Umbraco CMS: An All-Round Guide

In the world of content management that is dominated by Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft, WordPress and other colossi, Umbraco is a less known but no less efficient CMS. What is so special about the Umbraco CMS and can it become a better fit for your business than big-league players? Read this article to find out.

What Is Umbraco?

A product of a Dutch enterprise, Umbraco CMS was first released in 2000. Since then, this content management system has been a strong market player. Today, more than 17,000 websites work on this platform, including those of Mercedes-Benz, Carlsberg and McDonald’s.

Umbraco is an open-source platform; it’s written in C#, built on Microsoft .NET Framework using ASP.NET and deployed on Microsoft infrastructure.

This CMS is extremely powerful, flexible and extendable, which is why it can run anything from a small site or intranet to complex applications.

Umbraco: What’s under the Hood?

Today, the Umbraco business offering is more than just a CMS. Using Umbraco gives companies access to the following products:

• Umbraco CMS. A free open-source content management system that provides flexibility and smooth content editing.
• Umbraco Cloud. Hosted on Azure, the cloud-based version of the CMS allows companies to quickly start a site, avoid manual upgrading and establish smooth, streamlined workflows.
• Umbraco Uno. Functionality that enables creation of multilayered campaign sites on the fly with pre-built widgets for content structuring and design.
• Umbraco Heartcore. The headless CMS that runs on Umbraco Cloud for consistent content distribution.
• Umbraco Forms. Functionality that enables quick and easy creation of various sign-up and contact forms and questionnaires.

To improve the customer experience, the company also offers Support, which provides customers with the Umbraco team’s knowledge.

As of October 2020, the latest versions of the platform are Umbraco 7 and Umbraco 8.

Unlike many content management systems, Umbraco does not provide a built-in marketing or eCommerce functionality. Instead, the platform enables seamless integration with purpose-built solutions that perform these functions, such as uCommerce, Raptor, Vendr, Storm Marketing and uMarketingSuite.

How Your Business Will Benefit from Umbraco

Like any other CMS platform, Umbraco too has its idiosyncratic advantages. Let’s discuss the positive attributes that help create and support high-quality websites.

Ease of Use and Learning

Umbraco developers enjoy its ease of use and the steep learning curve. Programming engineers can easily integrate solutions with any existing business system because of its flexible architecture. The API provides programmatic access to every CMS feature. Designers have maximum freedom since there are no restrictions or set frameworks for frontend development.

Advanced Content Management

The most important advantage of Umbraco is probably the smooth content management that doesn’t require special knowledge or learning. With this platform, marketers can enjoy simple and friendly content creation and editing. The following factors make it a piece of cake to use:

• An intuitive interface and editing experience
• Editing workflows that are smoothly integrated into the company’s workflows
• Built-in multilingual support and content translating
• The ability to assign roles and rights
• A media library to manage all assets and edit images directly within CMS
• The ability to schedule and preview publishing
• SEO optimization
• Social media marketing