Steve and myself recently attended CodeGarden 2015 in Copenhagen, Denmark. CodeGarden is the annual conference for the popular, open source CMS, Umbraco and you can see my preview to the event here.

The conference

Across three days there were talks, discussions and workshops for individuals who are working with or interested in Umbraco.

I am not going to look at the talks or presentations, but I am going to look at the future of CodeGarden and some useful packages that I had found as a result of visiting the event.

The future of CodeGarden

It was the biggest conference to date, breaking records year after year for numbers of visitors.

It does, however, seem that the venue is no longer suitable for the conference, and it looks like the Umbraco HQ team will be moving the event to a larger and more adequate venue near the new Umbraco offices.

Why move CodeGarden?

CodeGarden is very popular with a wide range of skillsets for visitors. After discussions in the open circle, it appears that the venue is moving to:

reduce venue hire costs

reduce ticket costs

increase the number of tracks from two to up to six (potentially)

use smaller rooms to give new and upcoming speakers the chance to take part

introduce commerce into a town/city that would previously have not received it

allow more attendees

There will also be a dedicated team member who will organise the 2016 event, giving the core team time to focus on Umbraco itself.

I am sure there will be more news and updates over the coming weeks and months about the future of the event, so I will update you where possible.

New packages

Whilst attending a talk by Dave Woestenborghs, "Make your editors happy", I found some amazing packages that I had previously not been aware of...

Nested Content by Lee Kelleher

Lee Kelleher was voted MVP again for 2015, and as a regular umBristol member (which Lee organises), I was pleased to hear more about his latest package, Nested Content.

Nested Content is described as a "new list editing property editor for Umbraco 7+", which is quite similar to existing editors like Archetype and Embedded Content.

Nested Content, however, uses document types in Umbraco to power the data. And with a much preferred user interface compared to Archetype, it is definitely something I will consider using on our next Umbraco project.

Find out more about Umbraco Nested Content.

Vorto by Matt Brailsford

Another 2015 MVP, Matt Brailsford, has come up with a package, Vorto, that wraps other editors to allow multilingual editing.

Vorto allows you to edit content on a single node in various languages that your Umbraco website supports, a real gap in the Umbraco CMS as it currently stands (although functionality for future Umbraco releases is to support multilingual sites).

Find out more about Umbraco Vorto.

uEditorNotes by Marc Goodson

Finally, Marc Goodson has produced a fantastic yet simple package, uEditorNotes that lets you add further descriptive notes between property editors in Umbraco.

Giving content editors further instruction (in addition to descriptions with form labels) is something we have always wanted from Umbraco. This package allows developers to add HTML as a property editor to give additional help and support to content editors when editing content in Umbraco. Perfect!

Find out more about Umbraco uEditorNotes.

To 2016

Hopefully, we will have some Gibe talks, presentations or packages to contribute to the 2016 CodeGarden conference.

In which case, we will no doubt be involved with the 2016 event and thank the organisers of this years event and look forward to seeing them and you next year!