Umbraco is a website Content Management System (CMS) that we know and love at Sectorlight. With its endless list of advantages, we're loyal for a reason.

Firstly, the system is open source which means that no licenses are required and anyone can browse the code source. Secondly, it offers the ease of extensibility. For those of you living outside the world of software engineering, this means that Umbraco has a system design principle that takes future growth into consideration by allowing new functionalities to be added at any time. So, how do we benefit from all this?

It guarantees a seamless and easy to use set up for our clients where they can update and edit copy effortlessly

We can customise any of its existing features as well as add new ones

It gives us total control over the HTML. This allows our in-house digital designers to produce bespoke, creative interfaces that are highly tailored to our clients' needs. Unlike other CMS systems, we are not at all restricted to template designs

Includes useful tools to easily optimise sites for search engine (SEO)

This open source system is supported by an active, growing community and I'm proud to say that I'm a part of it. The latest Umbraco event took place at the end of October, selling out in a few days to over 200 participants from all over the world. Falling just before Halloween this year, the choice of venue was highly appropriate at the very cool and the very creepy Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell. Every year, developers gather for a "Hackathon" where they get their hands dirty in source code and try to squash as many Umbraco bugs as possible. With the support of Umbraco's core team, our group managed to fix 37 software issues.

Day 2 was busy day with talks, workshops and demonstrations. The Keynote started with Niels Hartvig (the 'father' of Umbraco) and Per Ploug who wowed us all with their ideas on Umbraco as a Service and new features coming out in the next release (stay tuned!). We were lucky to listen to a wide range of speakers discuss everything from user experience to graph database and after a day of inspiring talks, Umbraco's core developer Shannon Deminick took the stage to outline the roadmap for Umbraco 8 and beyond. Following this, I can safely say the future of Umbraco is a bright one. Don't miss a beat and check out the roadmap here.

For more videos and slides from the event head on over here.