Upgrading Umbraco from 7 to 11 (and everything in between)

What's the problem?

Umbraco 7 vs 8

Clients were not easily persuaded into upgrading from Umbraco 7 to 8, making the gap to 9+ even bigger.

Umbraco 7 is EOL

"End of Life" is a scary word for clients, so upgrades will be an important topic.

Out-of-date technology

Internal or publicly available technology is no longer maintained or developed for Umbraco 7, making upgrading even more important.

This postponing of the inevitable brings developers some major headaches. As if going from .NET Framework to .NET 5+ isn't hard enough, especially in terms of used dependencies, some major components in Umbraco have changed as well! All this has the potential of breaking a lot of code. To top it all off, in most cases content will have to be migrated as well.

On the bright side!

Umbraco 9+ has some really great features!

It has everything Umbraco 8 had, including multi-language content nodes and the Block List.
It is based on .NET 5+, which brings better performance compared to .NET Framework, all kinds of out-of-the-box functionality like native support for Dependency Injection and support for cross-platform hosting.
It has a clear versioning and release cadence, making it easier to manage expectations.

But, let's be honest...

We only have 35 minutes to talk about a subject that can easily be talked about for hours.

We're here to help!

Instead of choosing quantity over quality, we were able to boil down the most important aspects of the whole upgrade process to just those 35 minutes!

But since there is just so much more to tell, we've compiled a 56 page booklet with all the information that didn't make the cut! It contains information on:

The preparations you should do before even attempting an upgrade.
The steps required to migrate code and content from one version to the other.
The major differences between the different Umbraco versions.

Everyone attending the talk at Codegarden 2023 can get a physical copy of this booklet. However, since we've only printed a limited amount, everyone who can't get their hands on a physical copy can download the digital booklet right here!

Download the digital booklet!

Lennard Fonteijn

CTO @ Arlanet part of 4NG

Good to know:

Always playing with technology, over 20 years of (professional) experience.
Employed at Arlanet part of 4NG for about 10 years.
Employed at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as a Software Engineering docent for about 7 years.
Umbraco MVP & Umbraco Certified Master
Nocturnal animal

Upgrading Umbraco from 7 to 11 (and everything in between)