Codegarden 2025: The developer’s playground

Gary Trimnell, Technical Director and all round digital whizz, headed to Denmark for the 20th anniversary of Codegarden.

If you haven’t heard of Codegarden before, it’s Umbraco’s annual tech conference. It isn’t just key notes and handouts though, it’s an all singing, all dancing tech-fest. There was high-fives, there was Hammerschlagen and there was unicorns.

He touched back down in Bristol armed with some brilliant insights and we’re turning them into a two-part blog mini-series. The first will dive into the tech side of things, the next will help unpack how Umbraco can help tackle those tricky blockers that stand in the way of business transformation and digital acceleration.

So, without further ado, over to Gary and his sharp take on where Umbraco is heading next.

Codegarden 2025 – A developer’s playground

What happens when the world’s most passionate Umbraco minds get together in the middle of summer in Denmark? Innovation, inspiration, and a glimpse into the future of content management and AI.

I had the pleasure of attending this year’s Codegarden, a 3-day tech and innovation extravaganza. This year it marked 20 years of Umbraco and brought together developers, digital experts, and technical leaders from around the world.

As Platinum Partners, we also joined the Umbraco Business Summit prior to the main event, where we received exclusive insights into the platform’s commercial strategy, platform roadmap and partner collaboration.

Overall, Codegarden 2025 showcased how Umbraco is levelling up into a more powerful and mature CMS, well-suited for clients with increasingly complex requirements. Marking a significant step in Umbraco’s evolution, opening the door to more sophisticated use cases while retaining the flexibility and editor experience it’s always been known for.

Here’s a breakdown of the most exciting technical developments I took away from the event:

Umbraco Compose

Over recent years, the digital landscape has seen a strong shift toward headless solutions within a composable architecture, and for good reason. These approaches offer clear advantages over larger, complex monolithic solutions – such as performance, scalability and the ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs.

But, as adoption has grown, so too have the challenges. It was suggested there’s been a rise in “composable regret” - or “MACHlash”. Many organisations are now finding themselves tangled in overly complex, fragmented architectures with poorly connected systems and inconsistent tooling. Leading to increased management overhead, unnecessary complexity, and rising costs, therefore undermining the very benefits composability promised.

The announcement of Umbraco Compose felt like a pivotal moment. Positioned as a middle ground between monolithic platforms and completed decoupled setups. Compose is designed to bring structure and clarity to composable solutions.

It is a powerful new solution for orchestrating integrations between systems and ingesting anything from any source (e.g. CMS, CRM, Commerce) in a clean, structured and scalable way.

It doesn’t just connect systems – it helps teams manage them in a way that feels purposeful and efficient. It’s a solution built with real world complexity in mind.

With a private beta launching in Q3 2025 with a full release in early 2026, Compose is shaping up to be one of the most impactful additions to the Umbraco ecosystems in years. We’re excited to get hands-on with it and will share our experiences as soon as we do.

Umbraco 16: Making life easier for everyone

Umbraco 16, released just ahead of Codegarden, continues to refine the platform’s usability while introducing meaningful updates for developers and administrators. Ahead of the upcoming long-term supported release (v17), Umbraco is doubling down on accessibility , guided by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Editors will notice a calmer, more focused experience thanks to fewer popups, more consistent menu structures, and subtle UI notifications.

On the technical side, the Rich Text Editor TinyMCE has been replaced by Tiptap; a modern, extensible rich text editor that offers a cleaner interface and drag-and-drop toolbar customisation.

Another standout feature is the introduction of Property-Level Permissions, which allows the administrative ability to control the visibility and editior rights for content editors and granular level. This enables more sophisticated role-based editing, supporting complex approval workflows, and helps meet regulatory compliance requirements.

AI in action

AI is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s already transforming how we manage content. According to Forrester 26% of CMS users were already using Gen AI features in 2024, and that number is only growing. At Codegarden, several updates demonstrate how Umbraco is embracing this shift.

One of the standout innovations was the Umbraco MCP Server – an officially supported, open-source tool that connects AI clients to Umbraco using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This protocol acts as a bridge between large language models (LLMs) and the CMS, enabling AI agents to perform real actions on behalf of users. Rather than just suggesting content, these agents can now create, update, and manage content directly with the Umbraco back-office, all using prompts.

Another forward-looking concept was Web AI, which shifts AI processing from the cloud to the client side. By leveraging on-device hardware - GPU, CPU, and Neural Processing Unites (NPUs) – Web AI enables advanced tasks like image recognition and natural language processing to run locally. This approach offers benefits such as enhanced privacy, zero latency, and offline capability, all while reducing reliance on cloud infrastructure. While this tech is still in the experimental stage, the potential for Web AI to reshape digital experiences is clear.

Finally, a thought-provoking talk on sustainable AI reminded us that while AI unlocks new capabilities, we must not forget the environmental impact. As energy demands rise, developers and organisations must consider the invisible impact of AI usage, and adopt more responsible, efficient practices as the technology matures.

Umbraco cloud roadmap: looking ahead

Umbraco HQ shared a forward-looking roadmap for Umbraco Cloud, with a clear focus on giving developers and administrators greater visibility, control, and performance. A key theme was observability which will allow teams to monitor how the underlying infrastructure is performing. This includes request analytics via Cloudflare, bridging the gap between traditional SaaS offerings and fully hosted environments.

On the security front, security posture will be improved by phasing out support for outdated protocols (anything below TLS 1.2), providing self-service WAF configuration, enhanced DDoS detection and OpenID Connect integrations for external identity providers.

Performance and scalability are also being addressed through the rollout of dedicated database servers, load balancing in the back office, and structured maintenance windows for more predicable deployments. To mitigate the impact of “noisy neighbours”, affected sites will be migrated to isolated environments, ensuring more stable performance.

Crucially, the direction of travel is moving towards providing greater control via a single-entry point for managing all Umbraco services - making it easier for agencies and clients to manage projects more efficiently, including centralised subscription & licence management.

Partner support: better tools for better builds

As Platinum Partners, we now have direct access to second-level Umbraco engineers, significantly improving our ability to troubleshoot complex issues, validate architectural decisions, and accelerate delivery for client projects. In addition, Umbraco has launched new sales enablement training, designed to help agencies better articulate the platform’s value proposition.

Due to high demand, Umbraco is expanding its Extended Long-Term Support (XLTS) offering for versions 7 and 8. All future LTS releases will now be eligible for up to two additional years of support, extending the total support window to five years.

Final thoughts: a CMS that grows with you

The web content tech space is growing rapidly. 13.5% year-on-year through to 2027, outpacing the broader software market.  And Umbraco is clearly not standing still.

This year’s announcements made that clear:

• Umbraco Compose is addressing the complexity of modern architectures with a more structured, scalable approach to composability.
• AI integrations are moving beyond novelty, enabling real-time content creation and automation through tools like MCP Server and Web AI.
• Cloud enhancements are giving teams deeper observability, strong security, and more control over performance and deployment.

Whether you’re a developer, a digital strategist, or a content editor, Umbraco is positioning itself as a CMS that’s not just keeping up but helping you stay ahead.

If you want a helping hand

When it comes to understanding or implement Umbraco solutions, we’re here. Get in touch, we can get you going on the right path.