Umbraco 12: the fastest and most flexible headless CMS on the market

If you are looking for a CMS that offers you speed, flexibility and ease of use to create websites, mobile applications, or any other content channel with a single platform and with modern and secure technology, then Umbraco 12 is the solution you need.

Umbraco 12 is the latest major version of the world's most user-friendly CMS. In this post we are going to tell you all the news and advantages that this release brings, which includes features such as Content Delivery API which enables headless capabilities, support for Entity Framework Core and an updated version of the image processing library ImageSharp. In addition, we'll explain how you can start using Umbraco 12 today, either on Umbraco Cloud or on your own server.

What is Umbraco and why choose it as your CMS?

Umbraco It's a CMS (content management system) open source based on .NET. This means that you can use it to create and manage all types of websites and web applications, from blogs and corporate pages to online stores and news portals. Umbraco allows you to design your website however you want, without limitations or restrictions. In addition, you can expand its functionality with a wide variety of add-ons and extensions available in the market.

Umbraco is characterized by being a highly usable CMS, both for developers and for content publishers. Developers can take advantage of tools and frameworks they already know, such as Visual Studio Code, C#, Razor, or Blazor. Publishers can create and manage content in a simple and intuitive way, with a modern and customizable user interface. Umbraco also offers a live editing experience, allowing you to see changes on the website instantly.

Umbraco is also a very popular CMS used all over the world. According to its official website, it has more than 700,000 active installations and more than 250,000 members in its community.

What's new in Umbraco 12?

Umbraco 12 is a major version that introduces new features and significant improvements to the CMS. Below, we summarize the most important ones:

Content Delivery API for headless capabilities

One of the main new features of Umbraco 12 is the Content Delivery API, which allows the CMS to be used as a headless platform. This means that you can separate the presentation layer (the frontend) from the data layer (the backend), and thus deliver the same content to different channels and devices, such as websites, mobile apps, smartwatches or voice assistants.

The API offers you several advantages:

• Flexibility: you can choose the language, framework or technology you prefer to create the frontend, without depending on the CMS.
• Consistency: You can ensure that content is consistent and consistent across channels and devices, without having to duplicate or adapt it manually.
• Performance: You can optimize the speed and efficiency of your website or application, by reducing server load and taking advantage of the advantages of a CDN.
• Scalability: you can grow your project without problems, by having a more modular and decoupled architecture.

The Content Delivery API is available by default in Umbraco 12, without the need to install anything additional or write your own API. You just have to activate it and that's it. In addition, it is documented and versioned, making it easy to use and maintain.

Support for Entity Framework Core

Another important feature of Umbraco 12 is support for Entity Framework Core (EF Core), a very popular library for working with relational databases. EF Core allows you to access and manipulate data using objects and entities, without having to write SQL queries directly. This way, you save time and code, and you avoid errors and vulnerabilities.

Support for EF Core in Umbraco 12 focuses on making it easier to work with tables and custom data, which are not part of the CMS data model. For example, if you want to create a table to store user comments, or a table to save orders from an online store. With EF Core, you can easily and efficiently create and manage these tables, with access to the Umbraco context and services.

Updated version of ImageSharp

ImageSharp is the library that Umbraco uses to process images. In Umbraco 12, it has been updated to version 3, which brings several improvements and new features. Among them, the following stand out:

• Support for .NET 6 LTS, which means better performance and simplified functionality.
• New image decoding and encoding options, as well as new features and security improvements.
• Significant performance improvements in alpha composition and color settings.

• New decoding options to control image loading.

It should be noted that the new version of ImageSharp also has a new license. If you only use the image processing built into Umbraco, nothing changes and you can continue to benefit from the excellent work and performance advantages of the latest version. But if you need to use ImageSharp's functionality and APIs directly in your code, consider the license change.

For that reason, an ImageSharp 2 option continues to be offered that covers the needs of Umbraco. This way, you may be able to replace ImageSharp 3 with the ImageSharp 2 implementation and thus allow any existing project that uses the library directly to be upgraded to Umbraco 12 and meet the licensing requirements. This, of course, means that you won't benefit from the features and performance added in the latest version.

Umbraco Forms, Deploy, and Workflow 12

New versions of Umbraco Forms, Umbraco Deploy and Umbraco Workflow were also released. These versions offer full support for Umbraco 12 and bring some important functional updates. For example, Forms improves the headless API and Deploy increases operational performance by up to 50%. Umbraco Forms and Deploy are included in Umbraco Cloud.

For the full list of all features and improvements, see the Umbraco 12 release notes.

How to start using Umbraco 12

If you want to start using Umbraco 12, you have several options available:

• The easiest way is to create a new project on Umbraco Cloud, Umbraco's cloud platform that offers you all the advantages of the CMS without having to worry about hosting, security or maintenance. You can try Umbraco Cloud free for 14 days or choose the plan that best suits your needs.
• If you prefer to install Umbraco on your own server, you can follow the manual installation instructions or use the NuGet installer. Remember to consult the documentation on how to update Umbraco if you already have a previous version installed.
• If you want to learn more about Umbraco and its possibilities, you can access the free online courses or the tutorials available on its website. You can also join the Umbraco community on Our, the official forum where you can ask questions, share knowledge or find help.

Why trust us as your Umbraco agency

At Novicell, we are experts in Umbraco project development. We have been working with this CMS for more than ten years and have developed successful projects for clients from different sectors and industries. We have a team of certified and experienced Umbraco programmers, who are thoroughly familiar with all the features and advantages of the CMS.

As an Umbraco agency, we offer you a comprehensive and personalized service for your web project. We take care of everything from design and development to maintenance. Contact us, we'll be happy to help.