Umbraco-Festival Deutschland Returns!

The German-speaking Umbraco community had been waiting for this day for almost one and a half years, the preparations took the byte5 team months. Umbraco Festival Germany, successor to the umbOktoberfest, had its premiere last Friday and it couldn’t have been more fitting to the colourful community of developers that came to Frankfurt from all over Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other European countries.

Friday, 7.30 am. Behind the skyscrapers surrounding the terrace of Design Offices, the sun just rose and the byte5 team is already working at full steam. Name tags are being sorted, flags that are supposed to show everyone arriving what this day will be about are being put up. Umbraco, the world’s friendliest CMS, made its way to Bankenviertel, the centre of the city.

The programme is supposed to be the best one yet and it is so extensive it will be just about doable in one day. For nine hours, Umbraco experts from all over Europe will be discussing everything that is moving the community and everything that could be moved in Umbracoverse in the past months.

Søren Spelling Lund, Microsoft MVP and founder of uCommerce, discusses solutions for moving sites and packages to Umbraco Cloud. Dutch Umbraco developer, Jeffrey Shoemaker, talks about how Umbraco can be made safer in every day life. Bilingually, Theo Paraskevopoulos and Kasper Koslowski of British Gold Partner Growcreate present all existing options in personalising your Umbraco. Opten AG’s Severin d’Hereuse and Calvin Frei from Switzerland show their package which makes Umbraco multilingual in an instant – which they will upload to our.umbraco within the following hours.

Friday, 11 am. Rune Strand and Mads Rasmussen of the Umbraco headquarter have just given the keynote, now they can enjoy the rest of the festival with a clear head. The two developers had already given the keynote in 2015 and were now surprised by the growth the German Umbraco community has been showing since: “For our keynote, I updated the German numbers and even though, there is only a small part of the Umbraco community In Germany, I was impressed with how much has changed in only one and a half years”, says Strand on the fact that the number of active sites has risen from 5000 in 2015 by 1000 sites in 2017. According to the statistics on the community site our.umbraco, the unique visitors from Germany grew by 10.000 people. Now it will be the main aim to keep this tendency.

For this objective, the German festival with its new name and its new concept is best suited according to the project manager: “When comparing Umbraco festival with umbOktoberfest, it is safe to say that it gained a good amount of quality. Additionally, moving the festival to spring makes the trip to Frankfurt an even more exciting time”, says Strand. “Renaming the festival was a good move on byte5’s end, as the new name makes the festival’s mission clearer. It shows that Umbraco is a professional option on the CMS market and that the community knows what it’s doing. By doing that, it’s living the open source spirit”.

Friday, 7 pm. Slowly, the sun is setting behind the clouds on the roof terrace. Christian Wendler’s byte5 team has time to relax eventually as the festival moves its focus from the main programme to the evening programme. Inside, the festival is praised highly. “Our instinct to consider the last years’ feedback even more was the right decision”, Wendler says happily about the praise concerning the programme. “A lot of participants were surprised by how much they can take from our event, both in regards to having the opportunity to spend time with the international community and especially when it comes to the technical side. Exactly this was the objective we had in mind and we achieved it”, he says. “Though, without the teamwork the byte5 employees showed, our festival would have not been running as smoothly as it did”, Wendler emphasises. Meanwhile, the byte5 team is inside preparing the last highlight of the day with which byte5 apprentice and “The Voice of Germany” finalist Michel Schmied will prove that byte5 has even more to offer after 12 hours of festival. The small gig he plays with his band colleague Raffaele Angelo Tangredi is the perfect way to end this day that has been all about the diversity of the Umbraco community.

Friday, 22 pm. The after party of the festival is slowly coming to an end and the remaining participants get ready to end their evening here in the party district of town. The mirror inside Umbraco community legend and event photographer Douglas Robar’s camera clicks for the last time, the last Umbraco cocktail is drunk. The developer conference was a full success. Thanks to a great community which makes the world’s friendliest CMS what it is.

Did you miss this year’s festival? All session were filmed and will be uploaded shortly to our YouTube channel.

For more photos, go to Douglas Robar's Flickr.

Fotos des Festival >>

Alle Session-Videos >>