Having heard great things about previous Umbraco Codegarden events, our MD, Ian Jepp, made the decision to attend the 20th anniversary conference. Held at the DOK5000 building in the Danish city of Odense – where Umbraco is based - Codegarden is heralded as the biggest congregation of Umbraco users and developers in the world. As a Silver Partner, it absolutely made sense for Lake Solutions to be at this annual celebration of all things Umbraco.
For any seasoned conference-goers, let’s be clear, Codegarden is not your standard conference. As Umbraco describes it: Codegarden is a one-of-a-kind conference experience that mixes learning and collaboration with just the right amount of fun, while celebrating the fantastic things that people can do and make with Umbraco, serving to inform and inspire.
For a start, Odense, situated in the heart of Denmark on the island of Funen, is quite magical with cobbled streets and beautiful little mustard and orange buildings. The birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, it’s no surprise that, surrounded by this scenery, he was inspired to write such enchanting tales.
Ian’s first impression was that Codegarden was, indeed, very friendly and organisers made a great effort to make sure everyone felt included and conversations were encouraged between everyone. If three people were chatting in a group, Codegarden etiquette dictated that they stood not in a triangle shape, but a square, leaving a space for somebody else to join the discussion. The sense of community and togetherness was very real but, as was suggested with a sense of fun at quite a few opportunities, Umbraco definitely isn’t a ‘cult’!
There were plenty of social events in between the business elements of the show and Ian particularly enjoyed a pirate-themed party, organised at Umbraco’s base in the city!
But there was business to be done as well and there were a number of developments from Umbraco that really stood out:
Umbraco Compose
What was Umbraco Orchestration is currently being revamped as an exciting new development called Umbraco Compose. When launched, this will allow content from multiple sources to be consumed into a central layer and exposed to downstream systems and websites in a consistent way. As Umbraco itself explains ‘Umbraco Compose is a managed content orchestration layer that simplifies how you connect data across your digital ecosystem’.
Instead of building custom integrations for every service, Umbraco Compose brings together CMS content, product data, customer information and more into clean, consistent APIs, ready to power headless websites, apps and digital experiences.
It’s usual to have a vast amount of products in a management system and a raft of articles somewhere else, in addition to a CMS. Whatever lakes of data your business might have, Umbraco Compose will suck content in from those places. In short, it’s a very clever way of managing data.
A new way to search
Up until recently, search within Umbraco – to find an image in editor for example - was dependent upon Examine (which uses Lucene as its search and index engine). However, there have been some significant changes recently from Umbraco in the way search integrates with CMS and the search providers users can utilise.
In future versions of Umbraco, there will be a layer between Umbraco and Examine, meaning that editors will be able to use other search providers.
Creating facets
Building facets within a website involves creating filters that allow users to refine search results by specific attributes. Doing this has always been a time-consuming and often costly process in Umbraco. For instance, a piece of clothing listed on a website would need a facet created for each element, such as its colour, size, brand and material etc. Very soon, the ability to create facets will become a first-class citizen in Umbraco.
The Umbraco MCP Server
AI was a big topic of conversation at Codegarden, particularly generative AI, so delegates were excited to hear about a cool new project called The Umbraco MCP Server (Model Context Protocol). In fact, as Ian discovered at Codegarden, even its creators were taken aback by just how clever it is!
Built on open standards and powered by Umbraco’s native flexibility, Umbraco says it turns AI clients like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and GitHub Copilot into ‘true CMS collaborators’. With Umbraco MCP, generative AI tools can now act on your behalf, to help you manage and optimise your Umbraco project.
As Filip Bech-Larsen, CTO, Umbraco, explains: “This isn’t just about adding AI to Umbraco. It’s about making Umbraco accessible to AI. By opening up our management APIs through a standard protocol, we’re enabling a new kind of collaboration, one that helps people get more value from promising technology, safely and on their terms.”
In simple terms, MCP can save editors a huge amount of time when searching for images within a website. It could be that a key member of staff has left or you no longer sell a particular product and you need to identify and remove all of these photos. Websites today could have many pages, so this can be a really involved job finding them all. Utilising the AI within MCP, this all comes down to a click of a button.
You could ask it to find all the images of team members in the old uniform and replace them with employees in the new uniform. In the meantime, the AI capabilities can also identify pages that aren’t performing as well as others and suggest content changes.
There were live demonstrations going on at Codegarden to show its uses, highlighting how, for example, Umbraco MCP can:
* Create and update content using natural language prompts.
* Adjust product pricing and add descriptions dynamically in Umbraco Commerce.
* Read logs and surface warnings, including deprecated properties.
* Inspect document types and architecture to support implementers.
Adds Filip Bech-Larsen: “Umbraco MCP allows you to turn an AI client or service of your choice into a strategic advisor. With access to context, content, and architecture, it can help make intelligent, data-driven decisions. And it can actually execute them as well.”
If you want to talk to us about how Umbraco can revolutionise your website, contact Umbraco Silver Partner, Lake Solutions today: 0203 397 3222.