordering, copy/paste blocks, and Property Actions, all in a familiar editing interface.

Advanced Configuration

With the features listed above, you can create a flexible content editing experience focusing on freedom and creativity or predefined layout structures – or maybe even a combination of both.

Umbraco 11 Block Grid With Custom Views 1374X795px

There are Advanced configuration options that allow you to add custom views and stylesheets, control the size of the overlay for a Block, and hide the content edit button if you’re creating an inline editing experience or pulling in data that can’t be edited. These are useful tools but not necessary for creating a good editing experience. Still, they can help make a highly customized editing experience that makes your editors happy, and more easily achievable than ever before.

Making a Beautiful Frontend

Having good configuration and a great editing experience is not the full job though – it also needs to translate into something great on the front end. As with all things Umbraco, you have full control over markup and CSS.

There are helper methods to render Block Grid content. You can either use the example rendering that ships with Umbraco or create your own custom renderer. You can also create partial views for your custom Blocks and it all comes with full support for Models Builder so as a developer you can with strongly typed models with the Block Grid Editor.

Getting Started with the Block Grid editor

First, there is extensive documentation for the Block Grid Editor covering all the topics mentioned above.

When you add a new Block Grid Editor to your installation, you get the option to add a sample configuration that adds a few simple blocks such as Headline and Rich Text, and you can start from there. This is very similar to the default configuration that shipped with the old Grid Layout editor but now it is optional.

We’ve also published a Block Grid Example Site showing how a more advanced setup can be achieved with the Block Grid Editor. It has a pre-configured Block Grid with custom views for the backoffice, clever use of Areas, and more. Ready to be installed into a new Umbraco 11 project straight from NuGet:

dotnet add package Umbraco.BlockGrid.Example.Website

In the coming weeks, we will publish a series of deep-dive blog posts for the Block Grid Editor that will go into detail on all the areas along with examples of both configuration, code, and implementation. If you want a quick visual introduction, Kenn Jacobsen from Umbraco HQ did a talk at the recent Umbraco Together event that will help get you off to a good start.

It is worth noting that the Block Grid Editor will be added to Umbraco 10 (10.4) in an upcoming release, to make sure this new powerful Property Editor is available in the LTS version as well.

Umbraco Marketplace in the Package Section

If you go to the Package Section of the Umbraco 11 backoffice you will notice that things have changed quite a bit. Along with Umbraco 11, we have launched a new home for Umbraco packages.

Umbraco 11 New Marketplace With Tech Partners 2291X1103px

The new marketplace is not only available from the backoffice, but it is also browsable directly on marketplace.umbraco.com. It contains Umbraco packages for Umbraco 8+ as well as integrations and profiles for the growing Tech Partners eco-system. It is the place to go to see what is possible in terms of extending Umbraco and integrating 3rd-party services.

The “old” package listing at our.umbraco.com/packages will still be there for older versions of Umbraco.

Clean(er) Architecture

In this release, we have further abstracted some of the tightly coupled dependencies that existed in Umbraco 9 and 10. Even though the last couple of major releases have made big strides in this area and a lot of work went into creating cleaner architecture, it could still be difficult to upgrade some dependencies or indeed swap them out entirely.

This is now easier with improvements to the architecture and how these dependencies are referenced. For most, the changes here will not be noticeable. Should you encounter one of these situations, the path forward is more straightforward.

Updated dependencies

One of the huge benefits of having a fast major release cadence (every 6 months) is that we get to keep Umbraco up-to-date with all the fantastic work that is being done in both the underlying framework, as mentioned above, but also all the other dependencies used in Umbraco CMS. This means more secure and performant installations, with all the latest functionality.

TinyMCE

Aside from the obvious and beneficial upgrade to .NET 7, there are a number of updates, both big and small. Especially worth mentioning is the upgrade of TinyMCE, the JS framework used for Rich Text editing in the backoffice. Upgrading from version 4 to version 6 of TinyMCE is a big step with an improved user and developer experience, enhanced performance, and more.

Note that if you have custom plugins for TinyMCE, these will need to be migrated.

And more

There are many smaller dependency updates included in the release:

  • Async from 2.6.3 to 2.6.4
  • TinyMCE from v4 to v6
  • Minimist from 1.2.5 to 1.2.7
  • Eventsource from 1.1.0 to 1.1.2
  • Updated Smidge, Npoco and MailKit
  • Socket.io-parser from 4.0.4 to 4.0.5
  • Minimatch from 3.0.4 to 3.1.2
  • Engine.io and Socket.io to latest version

Umbraco Forms 11 and Umbraco Deploy 11

Also released today are new versions for both Umbraco Forms and Deploy. While they are new major versions, the changes have been made primarily to ensure full support for running on Umbraco 11 and .NET 7.

You can read the details in the version-specific upgrade notes for Umbraco Forms and Deploy.

Umbraco 11 Some 768X432 Dark Blue@2X

Umbraco Hosting Provider Recommendation

Are you looking for cheap Umbraco hosting? Finding a high quality cheap Umbraco hosting provider is crucial for your web application. Your Umbraco application can only run smooth if it will be hosted on a server which can provide a higher up time & plenty of computing resources. There’re thousands of web hosting providers which offer asp.net hosting, but choosing cheap Umbraco hosting provider is a time consuming task. To make your buying decision easy we’ve concluded 3 best yet cheap Umbraco hosting providers which are reliable and offer affordable Umbraco hosting so that every one can afford it.

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ASPHostPortal DiscountService.biz UKWindowsHostASP.NET
$1.00/month $2.00/month £3.00/month
Host 1 Site Host 1 Site Host 5 Sites
1 GB Disk Space 1 GB Disk Space 1 GB Disk Space
10 GB Bandwidth 10 GB Bandwidth 20 GB Bandwidth
Dedicated Application Pool Dedicated Application Pool Dedicated Application Pool
Support UTF-8 Domains Support UTF-8 Domains Support UTF-8 Domains
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SQL Server 2008/2012/2014 SQL Server 2008/2012/2014 SQL Server 2008/2012/2014
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