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Umbraco v8: changes for developers

The release of Umbraco v8 has just been announced. We have been playing around with the alpha versions that were available for testing for a while now and in this blog I try to give a quick overview of the biggest changes for developers like myself. If you are not a developer or are simply more interested in changes that impact editors instead, head over to part 1 of our blog series focused on editor changes.

This blog grew quite large due to all the changes in v8 so let me start with a little TL;DR: things are looking great!

The all new Umbraco 8

Umbraco is the user friendly open source content management system that we at Perplex have been using for years to make the internet prettier, better and more efficient. Ever since the first Umbraco 8 (the next big major release) announcement our expectations have been huge. In the past years of Umbraco’s development, Umbraco mainly focused on the options, possibilities and extensions for developers. In more recent releases more and more attention is given to the user experience and the editor. Umbraco 7 completely redid the back-office UX, a very worthwhile upgrade for the editor. And, according to Umbraco, Umbraco 8 will be the next step, for both developer and editor alike.

Why everyone should be digitally accessible

For years we have been fighting for digitally accessible websites. And with success: research shows that among the 5 best-scoring hospital websites, 3 are made by Perplex: Ziekenhuis Groep Twente (ZGT), VieCuri Medisch Centrum and Rijnstate! We are not yet finished with our mission to make the internet more accessible. Next month, the new Isala website will be live, which will of course be super accessible. No concessions are made in the design. In fact, it only gets better! We would like to introduce you to the principles of digital accessibility, read along?

Talk to your Umbraco website with Google Home

On October 24th Google launched Google Home in Dutch. From then on I can talk in my mother tongue with this smart speaker in my own living room. At Perplex we believe that voice will play a big role in our daily life on the internet in the future. We started experimenting over a year ago to prepare for this (r)evolution. What can we do, and what do we want to do with Google Home? How can we use Google Home in our daily work? Can Google Home help us work more efficiently? We will present our proof-of-concept Umbraco package and our Google Home app in this blog for our favourite CMS: Umbraco.

Security & Umbraco - Codegarden 2018

During the annual Umbraco Festival CodeGarden in Odense (Denmark) our colleague Jeffrey gave a presentation about security & Umbraco. In this presentation he demonstrates how he would hack a fictional Umbraco website, and how you can protect your website against these methods. The slides also show 9 concrete tips that are easily and directly applicable to your Umbraco website. You can download the presentation below to read at your leisure.

We won prizes at CodeGarden 2018!

This week CodeGarden 2018 took place: the international conference about the open source CMS Umbraco. Our colleagues Tim, Dennis, Jeffrey, Leon and Daniel travelled to beautiful Odense to learn, listen and share. And that's not all, because we've been nominated four times, and we won 2 Umbraco awards! 

How Google DDOS’ed our server

Usually, Google is our bestest friend on the web. Several weeks ago however, we ran into something odd. Our monitoring alerted us to the fact that for the past several days the CPU use of one of our sites was steadily increasing. On a daily basis we had one million crawled pages, and more than 25 Gb of data downloaded. And that was per day, from one bot! A quick analysis of our logfiles revealed the cause of this to be traffic generated by a Googlebot (or someone impersonating one).

Secure your Umbraco

Security is a hot issue currently and with the coming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) this topic will only become more and more important. The last couple of years I've been specializing in security and tried to combine this with my love for Umbraco. After dozens of security audits (executed by international organizations on our own Umbraco installations) and my own visions regarding security, I would like to use this blog to pass along some tips and tricks that are easy to apply to your own installations.