Highlights from Umbraco-kalaset 2025

My colleagues Ken and Lisa and I had the honor of attending this year’s Umbraco-kalaset at Berns in Stockholm. A festive event for and by the Umbraco community that provided great insights and left us wanting more!

Highlights from Umbraco-kalaset 2025

TL;DR

If you work with Umbraco CMS and haven’t attended one of the two Umbracokalas held so far, you should definitely join the next one.

Keynote

Emma and Sebastiaan from Umbraco delivered the keynote (a strange word, but “keynote” is even worse). They updated us on upcoming features and gave us a history lesson on the most important changes introduced since version 13.

Hybrid Cache

Next up was Markus Johansson, who explained how the new Hybrid Cache makes it possible for Umbraco to run very large websites—something that previously wasn’t recommended. The most interesting part of this session, however, was the input on how we as developers should think when building solutions with Hybrid Cache so that performance is not negatively affected.

Here’s a link to Markus’ presentation:

https://www.umbracokalaset.se/media/ccvhwzvs/hybrid-cache-forandrar-allt.pdf

MCP for Umbraco

Matthew Wise and Phil Whittaker demonstrated some pretty wild stuff—namely how they built a fully functional MCP for Umbraco’s Management API in just two weeks (Model Context Protocol, not Master Control Program).

Presentation:

https://www.umbracokalaset.se/media/q1npmrrv/from-clicks-to-commands-umbraco-mcp.pdf

GitHub project:

https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS-MCP-Dev

Lead Generation using Umbraco Forms

Niels Christian Laursen demonstrated how the Umbraco Growth team uses Umbraco Forms, webhooks, and workflows in Zapier to generate leads and recommend partners in an unbiased way.

Show & Tell

After lunch, it was time for lightning talks. I was very impressed by Alice, who among other things shared great tips on how we can use AlpineJS to improve accessibility on websites.

All presentations:

digital-tillganglighet-alpine.pdf

essem-case.pdf

qank-umbracokalaset-2025.pdf

Smørrebrød

With the title “The Umbraco Smorgasbord”, Carl showed practical examples of how to easily enable 2FA, implement Entra ID login, and create automated workflows—spiced up with a bit of Blazor.

He was so good and entertaining that I added him on LinkedIn immediately!

Sustainable Technology

Dennis seems to have talked about sustainability before—and he’s very good at it 😊

I really like the idea of having at least one “green ticket in every sprint.”

There was a lot covered in this session, so check out the presentation:

https://www.umbracokalaset.se/media/50qnclaw/sustainable-tech-umbracokalaset.pdf

The Friendly CMS

Owain gave us plenty of new inspiration on how we can further improve and simplify the user experience for editors.

Many—if not all—of these improvements will soon be incorporated into our Boilerplate at Esatto, which is used to kick-start new projects.

Presentation:

https://www.umbracokalaset.se/media/lbzim5tv/umbraco-building-friendly-content-editor-experiences.pdf

Blog post with the same content:

https://24days.in/umbraco-cms/2024/truly-friendly/

Owain also deservedly won first prize in the evening raffle—I do wonder how he managed to get the table hockey game (the prize) back home to Cardiff...

Side note!

Cardiff is a place I’d love to visit to revisit locations featured in Doctor Who and especially Torchwood.

90-ish Sites in One Installation

Daniel and Hannes showed and demonstrated how they built a client’s website with many smaller local sites inheriting content from a main site. They admitted it’s not great for SEO, but very convenient for maintaining a large number of websites.

Presentation:

https://www.umbracokalaset.se/media/00gbxjm2/1-projekt-90-siter-ish-wismos-umbraco-cloud.pdf

Miscellaneous

What makes events like this fun isn’t just the talks themselves, but also what’s mentioned between the lines and which tools are used during demos.

Here are some of them:

Contentment:

https://marketplace.umbraco.com/package/umbraco.community.contentment

Content segments in Umbraco 16:

https://skrift.io/issues/beyond-culture-using-umbraco-16-segments-for-contextual-experiences/

Elastic Search support in eXamine:

https://examinex.online/2024/02/15/elastic-search-support

Want to know more?

René Voigt

René Voigt

Web Architect

René Voigt is a senior developer and technical expert at Esatto, with deep experience in modern system development and AI-driven engineering practices. He works hands-on with clients to design and build scalable solutions, often at the intersection of architecture, development, and emerging technologies. René is known for his pragmatic mindset and his ability to turn complex technical challenges into robust, maintainable solutions.

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