After registration, and some catching up with old friends, it was time for the opening keynote from the Chief Unicorn, Niels Hartvig, and the Umbraco team. The atmosphere was buzzing with anticipation.

Niels and Umbraco CTO, Jacob Midtgaard-Olesen, outlined their plans using a clear roadmap, including what is happening now, what will be coming next and what is expected later.

The announcements for upcoming features included:

A new rich text editor editing experience, similar to that used on Medium

A new block-based editor to make it easier to build landing pages

New guidelines for documentation to ensure it is a first-class feature of any new Umbraco functionality

One of the biggest announcements, however, was the plan to move Umbraco to .NET Core, ensuring the platform keeps up-to-date with the latest technology in the next chapter of the CMS.

The roadmap went on to outline:

Now:

Final feature release of Umbraco 7

API corrections for Umbraco 8.1

Support for content migration from Umbraco 7 to 8

Umbraco 8 Headless (Q3 2019)

Next:

Multi-environment deploy tool for Umbraco

Better support for grid-based editing

Better overview and tracking of media usage in content

Later:

Moving Umbraco to .NET Core

The schedule

As always, there were some very interesting talks scheduled at the 2019 event, both technical and not, but there were a few that really caught my attention:

"Grids All The Way Down" by Rachel Andrew: exploring the problems that the new CSS grid and subgrid display properties aim to fix

exploring the problems that the new CSS grid and subgrid display properties aim to fix "Building Umbraco with a Little Help from Our Friends" by Sebastiaan Janssen, Jan Skovgaard and Kenn Jacobsen: how and why you should contribute to Umbraco

how and why you should contribute to Umbraco "You don't know GIT" by Damiaan Peeters: an overview and explanation of the most important GIT commands and when to use them

There were plenty more great talks, so for the full schedule please visit the Codegarden19 website.

In addition to the scheduled talks, there were also some new areas that I took advantage of. The new "Dream Corner - Collaborate and Share with HQ" was a chance to meet members of Umbraco HQ and other community members to share thoughts and ideas about Umbraco.

"Draw with Niels": conceptualise your ideas with UI/UX guru, Niels Lyngsø

conceptualise your ideas with UI/UX guru, Niels Lyngsø "Contribute to your Favourite CMS": demonstrating pull requests (PRs) for updating code, translations, documentation and more for Umbraco CMS with Sebastiaan Janssen

demonstrating pull requests (PRs) for updating code, translations, documentation and more for Umbraco CMS with Sebastiaan Janssen "Start a meetup/festival": discussions about creating meetups and festivals in the community with Ilham Boulghallat

The awards

Codegarden is also about rewarding companies, contributors and developers who are doing something special with Umbraco.

Every year, there is an opportunity to enter projects and solutions for an award (such as Best Custom Solution or Best Designed Site) but I am always excited for the Umbraco Most Valuable People (MVPs).

Within the announcements for MVPs, our very own Senior Software Developer, Emma Garland, had her Umbraco MVP status renewed! A fantastic achievement and a well-deserved award.

Can you spot yourself or anyone else in the MVP wall banner who has helped you over the years?