A little over 2 years ago the initial plan was made for how to migrate Umbraco CMS from .NET Framework to .NET Core. The project was codenamed Unicore, and in the following years a community team of the same name was created, multiple RFCs were posted, tough and exciting decisions were made, quite a few things were named and renamed, and 10 pre-releases across Alphas, Betas, and Release Candidates have been released and thoroughly tested. This all leads us to today. I’m proud to introduce the first official release of Umbraco CMS running 100% on .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core – Umbraco 9 is out 🎉!!

New technology – still Umbraco

Umbraco 9 is the fully customizable and editor-friendly open-source CMS updated to run 100% on .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core. The underlying framework has been updated to the latest version of Microsoft’s .NET framework but it is still Umbraco through and through with its main focus on editor friendliness and the goal of continuously making content management simpler. This means that most things should be instantly familiar if you’ve worked with Umbraco before – especially if you’re a content editor.

With the release of Umbraco 9, we’ve ensured that Umbraco can stay on top of all the new features and improvements that are coming for .NET in the future. In fact, it’s the start of a new major release cadence that will follow Microsoft’s LTS releases of .NET and ASP.NET Core. 

It is also the new official version of Umbraco. This means that all feature development will now be done on Umbraco 9 with a new minor release every 6 weeks and patch releases as needed – just like you’re used to from Umbraco 8.

Umbraco 9 provides a solid foundation for a thriving open-source CMS, based on relevant technology, flexible development, and a great editing experience.

So… what are the new benefits of Umbraco 9? Let’s take a look: 

Rocketing performance and scalability

In the last year, fantastic work has been done in Umbraco 8 in order to improve the performance and scalability of the CMS. This work has, of course, been carried over to Umbraco 9 – but there’s even more power in Umbraco 9.  Due to the noticeable performance gains in the new framework, you should see your new Umbraco projects be even faster, less resource-intensive, and more scalable.

Clean architecture 

Being a flexible and highly customizable choice for developers has always been at the core of Umbraco CMS. With Umbraco 9 the developer experience gets another bump in the right direction. Whether you’re contributing to Umbraco or developing projects for a client, you’ll find that the structure and overall architecture have been improved. It’s easier to find what you need and we’ve aligned even more with conventions in the framework such as Configuration and Microsoft Dependency Injection.

More tooling options and cross-platform capabilities

Being a true .NET 5 and ASP.NET Core CMS also means you get a wider choice of how you want to develop with Umbraco and what tools you use. If you’re a Visual Studio Code user, you can now get proper IntelliSense in your Umbraco projects. Visual Studio and Rider are also popular choices and these can be used to full effect as well. Not only do you get more choice and better support for tooling you can also benefit from the cross-platform capabilities built-in to .NET 5. Want to run Umbraco on Mac? Use a Linux server? Or serve Umbraco content from a Raspberry PI? The world is your oyster… or penguin?

The friendliest community on the 🌏

All of this would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the Umbraco open-source community. More than 20 developers have been directly involved in the Unicore community team, helping out with planning, writing RFCs, dedicated work on specific projects, and providing feedback and an Umbraco developer perspective to discussions. 

And it’s not just the Unicore team that’s been hard at work. A staggering 1326 contributions ranging from pull-request, to testing and bug reporting (and much more) have been submitted by 121 community members during the development period (See the full list of credits below). It’s been truly amazing to see the level of engagement! 🎉

And it’s not only the direct open-source contributions to Umbraco 9 that are impressive. Numerous blog posts and videos have been created to share knowledge when trying out Umbraco on .NET 5. People have inspired each other, collaborated, and helped make this a major release that is easier to get started with and thoroughly tested.

Last but not least, a big shout out to all the package developers that have picked up the challenge and made a long list of the most popular community packages available for Umbraco 9 – more than 40 packages are available at launch! Having so many packages, and so much functionality, ready at launch, means it will be much more straightforward to choose Umbraco 9 for your next project.

HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK 🙌 

Getting started with Umbraco 9

If you haven’t done so already, you’re hopefully eager to give Umbraco 9 a spin and there’s ample opportunity to do just that – in fact, you have 2 options:

Spin up Umbraco 9 in Umbraco Cloud

From today, Umbraco 9 is the default version for new projects created on Umbraco Cloud – so why not head on over and create your next project or take a free 14-days trial? 

Umbraco 9 also brings several benefits to Umbraco Cloud projects with an improved project structure, cross-platform development capabilities, new build-steps, and more. The official add-ons, Umbraco Forms, and Umbraco Deploy have also been updated to run on .NET 5 and are part of all your Umbraco Cloud projects. The blob storage provider, powering Umbraco Clouds Media storage, has also been open-sourced, so you can contribute to it and use it in on-premise installations as well. Get the full story in the Umbraco 9 on Cloud blog post.

Install on your own 

You can of course also install and configure Umbraco 9 on your own machine and set up any type of deployment workflow and hosting options you need (as long as they’re .NET 5 compatible 😉). This is now exclusively done with NuGet, via the command line tools or Visual Studios package manager. So if you’ve relied on downloading Umbraco as a .zip and spinning it up that way, there’s a small change here – luckily, there’s plenty of documentation to help you get started:

Get off to a great start with Umbraco 9 documentation

The easiest way to get familiar with the Umbraco 9 setup and installation process is to head over to the official documentation. You can start out directly from Visual Studio like you are used to or try the new command-line tools. Find tutorials and reference documentation and so much more in the new Umbraco 9 documentation.

More than 70% of the documentation has, at the time of writing, been updated for Umbraco 9, so you can find plenty of help and guidance in the many articles, tutorials, and examples available there. And there’s more to come – maybe from you? Like the CMS, the Umbraco documentation is open-source which means you can contribute and help others as you embark on your own Umbraco 9 journey. 

Start using Umbraco 9 today!

The buzz around Umbraco 9 has been immense! With more than 16,000 downloads of the release candidates alone, a sea of blog posts, tutorials, and documentation as well as many of the most popular packages being ready for launch, you can definitely feel confident in spinning up a project in Umbraco 9 today!

No matter how you use Umbraco, version 9 is here to make your Umbraco solutions better and ready for the future. Go on and give it a go 😉

Again, a big resounding thank you and HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK to all the many, many contributors to Umbraco 9. The numbers below are from GitHub only, looking at the available data for the CMS and the Documentation repositories.

Total community PRs: 145 
Total community issues: 148
Total community comments: 1033
Summed up – total community contributions: 1326 🎉

Total number of community contributors: 121 🙌

⭐ = First contribution to any Umbraco repository

For any other regular release of Umbraco, we’d be planting a tree for each contributor to thank them for their efforts. Umbraco 9 is a special release, however, so we thought it would only be appropriate to align the number of trees with the release version: 900 trees for Umbraco version 9.0.0! 🌲🌴🌳