Taking a Leap from Umbraco V.6 to V.7?

If you have a business, you already know that a content management system is essential to publish content easily and efficiently on your website and edit it according to your requirements. It not only allows for fast and efficient updates but also saves your cost and time.

Umbraco is an open source.NET CMS that deserves serious consideration while evaluating your new website platform. Released in the year 2004, it has matured into a stable product and is greatly popular in Europe and has a burgeoning user base in the US as well.

If you have been working on Umbraco version 6 for the past few years, then you might be a little nervous about the transition to version 7. But let me tell you that this latest version 7.2 has been completely redesigned with particular focus on content editors and allowing them to access the functions more easily so that they are able to manage the site with minimum efforts.

Now that Umbraco CMS 7.2 has been released, it has come up with powerful new features that are simply awesome and it rocks.

• CMS interface: The latest version brings to us a backend interface that is easily customizable and caters to all your content needs unlike other CMSs. Content editors and authors can now focus on their 1. work and not on the system. It is built on AngularJS, the JavaScript toolset to provide limitless customizable options to developers. Additionally, this interface is designed with mobile in the mind and so all the functionalities are accessible from various devices.
• Grid improvements: Rich text editors or RTEs have always been a vital part of editing content, but websites that target multiple platforms need a better semantic markup than a RTE. Grid Layout is engineered to deliver maximum flexibility and high quality semantic markup when it comes to creating and managing responsive websites.
• Compositions: There is a new feature called “Compositions” for document types. In the earlier versions of Umbraco, it was limited to nesting document types that inherited the properties from their parents. But compositions now allow you to create document types with fewer restrictions by copying the field from documents already created. This is of great benefit for ongoing development of medium to large scale sites.
• Preview mode device views: The latest Umbraco version has a new preview mode tool that is a slide bar allowing you to switch between various device views of your responsive website. It is very helpful for editors and publishers as they can have a quick view of how the content will appear over various devices out there.
• The architecture: Using ASP.NET 4.5 and Angular JS, Umbraco 7 is not just a makeover of its previous version, but it is a shining example of how fast a CMS can be. The API provides an open model to access the data by using the most comfortable development methods, whether it is WebForms, MVC, Razor or XSLT.
• Hosting and deployment: This can often be a painful process for many organizations with regard to CMS, especially those with an extensive hosting environment. Umbraco offers a great alternative to traditional hosting with its unique offering of CMS as SaaS. It can be hosted in Windows Azure for robust security, incredible uptime and instant scalability.

With increases usability and speed, upgrading to Umbraco 7 would bring many benefits to your website. While planning to upgrade, it is also important to analyze whether the existing codes and packages would be supported by the latest version.