Picture of Technical Director, Emmanuel Tissera, at Codegarden 2025

Umbraco Codegarden turns 20 with its best edition yet

The annual conference in Denmark set the scene for announcements about Umbraco Compose, Umbraco MCP Server, and naming Emmanuel and Mario as MVPs for the fifth and sixth times running!

Emmanuel Tissera

30 June 2025

7 minute read

As the Technical Director at Luminary, having just returned from Codegarden 2025, I'm thrilled to share some insights from the conference. It was a particularly eventful Codegarden for me, as I had the privilege of speaking at the Umbraco Business Summit and representing the MVPs at the Codegarden Keynote. 

This year's Codegarden, marking Umbraco's 20th anniversary, truly felt like the "best edition in Odense yet," bringing together over 1,250 attendees both in-person and online. The energy was palpable, and these announcements reinforce Umbraco's commitment to innovation and adaptability, which aligns perfectly with Luminary's focus on delivering cutting-edge digital solutions.

This year also brought the fantastic news that Mario Lopez and I were both renewed as Umbraco MVPs for the fifth and sixth times running!

Emmanuel Tissera and Mario Lopez with Umbraco award as they are named MVP

MVP Summit

The first-ever Umbraco MVP Summit, held over two days, was a significant gathering that saw over 60 MVPs join forces with 20 members of the Umbraco HQ team. A special acknowledgment goes to the Umbraco DevRel team for organising this collaborative event.

A collage of Umbraco MVPs atttending the Umbraco MVP Summit

The summit commenced with an insightful talk by Matt Brailsford, focusing on the important topic of creating a "neurodivergent-friendly" workplace. The agenda then branched into three deep-dive tracks. Track 1 explored various aspects, from extending the new Bellissima Backoffice to addressing challenges related to version migration. Track 2 was equally comprehensive, concentrating on enhancing Umbraco's training and educational resources and delving into the possibilities of AI integration within the platform. Beyond the structured sessions, the "Hallway Track & Hack" was a vibrant hub of activity, with MVPs actively collaborating on new features for the community website and working on upgrading Skrift.

The two-day summit was not merely about discussions; it was a powerful demonstration of collaboration, connection, and a collective effort to shape the future of Umbraco. 

Three key takeaways emerged from this MVP summit:

  1. Shared Vision - There is a clear and unified vision between Umbraco HQ and the MVPs for the future direction of the platform.
  2. Empowering Users - A strong focus was placed on enhancing the content editor experience and empowering developers with improved tools and capabilities.
  3. Community-Centric Growth - The community remains at the heart of Umbraco's growth, with discussions centred on fostering engagement, mentorship, and broader adoption of the platform.

Business Summit

The Umbraco Business Summit was an invite-only event for Umbraco Partners like Luminary. Hosted by Umbraco CEO Mats Persson, the summit adopted a fresh, dynamic talk-show format, that fostered engaging discussions, showcased global case studies, and inspired action among attendees.

The keynote was delivered by Forrester Principal Analyst Chuck Gahun, who presented on "The Future of Dynamic Experiences & Content Management." His session explored how brands can effectively manage their content and data while leveraging AI-powered dynamic experiences across fragmented channels. Key takeaways from his presentation on the future of content and AI included:

Forrester Principal Analyst Chuck Gahun on stage at the Umbraco Business Summit 2025
  1. Establishing an AI Findability Practice to Fuel Discovery: This emphasises the need for strategies that make content easily discoverable through AI.
  2. Developing Data-Powered Assets: The focus is on creating content that harnesses enterprise-wide knowledge to generate value across the digital ecosystem.
  3. Tuning Technology for Brand, Design, and Data Systems: This highlights the importance of aligning technology with core brand identity, design principles, and robust data management.

Visuals presented during the summit underscored these themes. Discussions highlighted "Content Management Trends in 2025," which included the rise of "Next-Gen Toolkits" for natural language search, visual builders, and Gen-AI content variants, alongside the growing importance of "Distributed Experiences," "Dynamic Experiences," and "Agentic Digital Content Management." These trends suggest a future where web content management interfaces are increasingly augmented by AI agents capable of generating and editing content, and managing content models for team efficiencies.

The summit also touched upon the evolving landscape of enterprise applications, moving towards an "AI-centric" and "composable" design beyond 2025. Data presented indicated that while AI features in CMS were still in early adoption in 2024 (8 out of 30 global technology decision-makers surveyed were using them), the web content technology market is forecasted to outpace the growth of the broader commercial software market through 2027. This signifies a significant opportunity for AI-driven content solutions. A core message was that Gen-AI is ushering in a "knowledge economy," aiming to remove friction between humans, content, and data. The current landscape of content delivery was also discussed, with an almost even split between "API experience delivery" (headless) and "Template delivery," and a smaller portion using a "Hybrid" approach among surveyed decision-makers.

Emmanuel Tissera and Mats Person on stage during the Umbraco Business Summit 2025

Additionally, I was fortunate to be on stage with Mats presenting on the Umbraco Education Program we ran in Sri Lanka. This highlighted Luminary's and Umbraco's broader commitment to community development and social responsibility. There were many Umbraco partner agencies who were keen on following this model to nurture talent in their respective regions.

Codegarden Conference

The standout announcement for me at the start of the three-day conference was the introduction of Umbraco Compose, a new SaaS tool that is a game-changer for building truly composable architectures, allowing us to unify content from diverse sources into a single, cohesive output. This is precisely the kind of flexibility and efficiency we look for when designing solutions for our clients.

However, the real emphasis and what truly resonated with me was Umbraco's significant AI push and the introduction of the Umbraco MCP Server. This standardised interface empowers AI tools to interact seamlessly with Umbraco projects via the Management API, all while respecting existing permissions. This opens up incredible possibilities for automating content workflows and leveraging AI for enhanced personalisation and content delivery – a crucial area for future development at Luminary. It was also interesting to note discussions around the energy requirements of Generative AI during the conference.

The Keynote itself unveiled a host of exciting features, including block-level variation, real-time collaboration, reusable content blocks, a new search abstraction, and official Docker images. I also represented the MVPs as I delivered a summary of the MVP summit during the keynote.

Emmanuel Tissera on stage during the Umbraco Codegarden 2025 Keynote

Umbraco Cloud also saw significant advancements. The new Flexible Environments will provide isolated development spaces, which is fantastic for managing complex projects and ensuring stability. CI/CD v2 promises even smoother deployments, and hostname monitoring will give us greater visibility into domain status. The addition of a new hosting region in Canada is also a welcome expansion. We're also keenly anticipating features like External Login for the Cloud Portal and Request Analytics, which will further streamline our operations. Furthermore, the keynote detailed a clear path to full load balancing and future plans for WAF rule configuration for Cloud projects.

Beyond the core platform, we saw promising updates across the Umbraco ecosystem:

  • Umbraco Engage is evolving with new capabilities, indicating a stronger focus on marketing and engagement tools, including specific talks on leveraging it for customer journeys.
  • Umbraco Commerce and Umbraco Workflow are gaining new features, which will be valuable for e-commerce and content governance projects respectively, with specific talks covering delivering enterprise commerce solutions.
  • Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy & UI Builder are also being enhanced, promising improved user experience and developer efficiency.

Finally, the release of Umbraco 16 brings a stable, lightweight update, featuring the new Tiptap-based Rich Text Editor, which I'm eager to get my hands on. Sessions like "Next-Level Backoffice" (also referring to the Bellisima backoffice) showcased how Umbraco 16 allows for tailoring the editor experience. Looking ahead to Umbraco 17, it's clear that Umbraco is not resting on its laurels, with "Umbraco CMS: Releases, Realities, and Rewriting the Umbraco Lore" debunking myths and outlining the roadmap. We also saw "The Future of (Umbraco) Search" presenting a new abstraction layer for search, decoupling it from Examine.

At Luminary, these updates reinforce our confidence in Umbraco as a robust and future-proof platform. It was a truly inspiring event, offering new ideas applicable even to non-Umbraco projects, and providing valuable networking opportunities. We're excited to integrate these new capabilities into our projects, delivering even more powerful and agile solutions for our clients.

Our Umbraco expertise

Our Umbraco team consists of developers and solution architects and is led by Emmanuel Tissera and Mario Lopez, two of just a handful of Umbraco MVPs in Australia.

Emmanuel Tissera

Emmanuel Tissera

Technical Director, Umbraco MVP

As Technical Director, Emmanuel works closely with our clients while providing leadership and mentoring to the development team.

Mario Lopez

Mario Lopez

Solutions Architect, Umbraco MVP, Optimizely Developer, Mentor

Mario is an experienced .NET & Optimizely developer, and an Umbraco MVP and Certified Master.

Ayu Laksmita

Senior Developer and Mentor

Ayu is an experienced software engineer with expertise in Xperience by Kentico, Sitecore and Umbraco.

Tony Duan

Tony Duan

Solutions Architect & Mentor

Tony is a certified CMS developer across Kentico Xperience and Optimizely, with a strong mastery of complex integrations.

Picture of Front Luminary team member, Jess

Jessica Djauhari

Web Developer

Jess is a quiet-achieving developer with a penchant for perfection.

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