Umbraco has announced the general availability of Umbraco 15, its open-source web content management system (CMS) built on .NET 9.

Hundreds of thousands of government, financial, retail and professional services websites are built on the Umbraco CMS platform. Over a quarter of a million people actively contribute to the open-source software, which is maintained by a commercial organisation with a well-established global network of digital agency partners building sites for clients in Europe, UK, and the US.

Announcing the availability of the latest enhancements to the platform, Umbraco CEO, Mats Persson said, “A growing number of our partners and larger organisations are building enterprise-level websites and digital experiences on Umbraco. We are committed to continually enhancing the platform’s performance to deliver the scalability, security, and multi-site management demanded by large international organisations.”

Umbraco 15 implements Microsoft’s brand-new .NET HybridCache to optimise performance of content-heavy websites that would otherwise load thousands of pages into memory. Using hybrid caching to ‘lazy-load’ content, a site with 25,000 webpages in 24 languages reduced boot time, and resource footprint, even with increased traffic. Umbraco 15 also introduces a new navigation service, to ensure non-cached content is still readily available.

“Umbraco 15 iterates on the extensibility provided by the re-architected backoffice introduced in Umbraco 14 and enhances the performance, scalability, and security of enterprise-level sites built on the platform,” comments Umbraco CTO, Filip Bech-Larsen. “Aligning with Microsoft’s .NET and C# release cycles future-proofs the Umbraco platform. This offers our digital agency partners the reassurance that their customers’ sites will continue to benefit from the latest, most secure and performant underlying .NET framework, with the longest possible support.”

Organisations that maintain international websites, where multiple content editors are updating pages in their local language, will also benefit from the Block Level Variations included in Umbraco 15. This allows content editors to manage multi-lingual content blocks, while role-based permissions control the degree of variation allowed, to maintain brand consistency. “Global brands can use Block Level Variations to maintain localised content without duplicating entire web pages, while still adhering to global brand guidelines. The process is much more efficient and flexibility is greatly increased,” enthuses Bech-Larsen.

The headless capability in the core Umbraco CMS already allows brands to deliver consistent content to multiple digital touchpoints via the Content Delivery API, and content management capabilities via the Management API. To enhance the security of API requests, Client Credentials have been introduced in Umbraco 15.

“Client Credentials make it easier for developers to set up rules that authenticate, or lock-down requests to the headless API layer, giving granular control over which users, or apps can request, or edit online content,” explains Bech-Larsen.

Key features of Umbraco 15 include:

• Umbraco 15 users benefit from the latest security, scalability and performance enhancements of the underlying Microsoft .Net 9 and C#13 frameworks
• Addition of HybridCache improves performance, and resource footprint of content-heavy websites
• Improved support for advanced caching strategies, and load-balanced setups, to benefit high-traffic sites
• Headless capabilities within the core CMS enable consistent content to be delivered to websites, apps, smartwatches, kiosks and smart speakers.
• Client Credentials improve management of authenticated API requests, without requiring additional coding
• Block Level Variants ease management of multi-lingual sites while maintaining global brand consistency
• Tiny MCE has been replaced with a new text editor based on open-source rich text editor, TipTap, improving content editing, and ensuring out-of-the-box license compliance
• Custom extensions can be built and managed with browser technology, such as web components, allowing digital agencies to build tailor-made solutions more efficiently for their clients.