Umbraco 10 is the newest release for Umbraco’s CMS. Our Umbraco team breaks down what this new version means for site editors and developers.

What is Umbraco 10?

Umbraco 10 is the latest major CMS version of Umbraco. It supports Microsoft .NET 6, which is also LTS, and comes with Long Term Support (LTS) until 2025.

What’s new?

Umbraco 10 is built on the latest version of Microsoft’s ASP.NET Core and .NET, version 6, taking advantage of its new features and the new features available in the latest version of the C# programming language.

Highlights include performance improvements, better usability, and more efficiency, and details include:

• Improved cross platform support — Umbraco 10 now uses the SQLite database engine in order to support .NET 6. This allows developers to work locally with Umbraco whether they are on a Windows, Linux, or Mac machine.
• Simplified development and a more maintainable codebase — C# 10 allows developers to write less code in a faster, more efficient way with features such as nullable reference types, hot reload, file-scoped namespaces, and global using statements.
• Updated third-party dependencies — The latest versions of ImageSharp, Umbraco Examine, and AngularJS are now used.

For more information on the release, you can visit Umbraco’s blog, or you can see what’s new in .NET version 6 at Microsoft.

Umbraco’s new release cadence.

Going forward from this release, Umbraco will be altering its release cadence to better follow Microsoft .NET’s pattern. This means Umbraco CMS LTS releases will now be aligned with the LTS releases of Microsoft .NET so your entire platform will now be supported for longer.

Major versions will have two stages of support:

• A “Support” stage — dedicated to fixing bugs, regressions, and security issues — continues 9 months from first release (and 24 months for LTS versions).
• A “Security” stage — focused only on fixing security issues — continues 9 months after the “Support” phase ends (and 12 months for LTS versions).

With this cadence:

• Every fourth major version of Umbraco (every 2 years) will be LTS.
• The next LTS major version of Umbraco will be 13, supporting .NET 8, at the end of 2023.

Breaking changes will only be included in major versions, which will be released twice per year - now you can have confidence that there should not be any issues updating your site to a new minor version within the same major version e.g. from 10.0.0 to 10.1.0. Additionally, small non-breaking updates (minor versions) will be released every 6 weeks, with patch versions such as bug fixes released as needed.

For more information on this cadence, visit Umbraco’s long term support page.

What does this mean for older Umbraco major versions?

The future of past major versions obviously depends on the age of those past versions. Currently, Umbraco 7, 8, and 9 are still in either “Support” or “Security” support phases as described above. Their End of Life (EOL), when they will no longer be supported is as follows:

• Umbraco 9 - December, 16, 2022 — Umbraco 9 was a major version but was not LTS. If your site is built on Umbraco 9, have a plan to upgrade to Umbraco 10 by the end of this year.
• Umbraco 8 (LTS) - February 2025 — As Umbraco 8 is LTS, you have a full two years to make the upgrade to Umbraco 10.
• Umbraco 7 (LTS) - September 2023 — Umbraco 7 was also LTS, so following the new release cadence you have about a year remaining to upgrade to Umbraco 10.

Final thoughts.

Umbraco 10 is an exciting new major version which brings the CMS right up to date with the latest features and developments from Microsoft as well as opening up Umbraco development to those using Mac or Linux systems.

Before upgrading to Umbraco 10, we would recommend waiting until the first minor version (10.1.x) has been released. Developers are still testing Umbraco 10 “in the real world” and giving feedback to Umbraco. The first minor version will, therefore, be more stable as it will contain fixes for issues which developers have found in their testing.