The Umbraco community has grown enormously since I personally joined it in 2009. Most people in the community were on Twitter and it wasn’t too hard to keep up with the who’s who at the time. With over 200,000 active community members these days that’s a bit harder to keep up with...

Over the years we’ve professed that Our Umbraco is the community hub for Umbraco related activity, the place where everything is “happening”. But in reality, there are many many more brilliant things happening all over the web that are difficult to find for a new Umbracian who is joining our little colony.

We’ve also developed a vocabulary over the years, that is a bit mysterious to newcomers - how would you even learn what something like karma even means? What’s an MVP? Badges? Huh?

The grand reveal 🎉

Instigated by some top-notch work from community member Anders Bjerner, we recently started imagining and building new sections for Our. We couldn’t have done it without you, Anders, and YOU, community members who’ve given us input along the way - H5YR!

You may have heard the rumblings on Twitter and you may have seen us reach out to people to ask for things like their favorite Umbraco related blogs on the web.. Today we’re ready for the first big reveal: the brand new Umbraco Community Hub is now live!

Yes, you read that right; this is the first launch. We’re only just getting started!

The 7 brand new features:

1: Gitter Chat

One of the more prominent new features is the usage of and integration with Gitter; an open chat system to provide an easily accessible chat around open source projects.



There are plenty of libraries available to integrate Gitter chat in other systems and the contents get indexed by Google. This makes it a perfect fit for our community, it being open and searchable.

We have a live integration on Our Umbraco, meaning that whenever people are chatting on Gitter, the latest messages will update the current page immediately through some wonderful SignalR magic.

The purpose of the chat is not to replace the Forum and make it a live help channel. The purpose is to make it easier for community members to discuss topics which require a lot of back and forth.

We will be using it, for example, to do chat with people attending hackathons and have more direct access for quick questions about contributing to the Umbraco CMS.