Umbraco 8 released

The much anticipated Umbraco version 8.0 officially launched last week, a major new release of the much loved content management system.

As the leading open-source Microsoft.Net CMS platform, Umbraco has grown in popularity over the last 10 years and is today widely used with a strong development community in support.

Umbraco version 8 brings a number of key features which makes it the most advanced and easy-to-use version of the software to date. Known as the “Friendly CMS”, Umbraco has a goal to make things simpler. Simpler for CMS users to manage content, simpler to publish content and simpler for developers to extend Umbraco. The new Umbraco 8 is in many ways an extension of the successful and powerful Umbraco 7, continuing the focus on stability, usability and simplicity.

We now look a bit closer at some of the new features.

Infinite editing

This update is all about improvements to the CMS users editing experience. This includes improvements to the current CMS backoffice navigation and UI which has made Umbraco even more intuitive. CMS users can now move between different tasks and parts of the editing suite uninterrupted. This provides a more natural editing flow and allows content editors to “zoom” into every detail of each content element without losing the big picture. Watch this video to get an idea of the new editing experience.

Umbraco 8 – Infinite Editing from Umbraco on Vimeo.

Language variants

This provides for much better management of multilingual content in Umbraco and allows you to see content by language in a side-by-side view making it easy to translate and update. You are also given the ability to easily switch between languages in a preview mode for simple comparison.

Umbraco will also allow you to further configure which language must be in place before a content node can be published. This will ensure editorial standards are kept in place for your website. The publishing engine will also allow you to decide which content variants you want to publish. This works well for multi-country sites with various language variants and you can decide if you want to publish to all markets at once or only certain markets.

Content apps

This new feature helps developers extend Umbraco. This helps to provide for more 3rd party applications and extending the functionality such as content-aware features that will give CMS users the ability to improve your content with insightful data. Examples of this could be analytics integrations for details on user adoption, engagement, audience or support tools with information and analysis of composition and structure of content.

Improved codebase, better performance

Umbraco have done a clean-up of the codebase to improve performance and make it easier for developments who work a lot with Umbraco to extend its features. This means developers can implement faster, install packages more efficiently and help to lower the cost of development.

Umbraco is known as the flexible CMS and these improvements will definitely help improve overall delivery of your projects.

Image source: https://umbraco.com/