The Umbraco CMS turns 18 today!
18 years is a long time in the tech world and it's fantastic to see that it's not only made it to the ripe age of 18 but that there is no sign of it not making it to its 25th even 35th birthday!
Over the years Umbraco has gone from strength to strength and yes, like any growing child, it's had it's issues and tantrums but thankfully they seem to be happening less and less.
Umbraco was the original child of Niels Harvig and Per Ploug Krogslund and it's come a long way from its original creation. It's now running on .Net Core, there is a Cloud version now too and a very healthy package ecosystem which is built mostly of community created packages.
Personally, I've been using Umbraco for 6 years and it's been a crazy 6 years!
I started looking at Umbraco CMS because I wanted a C# CMS for my own personal website.
I'd tried Orchard CMS but didn't really get on with it. Documentation was lacking and no-one seemed to be using it. Then one day in my work, someone mentioned they were moving their website on to Umbraco. I installed it (Umbraco 7 back then), I really liked what I found and posted a few questions on the Umbraco Forums. I got friendly replies and a number of people willing to give me a hand.
There were no stupid questions and that's when I "joined" the community.
That same year, I was encouraged to apply to CodeCabin by my mentor at the time, Barry O'Kane. I was lucky enough to get to attend the weekend retreat and it just concreted my decision to invest my time in getting to know more about Umbraco and the Community.
I was chatting with really well known Umbracians such as Lee Kelleher and Matt Brailsford and they were super friendly, they were happy to share their knowledge and they were happy to simplify examples for me when I didn't fully understand something. There was no elitist attitudes, which I had encountered in other groups.
After coming back from that weekend I started the Edinburgh Umbraco Users Group so that I could meet other Umbraco devs from Edinburgh.
In 2018 I attended my first Codegarden. I was also very fortunate to be awarded an Umbraco MVP and I have retained that for the past 5 years!
Over the years I've also taken ownership of the h5yr.com website, built my own package and been part of an Umbraco HQ team - the Core Collaborators team. I've spoken at Codegarden, been a guest on UmbraCoffee a few times and written articles for Skrift.
I've met so many amazing folk through using Umbraco. The community is super friendly and there are so many ways of getting involved.
You don't need to be a coder to get involved either. If you are a copywriter, you could help with the documentation for example.
There is an active community on Twitter, just search for #umbraco - the Forum is active and there is also the Discord server now.
If you are interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time!
Happy Birthday Umbraco!!
Published on: 16 February 2023