Umbraco: Time to migrate to V8?

Umbraco 8 was released in 2019, with a fresh look and three new features, including; smoother editing workflows, direct management of multilingual content and integrated, insightful content apps, we were excited to give it a spin!

As with any major version number change, Mentor decided to give the new version space to breathe, to allow for community testing and real world fine tuning. We gave it a good length of time to ensure the new version was fully stable, before we decided to use Umbraco 8 for our own site, as a starter project. With some new features in the release, we were keen to familiarise ourselves with it before rolling it out on our client sites. 

A great improvement for content editors

One of the key benefits of Umbraco 8 as a Content Editor is the content editing experience itself. Umbraco HQ describes this as "Infinite Editing". What this means is that all your editing is done in one place. For example no longer will you need to navigate away form the page you are editing to the media library to change the crop of an image. This keeps the content editor in their flow allowing for work to be carried out smoothly. More information on Umbraco 8 infinite editing can be found here.

Better multi-lingual support

Umbraco 8 introduces something called Language Variants where you can really easily manage your multi-lingual web content directly in the back office of Umbraco. Content editors can add new languages very quickly, and can even translate directly from one language to another in the Umbraco side-by-side editors.  You can set up mandatory languages and a default language too so that your content is never forgotten. Adding new languages is easy in Umbraco 8!