What’s New in Umbraco 8?

Following its launch in 2019, we are now starting to see the first wave of Umbraco 8 websites! CSI Media’s first Umbraco 8 website - for KW Kitchens - will go live in Feb 2020, with plenty more due to launch over the course of 2020.

Umbraco is already one of the world's most popular CMS platforms and is increasingly being chosen by big brands for their corporate website or enterprise platform, on account of its design flexibility, integration possibilities, and high-level performance.

But what's new in Umbraco 8, and how will the new features help you as a Digital Marketer?

Hopefully, as an official Umbraco Gold Partner, we can give you an insight Umbraco 8’s three main new features: Infinite Editing, Content Apps and Language Variants: all designed to enhance your content-editing experience, make website management more fun and a whole lot easier!

(For those of you whose website isn’t built on Umbraco, you can check out our blog article written earlier this year, “What is Umbraco?” for a wee glimpse into the popular CMS.)

Do you spend a lot of your time hysterically clicking around your CMS to edit a piece of content or image that lives on the same page? Well, you’ll be delighted to know that’s all changed with Umbraco 8’s Infinite Editing…

Now you can edit pieces of content and media in one place without having to navigate to different areas of the CMS, like in previous versions. This means that you can be editing a page on your website, select an image or piece of content on that page, and make specific changes right there.

This is on top of the new UI which enables you to nonchalantly glide through the CMS with sheer ease!

See the below video from Umbraco to give you a better idea:

Content Apps is an exciting new feature that will enable you to access contextual information related to the page you are working with in the CMS. Each app appears as a tab on the page you are editing.

Let’s say you’d like an insight into user behaviour - we could create an app so that key metrics for a page are pulled from Google Analytics and readily accessible in your admin, Page Views, Average Time Spent on Page, Exit Rate, etc.

Let's say you want to know the source of traffic, you would see a tab for “Traffic Source” on each individual page.

Insightful! Plus, it saves you the time of navigating around Google Analytics.

Depending on your setup, we may also be able to do something even more advanced and useful. We can (potentially) configure your Umbraco to display super-granular-level data relating to each ‘page version’. So, for example, version 1 of the page may have a 68% bounce rate, but following a few content updates and a ‘re-publish’, version 2 is now recording a much improved bounce rate of 41%.

You will need a developer to create Content Apps for your website or integrate any pre-existing apps. Here at CSI, we can advise on suitable apps, develop and implement them for you!

Does your company operate in multiple markets across the world? Well, if so, then you’re going to love Language Variants, the third new feature in Umbraco 8.

Language Variants allow you to have several variations of content - for example, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, etc. - all in one project.

For example, let’s say you’re well established in the UK and German markets. You could have different versions of your content - English and German - side-by-side in the Umbraco CMS, helping to make sure that content is consistent.

Wunderbar!

Your developer can also set mandatory languages - this defines which languages need to be in place before you publish your content. Using our previous scenario, let’s say English and German are set to mandatory languages. Content editors will be unable to publish pages if English and German content hasn’t been entered.

Now, you may also be starting to grow in Sweden, so we can configure a third language variant for you to enter Swedish content. However, it’s not a full-blown operation in Sweden just yet, so we’re not setting Swedish as a mandatory language. Therefore, Swedish content won't be required in order for pages to be published.

Finally, you can select which content variants you want to publish. For example, if you’re ready to launch in Sweden now - and thus across all your market worldwide - you could click publish and the new page will be published to all your markets worldwide. Or, if you’re only ready to launch in the UK and Germany - two out of your three markets - when you hit publish, the content will only update on the pages relevant to those two markets.  

Here at CSI Media, we LOVE Umbraco.

Our team of 30+ digital specialists design and develop Umbraco websites that deliver outstanding user experiences. We also provide Umbraco upgrades, Umbraco Healthchecks, and website maintenance on a retainer basis.

Contact us today to discuss your project further: