Community Blogs

Introducing Umbraco AI Copilot Workspace

The RC for Umbraco AI Copilot Workspace just went out on our open release branches, so it’s time to properly introduce it. If you’ve used Umbraco...

Umbraco Automate: Developer Automation or Marketing Automation?

Umbraco Automate is pitched at marketing teams, but it's developer tooling, and that's fine. What would have to change, from someone who's watched Kentico do it.

What the back office tells you that the pitch never will

This is the first of these. Every week I will write about one specific way digital work drifts from what it was supposed to achieve, usually because of a decision made years earlier by someone who has since left.

I built a free, self-hosted PWA package for Umbraco, because the alternative bills per site

I've used Umbraco for more than a decade. An unexpected reflection.

I just got back from vacation, and, for the first time in ages, I managed to ditch my laptop. So no Visual Studio, no migrations and no coding whatsoever. No people asking me “can you just…?”. It felt pretty good to unplug for a bit. I wasn’t mentally writing code the whole time, and I definitely didn’t set out to think about Umbraco over my morning coffee.And I was planning on reading blog posts, listen to a few podcasts, reading the docs, etc. But the terrible mobile connection in France prevented that. So I kicked back, soaked up some sun, and enjoyed the joy of doing nothing productive (and a beer here of there), my mind wandered back to it anyway. Because this holiday made me look back and reflect at the last couple of years somehow. Maybe it was the lack of a laptop that made me a look back…I’ve been working with Umbraco for 10+ years now. I started somewhere around 2012 or 2013, with Umbraco 4. In that time, I’ve watched versions come and go, seen the platform shift in big ways, and watched the community explode to what it is today. And I’ve wrangled my way through more projects and upgrades than I care to count.Thinking about that is weird. I never expected, back when I started, that I’d still be talking about Umbraco a decade later. It became part of my career, a source of major learning, and eventually even something I started writing about.So while I was taking a break, I found myself reflecting on this whole adventure. Not just on the version numbers, but on how the platform changed—and, honestly, how I changed right alongside it.

Expanding the backoffice search in Umbraco - Highlighting lesser known Umbraco features

Recently, I started using Erik-Jan Westerndorp's community package "Heading". on a project. It’s one of those packages that solves a very specific problem really neatly. In this case, the client wanted editors to be able to choose the heading level for a title on an element. So, for example, one image block might need an H2, while another might need an H3, depending on where it sits on the page. The package worked great for that. But, as often happens, solving one problem uncovered another. Not long after, the client came back with a new bit of feedback: I can’t search for the custom title I’ve added. And honestly, my first reaction was: surely that should just work? So I gave it a try - and they were right. The backoffice document search was only finding results based on the page name, not on values stored in custom fields. Searching by page name returns the page Searching by page title returns no results The first thing I did was check the internal index — and the title field was there, so that allowed me to cross off one possible issue. So the content was being indexed - it just wasn’t being searched by the backoffice search. I asked a few colleagues about it, and the general feeling was that this probably wasn’t something you could change. The assumption was that Umbraco backoffice search just searches a predefined set of fields and that was that. Still, it felt like there had to be a way. And there is. The Missing Piece: UmbracoTreeSearcherFields It turns out this is already supported and documented, but it was a feature I hadn’t come across before. Since I suspect I’m not the only one, it’s worth highlighting here: Backoffice Search - A guide to customization of Backoffice Search That article introduced me to UmbracoTreeSearcherFields, which controls the indexed fields used by backoffice search. By replacing it with a custom implementation, you can expand the list of searchable fields. My first attempt looked like this: public class CustomUmbracoTreeSearcherFields(ILanguageService languageService) : UmbracoTreeSearcherFields(languageService), IUmbracoTreeSearcherFields { public new IEnumerable<string> GetBackOfficeDocumentFields() { return new List<string>(base.GetBackOfficeFields()) { "title" }; } } I restarted my environment, tried again… and it still didn’t work. Backoffice search could still only find the page by name. The Catch: Variant Field Names After taking a closer look at the index, the reason became clear: the field key wasn’t simply title. Because the property had language variants, the indexed field name includes the language ISO code. So instead of hardcoding a single field name, I updated the implementation to generate the variant field names dynamically. That also makes it more future-proof — if new languages are added later, search continues to work without any code changes. Here’s the updated version: public class CustomUmbracoTreeSearcherFields(ILanguageService languageService) : UmbracoTreeSearcherFields(languageService), IUmbracoTreeSearcherFields { private static readonly string TitleAlias = PublishedModelHelper.GetModelPropertyAlias((Page x) => x.Title); public override IEnumerable<string> GetBackOfficeDocumentFields() { return base.GetBackOfficeDocumentFields().Concat(GetVariantFieldNames(TitleAlias)); } private IEnumerable<string> GetVariantFieldNames(string alias) => languageService.GetAllAsync().GetAwaiter().GetResult().Select(l => $"{alias}_{l.IsoCode.ToLowerInvariant()}"); } And with that in place, the backoffice search started returning results based on the custom title value as well. Why I’m sharing this This is one of those things that’s probably obvious once you’ve worked with it before, but until then, it’s easy to assume backoffice search is less flexible than it actually is. If you’ve got editors relying on custom fields it’s worth checking whether those fields are included in backoffice search. If they’re already indexed, you may only need to extend UmbracoTreeSearcherFields to make them searchable. A small change, but a very useful one for editors.

Umbraco Codegarden 2026 Day 1: AI, Elements & Community News | manifesto

Explore key takeaways from Day 1 of Umbraco Codegarden 2026, including major product keynotes, AI governance, new Elements features, and the Umbraco Awards.

Setting up Windows Server 2025 for Umbraco

Every time I build a new server I go through the same sequence, and every time I find myself trying to remember what I did last time. So this is my reference for turning a clean Windows Server 2025 instance into something that will happily host Umbraco on IIS and SQL Express, in the order I actually do things.

Why Umbraco 17 Is More Than an End-of-Life Escape

A reusable deploy pipeline for Umbraco Cloud

Create a reusable deploy pipeline for Umbraco Cloud

Assume your software will outlive its end-of-life

We still run an Umbraco v4 site, on purpose. End-of-life is a date on the vendor's calendar, not a fact about your customer's business. Why the version you ship is the one worth designing for, and how to tell a managed risk from plain neglect.

Build a custom Umbraco Automate action

Creating a custom action in Umbraco Automate to pull tags from a blog and display them as hashtags in social connections.