What is New in Umbraco 8?

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Following its launch in 2019, we are now starting to see the first wave of Umbraco 8 websites! CSI Media’s new Umbraco 8 website for KW Kitchens will go live in Feb 2020, with plenty more due to launch over the course of 2020

Umbraco is already one of the world's most popular CMS platforms and is increasingly being chosen by big brands for their website CMS or enterprise-system platform, accounting for its versatility, integration possibilities, and high-level performance.

But what's new in Umbraco 8, and how will the new features help you as a Content Editor / Digital Marketer?

Hopefully, as an official Umbraco Gold Partner, we can give you an insight Umbraco 8’s three main new features: Infinite Editing Content Apps and Language Variants: all designed to enhance your content-editing experience, make website management more fun and a whole lot easier!

(For those of you whose website isn’t built on Umbraco, you can check out our blog article written earlier this year, “What is Umbraco?” for a wee glimpse into the popular CMS.)

Infinite Editing

Do you spend a lot of your time hysterically clicking around your CMS to edit a piece of content or image that lives on the same page? Well, you’ll be delighted to know that’s all changed with Umbraco 8’s Infinite Editing…

Now, you can edit pieces of content and media in one place without having to navigate to different areas of the CMS, like in previous versions. This means that you can be editing a page on your website, select an image or piece of content on that page, and make specific changes right there.

This is on top of the new UI which enables you to nonchalantly glide through the CMS with sheer ease!

Content Apps!

Content Apps is an exciting new feature that will enable you to access contextual information related to the page you are working with in the CMS. Each app appears as a tab on the page you are editing.

Let’s say you’d like an insight into user behaviour - we could create an app so that key metrics for a page are pulled from Google Analytics and readily accessible in your admin, whether it’s source of traffic, Page Views, Average Time Spent on Page, Exit Rate, etc.

So, you’d see a tab for “Traffic Source” on each individual page. Insightful! Plus, it saves you the time of navigating around Google Analytics.

Depending on your setup, we may also be able to do something even more advanced and useful. We can (potentially) configure your Umbraco to display super-granular-level data relating to each ‘page version’. So, for example, version 1 of the page may have a 68% Bounce Rate but following a few content updates and a ‘re-publish’, version 2 is now recording a much improved, Bounce Rate of 41%. Important data!

You will need a developer to create Content Apps for your website or integrate any pre-existing apps. Here at CSI, we can advise on suitable apps, develop and implement them for you!

Language Variants

Does your company operate in multiple markets across the world? Well, if so, then you’re going to love Language Variants, the third new feature in Umbraco 8.

Language Variants allow you to have variants of the same content all in one project.

For example, let’s say you’re well established in the UK and German markets. You could have different versions of your content - English and German - side-by-side in the Umbraco CMS, helping to make sure that content is consistent.

Wunderbar!

Your developer can also set mandatory languages - this defines which languages need to be in place before you publish your content. Using our previous scenario, let’s say English and German are set to mandatory languages. Content editors will not be able to publish pages if English and German content hasn’t been entered.

Now, you may also be starting to grow in Sweden, so we can configure a third language variant for you to enter Swedish content. However, it’s not a full-blown operation just yet, so we’re not setting Swedish as a mandatory language. Therefore, pages won’t need Swedish content in order to be published.

Does Your Company Need a New Website?

CSI Media is an award-winning web design agency.

We design and develop websites that deliver outstanding user experiences and can match you with the best CMS for your requirements - we work with Umbraco, Magento and Sitecore.

Contact us today via enquiries@csimedia.net or 0344 873 0073.