Community Blogs

From Zero to Production: A no-nonsense Umbraco 17 setup (that won't age poorly)

Most Umbraco Setups Don’t Fail Immediately—They Fail LaterEvery new Umbraco project usually starts the same—fresh solution, everyone energized and maybe even a nice architecture diagram. For a couple weeks, life’s good. Everything moves quick, flows logically, and things feel buttoned-up.Then the real world shows up.Configuration starts drifting. What worked on your laptop doesn’t quite click on staging. Naming conventions get creative—sometimes even a little poetic—with no one quite sure which approach is the right one anymore. Deployment turns into a one-person magic show, full of rituals and half-remembered steps. Suddenly, what felt solid starts to make you nervous whenever someone asks for a change.Let’s be honest: Umbraco projects rarely blow up in the first week. Most problems show up months later, buried in the details.What does it take to build a setup that actually survives? Not just in someone’s imagination, but in production, with real clients pounding on it, editors making changes, deadlines looming. We’re talking about a setup that stays reliable and feels right six months—or even a year—down the road.Let’s dive into a straightforward, practical approach for an Umbraco 17 project that won’t fall apart just when you need it most.

Editor Friendly 404 Pages in Umbraco

How to create customizable 404 pages that editors can manage, with support for multi-site setups using a ContentLastChanceFinder.

AI in Umbraco: Beyond the Hype, Into Control

AI pops up everywhere these days. It’s in editors, IDEs, your browser—and, yes, your CMS. But Umbraco handles AI a bit differently. You won’t find any “magic” buttons or get stuck with one vendor. Instead, you get a thoughtful, flexible setup that actually keeps you in charge. And that’s where things start to get interesting.

Indexing Word, Excel and PowerPoint Documents in Umbraco Using Examine

By default Umbraco only indexes media item names, not their contents. Umbraco.Community.Examine.OpenXml fixes that by indexing text from docx, pptx and xlsx files with no additional configuration.

Umbraco Spark 2026

My notes and reflections from Umbraco Spark 2026 in Bristol. Covering every talk from Umbraco Search and backoffice collaboration to AI, cloud hosting and community.

Optimizing Umbraco Member Pagination From Slow to Lightning Fast

Creating Custom Dashboards in Umbraco 17: A Beginner's Tutorial

Ever wish your Umbraco back office felt as custom as your morning coffee order? Good news—Umbraco 17 gives you the tools to craft dashboards that put the info you want front and center. No more endless clicking, no more searching for stats. Now it's just your data, your way.

GitKraken CLI Beginner's Guide: A Better Git CLI for Developers

Umbraco In Action - Introduction to CMS for students

A session on what a CMS is, delivered to Coders Club students at Don Bosco College of Engineering, featuring practical demos using Umbraco, Next.js, and AI tools.

Umbraco In Action - Introduction to CMS for students

A session on what a CMS is, delivered to Coders Club students at Don Bosco College of Engineering, featuring practical demos using Umbraco, Next.js, and AI tools.

Building an AI-Powered Log Analyser for Umbraco at the Spark Hackathon

A look at how I built AI.LogAnalyser at the Umbraco Spark Hackathon - an open-source package that adds one-click AI analysis to the Umbraco backoffice log viewer. Click a button on any log entry and get a plain-language summary, likely cause, and recommended fix, powered by any AI provider via Umbraco.AI.

Developer’s Guide to Creating a Custom Umbraco 17 Backoffice Dashboard