Today saw the release of Umbraco 8 - a long-awaited update to the CMS we know and love.  We’ve been using Umbraco since version 3 way back in 2008 when Kung Fu Panda was released and the charts were chock full of X Factor stars.   Umbraco 7 has been arguably the most stable, successful and long-running version of the CMS. But the world has moved on, and with version 8, so has Umbraco.

Things we’re most looking forward to in this release are the new Content Apps, the improved performance and the new editing experience - Infinite Editing.

Content Apps are a new approach to integrating functionality into the editing experience of Umbraco to have features on a Page in the back end that aren’t content in and of themselves.  Content Apps add richness to the editing experience by enabling app developers to produce plugins to Umbraco enabling Editors to preview their page for SEO compliance or to review grammar structure with tools like Grammarly.  We’re really excited about the opportunity that Content Apps offer, and will be talking about it at the upcoming Umbraco Spark conference.

Performance in Umbraco 8 is significantly improved.  The system that caches content in Umbraco has been rewritten, nicknamed NuCache.  Unless you’re a web performance nerd, this probably means very little to you.  But what most people will understand is that testing has shown a 2x improvement in website performance with NuCache on Umbraco 8.  Pages will serve faster with the same hardware so you can get better performance out of cheaper hardware. What’s not to love about that?

The last significant feature for Editors is the new Infinite Editing interface.  This makes the exercise of editing content easier and simpler, with less need to jump between Content and Media sections of the Umbraco Backend.

There’s loads more goodies besides, including Multilingual Variants and a new API for developers that puts Umbraco 8 in a fit state for future development.  But we’re also eagerly awaiting developments due in the next few weeks that will enable us to upgrade Umbraco 7 sites to Umbraco 8.

The world of Umbraco has made a huge leap today, and if you’re using a site on early versions of Umbraco 7, or dare I say even earlier still, then you’re missing out on a treat.  While it’s not currently possible to upgrade an existing site to Umbraco 8, there is much that can be done to get ready for the move.  Our Rapid Response Health Check will do a quick assessment of the common vulnerabilities and issues facing older Umbraco sites giving actionable insights and costings to bring your site up to date and fit for version 8.