Umbraco Commerce
Umbraco's acquisition of Outfield Digital brought with it a powerful eCommerce plugin formerly known as Vendr. Matt Brailsford, one half of Outfield and now the Commerce Team Lead at Umbraco HQ, shared numerous valuable insights on the integration of Vendr into Umbraco, rebranded as 'Umbraco Commerce'. The presentation outlined the migration process from Vendr to Umbraco Commerce, offering valuable insights that will undoubtedly prove beneficial for our upcoming projects.
With the introduction of the Content Delivery API in Umbraco 12, Commerce has kept pace by introducing a brand-new Headless Commerce API. This is a significant time-saver, as we previously had to develop our own APIs for Vendr when necessary. We're eager to explore and leverage these new APIs for our projects.
Accessibility
The importance of accessibility cannot be overstated, as it is vital for all websites, tools, and technologies to be usable by individuals with various disabilities. Rachel Breeze, a seasoned developer with over two decades of experience and a strong commitment to accessibility, emphasized the significance of integrating accessibility considerations from the outset of a project rather than treating them as an afterthought. Rachel shared various development and building approaches that can facilitate the creation of an accessible website.
Creating an accessible website is a shared responsibility across different disciplines within the team, spanning from development to content management. Automated testing tools can be immensely helpful in assessing website accessibility, covering aspects such as aria attributes, color contrasts, and identifying missing or misleading content. Rachel highlighted a range of valuable tools and tips, including the Umbraco Accessibility Reporter, A11y Automation Tracker, Web Accessibility Extensions for VS Code, among others.
While automated testing tools are invaluable, it's important to note that certain aspects cannot be effectively tested by these tools alone. Hence, a combination of both automated and manual testing is essential. We eagerly anticipate experimenting with various tools to determine their effectiveness in ensuring an accessible digital environment.
Content Delivery API
Umbraco has dedicated significant efforts to enhance its Content Delivery API, and during this event, they provided us with an insightful update on the latest developments in this regard.
Not only have they teamed up with the Commerce team to create a common scheme that results in ease of use for the developers who will work with the API. They have also implemented endpoints to handle Media. This gives developers a lot of flexibility to create fully custom projects with the technology stack they prefer while maintaining the editor-friendly experience that we love Umbraco for.
While we can already explore the extended capabilities of the Content Delivery API, we eagerly anticipate what Umbraco has in store to further enhance this event and make it an even more rewarding experience for developers. Stay tuned as we continue to delve into the possibilities of this remarkable platform.
Umbraco's Codegarden 2023 Recap
Events
Umbraco v7 End-Of-Life: what does this mean?
umbraco
Umbraco MVP
Besides the Umbraco Headquarters' speakers, the event program is also filled with experienced developers who addressed various interesting and useful topics. We attended a helpful session that delved into advanced debugging. This provided us with direct insights and inspiration to apply the newly acquired techniques for investigating performance optimizations. Another insightful talk revolved around ASP.NET Core Routing and its applications beyond the basics. And, of course, let's not forget our very own colleague and Umbraco MVP, Dave Woestenborghs, who shared valuable best practices for working with ModelsBuilder. As he also did at Codegarden a few months ago. Read all about Codegarden 2023 in the blog article below.