Joining a select band

The Umbraco CMS platform has been an important enabler for some of our best and most successful work. Our partnership has grown over the past few years, and we’ve made a conscious effort to be more heavily involved in contributing to Umbraco’s development (as a community, a platform and an offering) in a number of ways.

So, we are over the moon to have been recognised as a Contributing Gold Partner, in Umbraco’s recent annual announcement of appointees.

We’re one of only 34 agencies worldwide to be recognised as Gold Contributing Partners. Elite company indeed.

So, as we briefly bathe in the glory, we thought it would be good to reflect on some of our contributions over the past year.

Contributing to Umbraco’s product development roadmap

The true technology team have contributed a number of Pull Requests covering a wide range of issues, many of our team have been recognised for their contributions by receiving their contributing badge in GitHub. One of our Junior Developers, has been getting really into the Umbraco community spirit and got a shoutout on twitter for her contribution too.

The team also contributed specifically to Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest. The whole Technology Team and some from beyond the tech team ran our own Hackathon at our office. This resulted in a significant number of us hacking across open tickets that Umbraco made available, which contributed to and helped fix a number of issues. A great day!

We helped shape future versions of the Umbraco platform. Attending sessions with Umbraco on Version 13 which will land later this year, putting ourselves forward to join community teams. With our Head of Technology joining the back-office team, and others spending time demoing our headless architecture to the Umbraco CMS team. We were also invited by Lasse Fredslund, Product Owner for the CMS, to attend Umbraco’s V12 feedback panel on Headless.

We have provided consultancy on Cloud issues in their early phase, and releases of the product to inform improvements. Specifically participating in calls with Umbraco to advise on the issues we experienced and help propose solutions.

One of our Full-stack Developers also created a package called Nodedefender which has been used in one of true’s implementations of Umbraco for Parmenion and this has also been made available to the Umbraco Community via Github.

Increasingly, we’re advocating a package-first approach and continue to support Umbraco in their ambitions for this.

We worked with Umbraco on potential 3^rd party integrations and opportunities that we saw in the market to help with the concept of composability. We discussed the opportunity within content recommendations and product recommendations including Recombee and Algolia. There is now an Algolia integration and a number of further content recommendations platforms are becoming partners with Umbraco.

It's been great to see our involvement result in enhancements to the product roadmap and make it into releases.

Contributing to the Umbraco Community

The true team have attended pretty much every event, meet up and working session there has been in the UK and Denmark. We were invited to speak at Codegarden where our talk on how Aardman’s architecture utilises a composable DXP was received with overwhelming feedback that it helped people understand the concept more effectively. That week, we spent time helping other developers get an understanding of what is a key USP for Umbraco. We also participated in a live Q&A session at Codegarden. Our Aardman.com work was even featured as a major case study at the conference and given the Jury’s award at the Umbraco Awards!

Members of our development team have dedicated weekly bookings in their resource schedule for both UmbraCollab and UmbraCoffee. Its now part of their working week at true should they wish to attend, and gives them space to be active in the Umbraco Github, Discord and wider social media communities.

We’re also supporting and nurturing future Umbraco MVP talent at both the junior and more experienced levels. We encourage them to develop their skills, participate in the community, attend meet ups and events and undertake training. All working toward MVP.

We participated in working groups for the new Back Office remotely but also attending in person in Odense. As part of this work, we specifically provided feedback on the V13 RFC (Requests for Change) and helping to improve the new Back Office.

To support this, we have adopted Playwright as our automated testing platform, moving away from Selenium. This is so that we can support the QA for the back-office and provide relevant feedback on the implementation as we go. As part of this we have started evangelising Playwright within the Bristol tech and QA communities.

true have also been invited to attend meetings in Odense to help develop Cloud and provide valuable feedback to help shape the future of the Gold Partner programme.

More recently, we’ve just spoken at the January umBristol event where we discussed our custom approach to delivering components and the advantages of headless development ahead of the v12 release and are planning to be incredibly active with talks across this year.

Contributing to spreading the Umbraco story

We love talking about the success of our Gold partnership with Umbraco. We’re proud of what we achieve together.

In the past year, we’ve won 8 awards in collaboration with our clients and Umbraco including 2 BIMAs, The Sport Business Awards, A Lovie, Drum B2B awards, Webbys, CSSDA Site of the Day and Awwwards.winners. It’s been quite a year!

We’ve been pretty busy getting stuck in supporting, adding to, connecting, enhancing, improving, and celebrating all that Umbraco does and that we achieve together.  

Receiving the Contributing Gold Partner recognition is brilliant and we’re looking forward to more exciting collaboration with Umbraco across this year.

If you’d like to discuss a potential Umbraco solution with us, get in touch.