Jon's visit to the Umbraco UK Festival was a fantastic opportunity for Screenmedia to get further exposure to the latest version of Umbraco 5. Now in public Alpha 3, Umbraco 5 is really shaping up to be a great addition to the Umbraco toolkit. Started from a blank canvas, the Umbraco HQ team has been working flat out on architecting and developing this new asp.net mvc 3 based version of Umbraco CMS.

The keynote by Niels (Umbraco creator) and Alex (architect for Umbraco 5) covered all the work that's been done on the system since Code Garden in the Summer 2011. Umbraco Hive the interface to the data layer has really matured and as a result Umbraco sites will be quicker than ever.

The Umbraco team also released a new open source project for extending Umbraco called Umbraco Contrib. This project is a space for developers in the community to start to help extending the software and integrate it with other open platforms. As a bit of a joke the HQ team have released a Wordpress Umbraco provider example project, so watch this space as, soon you'll be able to run, serve, edit and update your WordPress site within Umbraco.

Another session was about UComponents - although you may not know what this is, if you've had a site built by Screenmedia over the last year you'll be using some functionality of UComponents without even knowing it! This open source project started with a whirlwind of praise from community developers and it's gone from strength to strength. The session started with the release of a new version, live before our eyes, then continued to show some of the lesser known, but super powerful, functionality within the project. The next couple of sessions Jon attended covered some very techie subjects, including knockouts and web hooks which we'll be explaining to our team here and hopefully coming up with some enhanced functionality soon.

A further session, from Per of the Umbraco HQ team, discussed Courier - a piece of additional Umbraco software which allows content editors and developers to push new content and functionality between a staging server and production server. This great functionality allows us to push new functionality to Umbraco sites, in minutes not hours, and will provide a cost saving for sites where we're updating functionality on a regular basis.

The final session of the day was by Martin Beeby from Microsoft who was speaking to us about how Internet Explorer 10 is evolving and how Microsoft are opening up the doors for the development community to feedback bugs, usability problems and feature requests.

We'd really like to thank Cogworks for running such a great event and the Umbraco HQ Europe team for all coming over to the UK.

-A big thanks to Doug for the images.