Codegarden 2026 Takeaways

3rd July 2026

Codegarden 2026

Codegarden 2026 delivered everything we've come to expect from Umbraco's annual developer conference: major product announcements, AI innovation, inspiring talks and a clear vision - not to mention the social highlights, the tattoos, the candy store, even a double rainbow appeared over the conference site!

For the Factory73 team, though, there was one standout moment.

We were incredibly proud to be awarded Umbraco Platinum Partner status in Copenhagen, making Factory73 the only agency in Scotland to hold Umbraco's highest level of partnership.

It's recognition of our team's technical expertise, long-standing commitment to the platform and the trust our clients place in us to deliver Umbraco sites.

That achievement was the highlight of an unforgettable week, but it wasn't the only thing we brought home. Here are our top 10 takeaways from Codegarden 2026.

AI in Umbraco

This was always going to be "the AI Codegarden" since so much has happened in the last year.

Umbraco have taken AI and integrated it into the back-office (in a way that can be completely customised and doesn't tie them or us into any one technology or approach), with a configurable Umbraco Copilot which is site and content-aware.

This is huge, and we're already experimenting to see the possibilities. But at a very basic level you can use it to generate content for fields, analyse documents, interact with pages for editing, and run natural language queries about anything on your site:

"Hey Copilot, find all the pages with no SEO Description"

Umbraco Automate

This is by far the most useful and innovative feature we've seen in a CMS for years.

Triggers and Actions to automate almost anything across the platform. Constructed visually like workflows in Zapier, or your CRM, choose your trigger ("when a page is saved", "when an editor logs in") and chain to an action ("send a message on Slack", "publish a page").

We can, of course, create our own, specific to your needs.

Awesome.

Umbraco Engage

Engage has had a significant overhaul in v17, with the latest enhancements released just a few days ago. There are a number of bug fixes and much-needed UI improvements which will remove friction for marketers. We also now have better integration and analytics with Umbraco Forms, the MCP server is being released so Engage becomes AI-ready for Umbraco Copilot, and Automate will be Engage-aware. There's a new Reporting API coming soon too, which will allow export of data to external systems and dashboards like Power BI or Looker Studio.

Elements

Umbraco Elements brings global blocks to the CMS within a dedicated library for reusable components. This is essentially shared content that we've built our own solutions for over the years. It's great to see this landing in the core product, as it's been an obvious omission from Umbraco to date. There are going to be elements of Elements released in v18, with full functionality expected in v19.

Coming Soon

There are a whole lot of features coming with v18 and looking towards v19. It's definitely going to be worthwhile keeping up with each version from now on, and it should be a smooth upgrade (we're promised). Block-level variation (for translation or Engage testing and personalisation) is a biggie we've been waiting for, but also Editor Collaboration for large teams to ensure editors don't collide or overwrite content. The back-office is also getting a new content search which should be much more flexible and usable, and some rounded corners...

Umbraco Deploy

This has been out for a while, but it's come of age (and price point). Now with support to push Engage data, we can now implement Deploy between staging environment and production, set up AB Tests, Segments and Personalisations, and when we're ready push to production. This and with all the things usually handled by uSync (settings, content and images), we're excited to have one tool that covers everything. And anything that helps keep production tidy (and free of experiments) has to be a good thing.

Cloud Analytics

Launched just ahead of Codegarden is the new Cloud Analytics dashboard for sites hosted on Umbraco Cloud. Driven both from Cloudflare's edge traffic logs, and Azure Monitor application logs, we now have one place to see our traffic metrics and keep an eye on site pressure and health. Also, in line with Umbraco and Factory73's commitment to sustainability, there's a new sustainability dashboard to see how green your site is.

Load Balancing on Cloud

Launched this month, we can now load-balance on Umbraco Cloud, with two instances. Anyone who saw Colin's talk at Codegarden last year will know how we load-balance The Dalmore website for Whyte and Mackay. It needs three app services, and now we only need two. The Cloud team are looking at ways to deploy updates without restarting your site, and blue/green deploys for zero downtime are on the way. Our infrastructure team like this a lot.

Developer Updates

Less exciting to end users and clients than to us, there are some great new features in v17 including cache changes (makes things faster), flexibility in how we arrange fields on tabs (improving the editor experience even further), creating dummy data for load testing (ensuring resilience), and a new search for doc type icons (saving hours of scrolling just to add a nice "article" icon next to news items). Not setting the world alight, but these things make us happy. :)

Umbraco in AI

A great talk from Matt Wise - "Vibe Coder to AI Engineer" - gave us some insight into how his agency is using Agentic workflows to develop on Umbraco. We've been following many of the same patterns, but Matt delved into some techniques to improve code quality and reduce AI slop in code, and being a lot more efficient with tokens which is a key area we want to monitor for sustainability reasons. Long story short, Agentic coding is the present, and future, and Umbraco is well suited for this providing it's used correctly.