What is Umbraco CMS?

Overview

Umbraco is an open-source CMS built on Microsoft’s .NET framework using ASP.NET and is written in C#. It was born in 1999 but version 1.0 was announced in 2003 by Niels Hartvig. And on February 16th, 2005, with Umbraco 2.0 it became a fully open-source CMS. The latest major version, Umbraco 9, was launched on September 28th, 2021. Umbraco 9 saw a transition from ASP.NET to the .NETCore framework.

In 2005, Umbraco started hosting Codegarden – the official annual Umbraco developer conference. It evolved from 23 developers to more than 2000 attendees from all around the world.

In 2009, Umbraco launched a dedicated Umbraco Community site, called OurUmbraco. It serves as a platform for the online developer community to find technical documentation about Umbraco products, exchange knowledge, or ask other developers about Umbraco-related questions.

In 2013, the Umbraco source code became available on GitHub, making Umbraco more open-source-friendly and making it easier for the global community of developers to create issues and make pull requests.

Besides the free CMS, Umbraco’s offer of products expanded in 2015 to include Umbraco Cloud, a product providing secure and updated hosting through Microsoft Azure. Umbraco Heartcore, the headless CMS solution released in 2019, is running on Umbraco Cloud.

Umbraco CMS can be used for complex solutions. It provides third-party integration, a powerful audit trail, rollback, and scheduling functionality. Its use is not bound by any templating which makes it flexible in design and functionality but on the other hand it means longer effort in development and in-depth planning.

This CMS has a powerful built-in search engine and user management. Another positive point is the availability of page previews on different devices which makes content management more mobile. Umbraco also supports multi-sites and multilingual.

Some of the international companies using Umbraco CMS are: Veterans CrisisLine, Marie Curie Library, International Tennis Federation, and Johnnie Walker.

Key Umbraco features?

Here are some of Umbraco’s main features:

  • Stable, secure, fast, and powerful;

  • Preview content before publishing across several devices such as desktop, tablet, and mobile, and landscape and portrait views too;

  • Built-in image cropper and focal point manager;

  • Built-in search tool;

  • Built-in form builder, no coding required (paid feature);

  • Manage CMS users’ levels of access;

  • Schedule content;

  • Easy version control, auditing, and rollback with a mouse click;

  • Media library for your photos, videos, images, and documents with option for folder organization;

  • Easy editing of all content;

  • Multilingual support;

  • Multisites support;

  • SEO-friendly URLs;

  • Plenty of additional secure content apps, plugins, and modules.