Umbraco 7 end of life - what does it mean?

Nick Durrant, CEO at Bluegrass Digital

As a business, this would expose your website or solution to both security and performance risks. No one will know what to expect once this date passes and any enterprise would never put their organisation at risk without considering a website upgrade or migration to a new version of the software.

Unfortunately, there are no direct upgrade paths from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 8 or even newer versions. Migration is possible, but this will require some careful planning with your Umbraco partner team to help plan your Umbraco migration project as there are various factors determining the size of work.

In short, it will likely involve a re-platform of your website onto a new version of Umbraco and at Bluegrass we are already busy with a number of migration projects.

Umbraco is one of the leading CMS platforms and is a scalable platform which is particularly great for CMS editors managing large content websites. It has an intuitive editing interface and is why it is dubbed 'The Friendly CMS'.

Developers also love implementing Umbraco solution due to its scalable framework and extensible API. At Bluegrass, we use Umbraco as a content management system for many of the websites and platforms we design and build for our clients.

However, as with any software and the evolution of technology means, older versions of their software will also reach the end of their lifespan. This is now the case with Umbraco 7 which is now a year away from reaching end of life (EOL) and it is important to start planning the upgrade of your website and a move to a modern version.

Umbraco 10 launches with .NET 6

With Umbraco 10 comes a more powerful platform, which goes a long way by extending cross-platform capabilities, providing support for both Windows and Unix-based platforms. It comes with more features including third-party dependency upgrades for ImageSharp, Umbraco Examine, and AngularJS support.

For its cross-platform support, Umbraco 10 now uses SQLite so it can support .NET 6 and will support developers working their code on Windows, Linux or a Mac. Along with C# 10 it will also allow developers to develop faster and provide for a more efficient and maintainable codebase. That all means that with Umbraco 10 you are running .NET 6, ASP.NET Core 6, and C#10.

It is also the first Long Term Support (LTS) version of Umbraco which has started applying proper semantic versioning and aligned themselves with .Net’s release cadence and Microsoft’s LTS policy.

This will certainly help Umbraco plan a more predictable release cycle for customers and help all of us better plan for software upgrades and future implementation projects. Umbraco 10 is an LTS release with support ending in 2025.

Conclusion

Regular software upgrades are a necessity in maintaining a secure, optimised and healthy platform. Websites using Umbraco 7 must now begin planning their migration project and avoid any last-minute panic.

Umbraco 10 is an exciting new version and along with all the latest CMS features, it also supports all the latest developments from Microsoft. As with any new software, we would recommend waiting a few months after a few minor releases to the new version (Umbraco 10.1.x) ensuring that any bug fixes and more a more stable platform is available.