Here I am again, for the third time at Umbraco CodeGarden. For those who do not know what it is, it's the yearly Umbraco developer conference, this year celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Before going to sleep after a long day I just wanted to post my recap of the day.

The Keynote

Some numbers on the "size" of the community:

• almost 200k active developers on the community site
• almost 300k active public installation of Umbraco
• over 200k installation of Umbraco v7 in the last year

In addition to giving all these figures, Niels also highlighted some popular packages contributed by the community (Vorto for 1 to 1 translations, NuPicker and Nested Contents for enhanced editors experience, LePainter a visual grid editor and BookShelf to provide inline contextual help to the backoffice).

Other announcements included the features that are coming with v7.3 (automatic load balancing, a new API library as first path to get rid of legacy API, authentication based on ASP.NET Identity, which enables twitter, Google, Active Directory and 2 factor authentication via Google) and future features that are currently being experimented like the new cache layer, a new content type editor and a full-fledged REST API based on the HAL standard.

Roadmap panel

Immediately after the keynote, 5 members of the core dev team answered questions on specific pain-points that users would like addressed in future (v8) releases, and also unveiled HQ's priorities:

• Improving the UX
• Fresh start on the code (getting rid of the decennial original legacy API)
• Bringing many features of Umbraco.com (the SaaS platoform) to on-premises installations (like migrations from environments, syncronization of content and so on)
• Segmentation, segments-based content variations and personalization

Contributing to the core

After the usual organic lunch, the afternoon started with some Git tips to better contribute to the core of Umbraco and make maintainers' life easier:

• First squash all commits into one, making sure no typos or "missed file" kind of commits are sent in the pull request. The suggestion was to use the git rebase --interactive command.
• Then making sure our pull request is based on a pretty recent version of the repository, using the following process:
  • Track upstream git remote add upstream ...
  • Fetch upstream git fetch upstream
  • Rebase your commit on top of the latest version of the repo git rebase upstream/dev-7
• And finally, merge all the conflicts that might arise before doing the pull request

Make Editors Happy

As last year, one of the main tenet of the conference is reminding us developers that also content editors deserve love, and with Umbraco 7 it's very easy to craft data editors tailored to custom editing expectations and flows. But even without going down the path of customization with AngularJS, many things can be done also with the core editors and a few selected packages: group properties in tabs, remove from the RTE everthing tha editors do not need, provide contextual help (maybe consider the uEditorNotes package) and finally use NuPicker and Nested Content to provide a better experience when choosing node from the tree and when creating list of items.

How to sell Umbraco

The day ended with an amazing talk by Theo Paraskevopoulos with tips on how to sell Umbraco as platform when doing projects. Unfortunately the slides are not published yet, but will update the post as soon as they are.

Some impressive facts I didn't know about: NFL uses Umbraco for one of they sub-sites (http://operations.NFL.com) and Umbraco, with 0,7%, is the 5th platform in term of marketshare in the industry of CMS, after WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and DotNetNuke (1%); all the rest of the CMS account for 1.4%.

Conclusion

The evening ended with a protest march through the streets of Copenhagen, which unfortunately I had to miss due to a broken toe, caused by an injury in a recent triathlon race.

The first day was not super-tech, but more soft-skill and UX oriented, but very useful anyway, especially for me since my reason to be here is to get a feeling of where Umbraco is going in the future to see if it can be used as CMS platform at my workplace.

Tomorrow it looks like a more tech-focused agenda.

NBAs soon as slides and video are published, I'll update the post.