On Thursday and Friday last week, we hosted one of our favorite events each year: the community teams visit.
During these few days, we welcome all members in community teams to come over to Umbraco HQ to spend a few days with us, and mostly spend a few days together. Being in the same location together is a perfect time to have great in-person chats, cross pollination between teams and, by lucky coincidence: a chance for each team to meet Umbraco's new CEO in his first week at Umbraco.
The overall theme for this year was "back to basics." We all thought about the people who are new to Umbraco and our community. We wondered how we could make their introduction super smooth. For each team the question was: "How can your team have the most impact in furthering their enjoyment of our products and community?".
Below is a few excerpts written by each team about their experience of the visit.
The diversity, equity and inclusion team
The DEI team had a fantastic couple of days and were delighted to spend time working on our upcoming initiatives. We looked at structuring the upcoming year into four diversity releases for, focusing on the experiences of the neurodiverse, those from under-represented genders, people of colour, and one community-driven topic. Each release will include various content like blog posts, appearances at events, and on podcasts, with defined tasks—some mandatory, others optional. The DEI team look forward to acting as cheerleaders, encouraging community-driven or supported content creation. We also identified potential crossovers with UmbraCoffee, uProfile, CandidContributions, Skrift, and 24days. We were super excited to set about planning, set deadlines, assign responsibilities, and start creating content.
The backoffice community team
We met up at the Community Teams Visit for our third and final time. We have now retired the team following the successful launch of Bellissima along with Umbraco 14. Our legacy remains and to solidify that, we have prepared a handover document for Umbraco HQ. This document includes our recommendations on how to aid the wider community in adopting Bellissima. We suggest helping users jump to V14+ by offering plenty of documentation. We have advised expanding upon the roadmap and highlighting the implications of sticking with older versions. We hope that in doing so we have left Umbraco HQ with a platform to be built upon for future generations of the CMS.
The sustainability team
The team, committed to promoting conscious, sustainable development of Umbraco, aims to lead in creating greener CMS solutions by emphasizing transparency, collaboration, progressiveness, and responsibility. We discussed our successful sustainability package, which has seen over 1000 downloads and plans for further improvements, including more holistic carbon ratings and enhanced configuration options.
The visit also included a meeting with Umbraco HQ to align on sustainability goals and a field trip to Energinet to learn about their role in Denmark's energy grid and data management. We reflected on our achievements over the year, including running a highly attended webinar and launching a sustainability competition. All in all, a very productive visit with more than enough inspiration to work on many more things in the upcoming year.
The package team
The Package Team was recently renewed, so we kicked off the visit with our first 'formal' meeting with all new members. After a round of introductions, we shared our personal goals, ideas, and set a collective focus for the team. With Umbraco 14 now released and more people exploring the new tech-stack, Extension API, and migrating existing projects/packages, we discussed how the team can best support this transition. The main concern seems to be the time and effort required to start building extensions with the (new) backoffice. To address this, we aim to make the transition as straightforward as possible by improving documentation, providing scaffolding, and offering example projects.
In line with the "back to basics" theme, we reviewed the current documentation and identified areas where additional guidance would benefit new users. We also started drafting tutorials and guides for some of the new concepts. Over the course of the two days, we learned more ourselves by continuing the migration of the UI Examples package to v14 and exploring tooling and templating solutions to make getting started easier. Our efforts have been structured into a public project board, and we’re open to suggestions through issues on the Umbraco.Packages repository. It was a productive two days, and we’re excited about the year ahead!
The core collaborators team
We had a good look at all the things that could hinder people from contributing to Umbraco's code base. During the process we realized that the contributing documentation is expanding especially now that there are multiple repositories to contribute to. In order to facilitate the different repositories, we'll be moving to the actual Umbraco documentation side, making the "contributing" section there a bit less confusing as well. Docs will be guided by videos to make it easier to follow.
We love contributions and can be better at celebrating the people who do contribute, we investigated some tooling to make it easier to share across multiple platforms. We're also thinking of events where we teach people how to contribute, be it brand new developers who have never touched Umbraco before or existing people.
Speaking of events: Hacktoberfest is coming up and a good bit of preparation is in progress now, more on that soon.
And more..
Throughout the first day, new CEO Mats Persson sat with each of the teams to introduce himself and to learn more about what they do. As community teams, we're so happy that his first week featured a full day of community people who are (true to our company values) Friendly and Hungry to help out.
At Umbraco HQ we are so very thankful for community members and their respective companies who give up their time to help us grow and learn. So treating them to great food and drinks during this visit is the very least thing we can do. Between some street food at Storms, some "lawn games" at Fransons, a lovely dinner at Madklubben, and a special Friday bar at HQ, we had a great time getting to know each other.. AND win some "medals".
A huge thank you
On behalf of Umbraco HQ, we would like to send a huge "SuperTak" to everyone who came along and participated so passionately. We feel so lucky to have the community teams input at all times. We're very much looking forward for the new initiatives discussed to come to fruition.
If you meet any of the team members in the wild, be it online or in person, give them a big high five as well, and maybe you want to discuss any of their specialist topics with them too, to help make the Umbraco project the best it can be.
Written by: Sebastiaan Janssen
Published: September 9, 2024