Umbraco Spark Innovation Conference

With Umbraco 17 now available, the temptation to upgrade can be strong after all, it has new features and new performance gains, but upgrading isn't always the right choice, and sticking with your current version isn't always the wrong one. Every Umbraco project lives in its own reality. Each project has its own budgets, integrations, risk tolerance, developer capacity, and long-term business goals, all of which shape what "the right path" looks like.

In this talk, we'll explore the full spectrum of options for maintaining an Umbraco site, from staying on the project's current major version to upgrading thoughtfully or even rewriting when it truly makes sense.

Umbraco Search will replace search as we know it in Umbraco today. But what does that really mean?

And what's in it for us as developers?

In this session we'll have a close look at Umbraco Search through the eyes of a developer. We'll cover:

• The shiny new things.

• The extensibility model.

• The impact (and how we can prepare for it).

Expect lots of demos and lots of code!

Bringing the cloud to the conference, I'll replicate in miniature a scalable, load-balanced environment to host containers and demonstrate concepts around Load Balancing in a fun and interactive way!

Using a cluster of mini-computers, a router and some networking magic (and with a healthy sacrifice to the demo gods), we'll re-create a cloud in a mini-cluster and see how it copes with scaling, load-balancing, outages and downtime. There will be audience participation, there will be live demos, there will almost certainly be chaos but you'll learn key concepts needed to understand how load balancing will help you build resilient and scalable apps while having fun at the same time!

While TinyMCE is no longer Umbraco’s default rich text editor, you can still easily use it to satisfy all your Umraco text editing needs. In this talk, Fred will show you how to get the ball rolling with the TinyMCE Package to keep using the WYSIWYG you love without a fuss, and more importantly, without losing data in the process.

Ok, so in a world where OpenAI processes around 2.5 billion prompts per day and around a 5th of those are product related requests. It is clear that the way people are searching online is changing, and the source of their information is changing too.

Optimising for this new way of searching is known as GEO. Generative Engine optimistation.

And therefore we have to start asking ourselves.. are our commerce platforms or products ready for this?... and what are the implications if not?

Ever since zero became something for nothing, you'd think we'd solved nothing. Whether we're talking NaN, string.Empty, nullables or database nulls, it turns out that nothing is more surprising than nothing. There some things to learn in this talk about nothing.

I ran an experiment to see how far I could get building an accessible web tool by writing specifications instead of code. Using Claude Code and Speckl (Thanks Matt Brailsford!), I created a spec and task list for a brand colour contrast checker, then iterated while the AI generated the implementation.

In this lightning talk, I’ll share what worked surprisingly well (accessibility-focused specs, automated testing, WCAG contrast calculations), where the approach struggled (UX polish, visual judgement, progressive enhancement), and what I learned about using AI responsibly when accessibility and quality actually matter.

Compare, contrast and critique the approaches and philosophies of different cloud service providers (CSPs) - such as Azure, AWS, GCP and Hetzner - and how Umbraco solutions be architected in each.

Having recently moved from an "Azure-only" mindset to a more diverse appreciation of different CSP offerings, Richard F. Jackson is looking to share what possible benefits could be found from considering other options. There's also some core philosophical differences between the CSPs and their resource management strategies that have been illuminating to discover, and he would love to share them with you!

Now that the Backoffice transformation is complete, the platform is ready for innovation. The next phase focuses on collaboration. Introducing features that support teamwork, shared content blocks, content diff views, and simultaneous editing.

In this session, we’ll explore what’s coming next. This session will bring live demos of work in progress and some as conceptual walkthroughs.

This is your chance to get an exclusive look at what's to come.

What happens when your team spends work time eating pizza and hanging out with other techies? Surprisingly, they don’t just come back with stickers. They come back with ideas, solutions to problems, and a renewed enthusiasm for the work in front of them.

The Umbraco community is one of the most active in the tech world, with in-person and virtual meetups across the globe hosting experts who love sharing their knowledge. For businesses, these events are an incredibly cost‑effective way to keep teams engaged and learning. While conferences or formal training can swallow days of time and thousands in cash, a local meetup costs little more than a couple of hours and a bus fare — yet often delivers insights that save development time, reduce risk, keep technical debt in check and help teams adopt new technologies sooner while avoiding outdated approaches and reinventing the wheel.

In this lightning talk, Joe shares what he’s learned as an organiser of the Bristol Umbraco Meetup — one of the longest‑running and best‑attended groups in the community.

If you want a stronger tech team and bulletproof projects, helping them engage with the community might just be the highest-value superpower you can give them.

"A Website, an Email, and an AI Summary walk into a Bar... and none of them can agree on the price of a pint"

Ok, so in a world where OpenAI processes around 2.5 billion prompts per day and around a 5th of those are product related requests. It is clear that the way people are searching online is changing, and the source of their information is changing too.

Optimising for this new way of searching is known as GEO. Generative Engine optimistation.

And therefore we have to start asking ourselves.. are our commerce platforms or products ready for this?... and what are the implications if not?

In this talk we will highlight:

• How you can get your platforms ready for GEO

• How you can align all of your product data sources

• How we can use tools like Struct and utilise AI successfully to counteract hallucinations and unreliable product data being returned