标签：#umbraco

A few weeks ago I was in Copenhagen for my first Codegarden, and one quiet thought has stuck with me since. It didn't come from a keynote. It came from the bit the keynote leaves out. I've worked with Umbraco for years, but I'd never been to Codegarden, and I turned up without much of a fixed idea of what the two days would be. I kept that open on purpose. I wanted to take it in rather than measure it against something I'd decided in advance. What struck me most was that the value came from two places at once. The sessions were a fantastic source of inspiration; everything from keynotes to guest speakers all seemed to resonate in some way or another. The conversations in between the sessions - drifting around the event space and finding common ground with anyone and everyone - proved just as valuable. I came home more energised than I've been in a while, with a notebook full of half-formed ideas and a better feel for the community I'm part of. But the thing I kept turning over afterwards was that bit the keynote leaves out. That's what I want to write about. The easy half and the hard half Every major Umbraco release gets the same treatment. A polished keynote, a clean demo, a feature that looks effortless on stage. There's plenty in 18, and which part matters most depends on what you're building. For me it's Elements: a new Library section where you manage reusable content and reference it through a new element picker. Create once, use everywhere. It's a genuinely good direction. Reusable content has lived awkwardly in the content tree for years, and Library finally gives it a proper home. What the demos don't show you is the part I've been playing around with for the past few weeks. Taking a real Umbraco 17 site, with content pickers threaded through block lists, block grids, rich text blocks and base document properties, and getting all of it to point at the new Library without an editor ever noticing anything moved underneath them. The feature is the easy half.

Since the Umbraco 16 release, Umbraco ships only with the TipTap Rich Text Editor. This was unfortunately something that Umbraco was forced to do. TinyMce 7 has a license that is incompatible with the open source license of Umbraco and TinyMce 6 was going out of support. So an alternative had to be found. Umbraco did a pretty good job at abstracting the rich text data. In Umbraco 15 both TinyMCE and TipTap were still present and exchangeable because of this abstraction. And arguably, the way you can set up your toolbars for the TipTap editor is superior to TinyMCE. But still, a new Rich Text Editor is a big change that presents real challenges. These challenges are most obvious when looking at the Umbraco forum's tip-tap tag . Topics vary, but a few come up again and again: Additional HTML tags getting added to the markup, like a <p> tag inside a <li> The inability to add certain tags to TipTap, like <script> tags The inability to add styling to an element, for instance to create a link that looks like a button These are valid challenges, especially if you're upgrading from an existing TinyMCE setup. But this is also a good moment to ask two questions: Why do I want the same behaviour? And was the old behaviour actually any good to begin with? You don't have to migrate everything at once Before getting into that, it's worth knowing that TinyMCE is still available as a community package for Umbraco 16+. If you're in the middle of a project, dealing with a large codebase, or just not ready to rethink your Rich Text Editor setup right now, that's a valid escape hatch. Swap in the package, keep things running, and give yourself time to migrate properly. But "later" should still be on the roadmap. The package is community maintained, not an official Umbraco product, so there are no guarantees around long-term support or compatibility with future Umbraco versions. Relying on it indefinitely carries the same risk as the situation Umbraco just came out of with TinyMCE 6. So