Umbraco CodeGarden

Every year at the beginning of summer, the Umbraco headquarters calls for the community to go to their home of Copenhagen for CodeGarden, the annual Umbraco conference. This year’s CodeGarden was the ninth edition and, with 350 participants, the largest event in the Umbraco world.

Almost half of the participants took part for the first time, which clearly reflects the dynamic growth of the community.

byte5 travelled to the Danish capital with a team of four and who stayed for four days to talk with their Umbraco peers, learn new things in numerous sessions and – that was a real premiere – to give a session on the main stage.

Our colleagues Theresa Danowski and Iria Muñiz Corral spoke for 45 minutes to an international audience about a special case study by the name of “Umbraco can save your life”, which discusses Umbraco as the basis for an intranet solution in the medical environment.

It doesn’t always have to be ordinary websites. The byte5 women also received high praise for the refreshing presentation, which was created with a lot of effort on the digital drawing board in the weeks before.

The talk by our nice colleagues from Rockpool Digital, who reported on the implementation of one of the most popular Umbraco websites to date, was also extremely interesting: the official website for Felix Baumgartner’s Red Bull Stratos project. The project successfully processed 22 million visits within a short time and thus impressively demonstrated what is possible do realise with Umbraco, an intelligent architecture and the use of content distribution.

One of the most important topics of this year’s CodeGarden was certainly the success of Umbraco 6, which was launched at the beginning of the year, and which is now available as version 6.1. It is being used for almost all new installations worldwide. A fate like the one of unfortunate version 5 does not threaten the new edition – quite the contrary: Since this time the accessibility of the source code was very important, the community has provided the professional Umbraco core development team with bug fixes, improvements and new features at record levels over the past few months.

As for Codegarden, the keynote provided an outlook on Umbraco 7, which may be published in autumn. At its core will be a completely new backend that will not only be chic and user-friendly, but can also be easily expanded by frontend developers and editors with new functionalities without having to intervene in the programming.

Niels‘s keynote can be viewed under this link.

Umbraco is continuing to make daily work with websites as pleasant as possible for developers, web designers and users. And we are happy to be able to contribute to the creative development of this unique content management system: for instace with this year’s umbOktoberfest on 30 August 2013 – at which we will once again welcome Umbraco founder Niels Hartvig as keynote speaker.

Tickets for umbOktoberfest are available on Eventbrite.

PS: We thank Douglas Robar for providing the wonderful pictures. All pictures from CodeGarden 2013 are on Flickr.