Community Blogs

Why 2026 Is Finally the Year I'm Going to Codegarden

Some things just hang around on your bucket list forever. You tell yourself, “maybe next year,” but you never actually get around to it. For me, that’s always been Codegarden.I’ve been working with Umbraco since version 4—so, we’re talking 2012 or 2013. That’s over a decade of projects, bug fixes, and late-night “why is this still broken?” moments. But I’ve never packed a bag and headed to Copenhagen for the biggest Umbraco event on the planet. Not once. Until now.

Fixing the sort order in Content Pickers in Umbraco

Umbraco MVP 2026!

Woohoo! Proud to receive my seventh Umbraco MVP award in 2026, marking another year of sharing, building, and community-driven progress.

Noisy ImageSharp Logs in Umbraco

ImageSharp logs every image request at INFO level, quietly filling your Umbraco logs until the backoffice viewer hits its 100 MB limit and refuses to open them. Here's the one line Serilog fix, plus why a CDN helps.

How I let Cursor build an Azure Search provider for Umbraco Search

I wanted to build an Azure Search provider for Umbraco and let Cursor do the heavy lifting. This is what that looked like from the first prompt to the final commit.

Codegarden 2026 - not long now!

Browsing Umbraco Logs in Kudu

A new userscript that brings a proper Serilog log viewer into the Kudu interface: file picker, expression search, saved queries, and a momentum graph, all with no build step required.

Smarter redirects when editors trash content in Umbraco

A new Umbraco package that replaces the default trash action. It captures the URLs of doomed content first, then suggests redirect targets using Umbraco.AI.Search, with a non-AI fallback for bulk trashes.

Releasing Image Hotspot 17.0.0

What's new in version 17.0.0 of the Image Hotspot property editor: Umbraco 17 support, block editor fixes, localization in 29 languages, and a new versioning scheme.

Share the Love - Bringing #H5YR to jcdc.dev

I've added the new #H5YR widget to my sites. Send a virtual High Five!

The Umbicosaurus De-Extinction: The Community Effort that Brought a Better Icon Picker to Umbraco 17.4

In 2021, I dreamed of improving the icon picker in the Umbraco backoffice and today, in Umbraco 17.4, the package I started is making a splash as part of Core! This is the story of Umbicosaurus.

Advanced Permissions for Umbraco: Advanced User Group Control for Complex Scenarios

Quick note: I write these blogs myself, AI only redacts them. I'm excited to announce that I just released my very first open source Umbraco community package: Advanced Permissions for Umbraco! In this post, I'll explain why I created this package, what it adds to Umbraco's permission system, and when you'd want to use it. Why This Package Exists I've been working with Umbraco since version 4, mostly in an agency context where projects often involve multiple editors, multiple user groups, and more complex content structures. That experience shaped what I value: features that give teams enough control without making day-to-day editing harder. I wrote about these scenarios in a GitHub discussion a while back. The current permission system works fine for many use cases, but I do think it becomes too limited once projects grow in complexity. In my opinion, this is an area where Umbraco could — and should — offer more flexibility. For now, this package is my attempt to solve that problem in a practical way. Advanced Permissions for Umbraco is designed for situations where the built-in permission model does not give you enough control. The Current Permission System (In a Nutshell) To really understand the benefits of Advanced Permissions, you first need to understand the default Umbraco permission system. Here's how it works: You assign default permissions to a User Group by toggling a list of verbs: Create, Delete, Cultures and Hostnames, Publish, and so on. Users with that group inherit those permissions. You can also override these permissions on specific nodes, and those overrides apply to that node and all its descendants. It's straightforward and handles most workflows well. Where It Reaches Its Limits Grant Types and Inheritance In Umbraco, you set default permissions on a User Group, and then you can override those on specific nodes. But here's the catch—when you override permissions on a node, those node-specific permissions completely replace the defaults. There's no inheritance. So if you want to change just one permission on a node (say, disallow Delete), you have to specify every single permission at that node level. You can't say "inherit everything from the default and only change this one thing." You end up copying all the default permissions to the node level just to tweak one, which is error-prone and a maintenance nightmare. And because permissions are just toggles—allow (checked) or deny (unchecked)—there's really only "allow" and a sort of implicit "not-allow." There's no way to explicitly deny something. This matters when you have multiple User Groups on a single user: all their permissions just stack up. You can only gain permissions, never restrict them. Scope Node permissions always apply to a node and its descendants. You can't set permissions on just the node itself, or just on descendants. Take an employee directory: an overview page with employee pages underneath. Ideally, you'd want editors to leave the overview page alone but be able to delete individual employee pages as they leave. The current system doesn't support that directly. Multiple User Groups When a user has multiple groups, their effective permissions are the combined list of everything allowed across those groups. There's no way to say "this group can do X, but that specific group cannot delete content." You get the union of all their permissions. What Advanced Permissions Adds The package introduces three capabilities for when you need more control: Three Grant Types (Allow, Deny, Inherit) Instead of just allow/deny, you get: Allow: explicitly permit something Deny: explicitly forbid something Inherit: use whatever the ancestor nodes specifies This means you only need to set the permissions you want to change and let everything else inherit from above. No more duplicating every permission just to tweak one. Flexible Scopes Choose where permissions apply: Node + Descendants (the standard Umbraco behavior) Node Only (children inherit from ancestors above) Descendants Only (the node itself isn't affected) You can combine node-only and descendants-only permissions on the same node to set different rules for a parent and its children. Smart Permission Resolution Advanced Permissions includes a resolver that calculates your actual permissions based on priority: Explicit deny (takes precedence) Explicit allow Implicit deny Implicit allow It handles multiple User Groups intelligently across all of them. Apply Permissions to Everyone There's a virtual "All Users" group for permissions that should apply to everyone. Useful for nodes that should never be deleted, for example. It works like any other group from the resolver's perspective. The Access Viewer To understand your actual permissions when things get complex, there's an Access Viewer that shows your effective permissions for any user or group. Click on any permission and see the resolver chain that determined it. When You'd Use This You'd reach for Advanced Permissions when the built-in permission model starts to feel too restrictive—multiple teams with overlapping responsibilities, permissions that need to vary significantly across your content tree, or content structures that don't fit neatly into the standard model. For simple scenarios, Umbraco's built-in permissions may be enough. But when you need more control over how permissions are inherited, combined, allowed, or denied, Advanced Permissions gives you a more flexible model to work with. You can find the package on the Umbraco marketplace today!