The road to success is always under construction

The Umbraco community are an active bunch, continually looking for ways to improve and expand the CMS we know and love. With this comes updates to the CMS, some small, others more substantial. To get the most out of your site, we recommend making regular updates to your CMS as part of your website maintenance. An outdated CMS system not only limits your content editors, it is also the number one cause of cyberattacks.

When we talk about upgrades there are typically two types we refer to – minor updates within a version of Umbraco; and the more major migration to a new version of Umbraco. Minor upgrades will address security patches, bugs and small enhancements to how the CMS is performing. Whereas new versions often make more fundamental changes across platform.

Umbraco released Umbraco 8 in 2019 and has made a number of minor updates since release. Umbraco 8 sets a new standard for the next generation of Umbraco websites. While there’s a heap in the background that have our developers frothing, many of Umbraco 8’s beauty lies in changes to the content editing experience.

Content apps

Content apps are a new feature in Umbraco 8 that allow editors to switch from creating content on pages to viewing contextual information related to the page they are editing.

A couple of content apps we’re in love with include ‘Analytics’ and ‘Preflight’. The analytics app lets you see at a glance how much traffic a particular page is getting, without having to leave the comfort of your CMS.

Preflight is designed to aid content quality, testing readability, sentence and word length, and complexity. If you have multiple content contributors, Preflight is a great way to ensure editors meet editorial standards by setting minimum publishing standards and cancelling content saves when particular tests fail.  

Preflight with Umbraco

Languages

There’s growing momentum in organisations keen to celebrate New Zealand's cultural diversity. The flow on from this has seen an increase in the number of clients wanting to explore a range of multi-language options for their websites. That’s why we’re pumped by the language features offered by Umbraco 8.

A multilingual website demonstrates that you’re thinking about your audience and helps you reach more people by removing potential cultural barriers. It also helps with your SEO as Google are developing the capacity to run searches in foreign languages.

Umbraco 8’s side-by-side language editing makes it easy to ensure your branding, layout, and web design elements are consistent when you switch between languages. That means there’s the great experience you’ve worked hard to create is consistent, no matter which language version of your site visitors land on.

We’ve loved working on multi-lingual projects for Auckland Emergency Management and Massey University

Superior editing experience

Umbraco prides itself on being a user friendly CMS and Umbraco 8 offers has been designed to fit your natural workflow. Integrated workflows in the CMS ensure that you and your team won’t get interrupted and can always stay focused on the context and the content you are creating.  Create a page, add text, upload and crop images perfectly for the page and write catchy SEO titles and descriptions - all without leaving the page you are working on.

While we recommend you start factoring in an upgrade in your website’s near future,  there’s a few things to be mindful of before migrating to Umbraco 8.  Like all good things, making the move will take and effort, particularly if your website has third party apps or complex system integrations. Our team can help guide you through the process and let you know what will be involved to make the switch.

Not up to moving just yet? No sweat, we know that not everyone’s budget can stretch to a full migration. Umbraco 7 is still in circulation and will receive security patches until September 2023 but we do recommend you keep this on your radar.