Official Umbraco Gold Partner: our Codegarden 2026 recap

True People is an Umbraco Gold Partner

Let's start with the big news: True People is officially an Umbraco Gold Partner. We accepted the recognition at Codegarden and celebrated it in person with CEO Mats Persson.

The Gold Partner status recognizes years of craftsmanship, projects we put our hearts into, and a team that genuinely loves building on Umbraco. For our clients, it means higher priority with Umbraco support, early access to new functionality, and a direct line to the Umbraco core team. That it happened at Codegarden, surrounded by the community that makes this platform what it is, made it extra special. Thank you, Mats, for the warm welcome. We wear the gold with pride!

A venue worthy of the community

Codegarden takes place in the heart of Copenhagen, in a venue fully dressed in Umbraco style. Good food, a barista making coffee all day, and an arcade with retro games between sessions. It feels less like a business conference and more like a gathering of people who are genuinely excited about the platform they build on.

That enthusiasm carries into the content. The two conference days were built around a clear theme: how do you keep an Umbraco website stable and future-proof while AI and the rest of the ecosystem keep changing at high speed?

Day one: the keynote and the bigger picture

The first day opened with the keynote by CEO Mats Persson. He walked us through the products that extend Umbraco and the direction the platform is heading, with AI front and center.

What stayed with us most was the philosophy behind it: keep the CMS stable and the AI flexible. Umbraco doesn't bake AI into the core but treats it as something modular and optional. You use it where it adds value, extend it when you need to, and stay in control yourself. For an agency that makes these choices together with clients, that's exactly the attitude you want to see from a platform.

The sessions that followed covered both the technical implementation and getting real value out of the right configuration. Four products stood out for us:

• Umbraco Compose brings structure to the data flows of a headless stack, so you manage integrations instead of hand-coding them.

• Umbraco Workflow moves approval steps into the system itself, instead of relying on scattered Slack messages and reminders.

• Umbraco Deploy handles schema, structure, and content between environments automatically, without manual hassle on a busy Friday afternoon.

• Umbraco Engage brings server-side analytics, A/B testing, and personalization together in one place, so you can tailor the experience per visitor instead of guessing.

Day two: AI with control, and a first look at Umbraco 18

The second day was all about AI and what's coming. Here too, control was the keyword. Umbraco.AI forms the governed foundation inside the backoffice: you define the models, tone of voice, and governance rules once, and they're applied consistently before AI ever reaches an editor. On top of that sit modular AI packages such as prompts, a Copilot, and automation, all opt-in and within the rules you set yourself.

The promise that stuck most: no vendor lock-in. You choose your own AI providers, pay them directly, and your content is never used to train anyone else's model. For clients who want to know more, we've already written extensively about AI in Umbraco CMS.

Then came the first look at Umbraco 18, rightly announced as the "short and sweet" major release. If you're on Umbraco 17 today, the news is reassuring: that LTS version (long-term support) remains home for most projects and stays supported with minor releases roughly every six weeks. Upgrading to 18 is not about the fear of missing out, as we also described in our Umbraco 17 update.

The Library and Elements: less custom work, more structure

The headline feature of Umbraco 18 is a new backoffice section called the Library, with Elements as its first resident. Elements are reusable, non-routable content blocks that you can create, manage, publish, and roll back like anything else, and then place on pages with a new Element Picker.

It's the native answer to the "global content" node that we, and probably every Umbraco agency, have built by hand project after project. Umbraco 18 lays the foundation for this. The real edit-once-update-everywhere magic follows with Umbraco 19, planned for Q4 2026, when Elements are integrated directly into the Block Editors. Developers also get good news in the form of typed OpenAPI schemas for the Delivery API.

The Codegarden dinner

After the talks came the legendary Codegarden dinner. 750 people, a party with sketches, live shows, and the famous Umbraco bingo. Every table had a sticker printer you could use through a web app to send limited-edition stickers, until someone in the room, at an event full of developers, hacked the printers and had them spit out meme photos of well-known Umbraco people. Everyone loved it.

Between sessions there was also room for the conversations you can only have face to face. We caught up with fellow Dutch professionals and noticed a shared optimism about where the platform is heading. It's good to see that we all read the roadmap the same way.

We came home with a head full of ideas, a roadmap we're excited about, and a Gold Partner badge we worked hard for. Codegarden 2026 reminded us why we build on Umbraco: the product is heading in an interesting direction, and the community around it is a special one.

Until next year, Copenhagen!