9. A CMS on the rise
Umbraco has seen its progression soar worldwide. In France, it is developing fast. Get ready!
A promising expanding solution.
Obviously Umbraco is not yet Drupal or WordPress, the leaders on the market. But, in 2013, there was one installation every three minutes with nearly 70’000 registered developers. The community of "Umbracians" is growing fast and the enthusiasm it spurs leads to impressive figures: for 2014, there is mention of one million unique visitors and 185 000 posts on umbraco.org. And those guys do more than just talk and discuss. With around seven new versions and 160 new packages released in the year, there’s no time lost at Umbraco!
Naturally the results are there too, and Umbraco piles on references. In the high-tech sector Microsoft has retained it for the site of its web ASP.NET Framework and the magazine Wired for its English website wired.co.uk. It is also found behind the sites of major brands such as Heinz (heinz.com) or e-commerce websites such as Warner (warnerbros.com.au) and Sony (sonymusicshop.dk). Hey, Mamma Mia! The official site of group ABBA is also Umbraco powered!
After 8 years of existence, Umbraco has imposed itself as the leading open source CMS in Microsoft .NET technology. In line with the main technological trends, it has brought together a solid community of professionals.
Umbraco boasts the figures typical of a rapidly developing open source solution. In 2013, the community of developers increased by 50% and activity on the forum was up 25%. 2014 also promises to be a good year for the Umbraco world.
With the release of Version 7 (code name "Belle"), Umbraco strikes hard: complete rewriting of the application base, new design for the interface, back-office support using mobiles devices, implementation of Angular JS to facilitate adding new functionalities... The work accomplished is impressive, in particular regarding the user-friendliness and graphics aspects. Of course, the philosophy remains unchanged.
And the story continues: the launch of "Umbraco As A Service", code name "Concorde", an online service for hosting Umbraco sites directly in the Cloud is planned for the near future.
Umbraco adepts will enjoy all the advantages of hosting on a virtual machine: adjustment of performance according to the traffic, expandable disk space, etc. Other functionalities will be introduced to make the CMS even more indispensable: alert system, display and logging of modifications made or errors encountered, full access to Umbraco-TV... Coming soon!
Stéphane Gay
Member of the Umbraco Core Team
Independent Internet Consultant. Contributor, member of Umbraco’s core design and development team.
Interview with Stéphane Gay
"Umbraco and France, love one day?"
"Universal Music in Japan… Microsoft in the USA… ABBA in Sweden… Use on just about every continent, with its main developers based in Australia, Denmark and the US, Umbraco seems to be lagging behind in France. Two main reasons to this: Microsoft and the English language.
France, land of freedom and revolution, has never had a really good opinion of Microsoft. Agencies often prefer, by principle, Linux and PHP. Because it is international, Umbraco is essentially documented in English, which is a barrier for many French-speaking developers.
Yet, the fact that the main mobile development tools (Xamarin) are being built around .NET and the C# language owes nothing the chance, but more to the fact that .NET + ASP.NET is today an appealing platform, based on solid foundations (complied language strongly typed C#, MVC…) and open to Open Source tools (MySQL, Git…)
By improving your English skills and setting aside any distrust for Microsoft, what do you find? A CMS back-office that is robust, modular and very open, designed to make life as easy as possible for editors. A front-office that is wide open, efficient, that imposes no constraints regarding the HTML produced and, as such, is therefore particularly suited to keep up with the constant 'responsive/adaptive/...' evolutions.
The learning curve of Umbraco may seem faster than that of other products. If it is not properly configured Umbraco displays… nothing. But this drawback turns into an advantage when, once you have taken the step, no 'default choice' will ever hinder the possibilities for development!"