Umbraco Spark 2026: Highlights and Key Insights

As Umbraco continues to evolve, Umbraco Spark 2026 offered a clear view of the technologies and ideas shaping its future. Our Lead .NET Umbraco Developer, James Carter, shares his key highlights from the event in Bristol.

Rachel Breeze: Umbraco Decisions: Stay, Upgrade, Rewrite

Rachel Breeze, Development Practice Lead & .NET Developer at Nexer Digital

With Umbraco 17 now available, every project faces the question: upgrade, stay put, or rewrite? Rachel explored the full spectrum of options – factoring in budgets, integrations, risk tolerance, developer capacity, and long-term business goals – to help teams make the right call for their specific reality.

Key highlights:

• There is no "right answer"
  • Each project must be reviewed 
• Not just a technical decision
• Staying is an intentional decision

Kenn Jacobsen: Umbraco Search: A Developer's Perspective

Kenn Jacobsen, Principal Engineer at Umbraco

Umbraco Search is set to replace search as we know it. Kenn walked through the new search platform from a developer's point of view – covering what's new, the extensibility model, and the migration impact. Lots of live demos and code.

Key highlights:

• Umbraco Search is powerful
  • We're excited to get our hands on it
• Developers can build better search solutions with the new tooling provided
• Integrations with search providers such as Elasticsearch
• Exciting live demos with humour 

Resources: GitHub repo from the talk

Carl Sargunar: DDoS My Desk: Load Balancing Live and Uncut!

Carl Sargunar, .NET Developer at Mondo Media

Carl brought the cloud to the conference – literally. Using a cluster of mini-computers, a router and some networking magic, he replicated a scalable, load-balanced environment live on stage to demonstrate scaling, load balancing, outages and downtime concepts in an interactive way.

Key highlights:

• Modern Umbraco can be hosted in many different ways
• Umbraco can run on Linux and in Docker 
• Docker Swarm was used to manage a load balanced environment 
• The live demo sadly didn't work due to no internet access

Frédéric Harper: Tiny but Mighty: TinyMCE in Umbraco 17

Frédéric Harper, Senior Developer Relations Manager at TinyMCE

While TinyMCE is no longer Umbraco's default rich text editor, Fred showed how to get up and running with the TinyMCE Package to keep using the WYSIWYG editor – without losing data in the process.

Key highlights:

• A high level reminder that TinyMCE can still be used in modern Umbraco
• Showed a community plugin that allows TinyMCE to be added back into Umbraco
  • Including access to all of the paid/premium featues (license required to use those features)

Resources: Slides (PDF)

Georgina Bidder & Matt Sutherland: A Website, an Email, and an AI Summary Walk into a Bar…

Georgina Bidder, Developer at true digital & Matt Sutherland, Head of Technology at true digital

With ~2.5 billion prompts per day hitting OpenAI (a fifth being product-related), the way people search is fundamentally changing. This talk covered Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) – how to get platforms ready for AI-driven search, align product data sources, and use tools like Struct to counteract hallucinations and unreliable product data.

Key highlights:

• A case study with multiple data sources highlighting the risk of data inconsistencies with a focus on how it impacts AI
• Covered how Struct was used to manage data as a source of truth 
• Inspired me to consider how we build websites for the Agentic Web

Kevlin Henney: Much Ado About Nothing

Kevlin Henney, Independent Consultant & Thought Provoker

A deep dive into "nothing" – from zero to NaN, string.Empty, nullables and database nulls. Kevlin explored the surprising complexity of representing nothingness in software, and the lessons we can take from it.

Key highlights:

• A fun, "off topic" talk about the theory (and application) of how we use nothing, null and 0 in computing
• Very funny and engaging

Mike Masey — Can AI Build an Accessible Tool If You Only Write the Spec? ⚡

Mike Masey, Full Stack Developer at Huskey Ltd

A lightning talk on an experiment: building an accessible brand colour contrast checker by writing specifications instead of code, using Claude Code and Speckl. Mike shared what worked (accessibility-focused specs, automated testing, WCAG contrast calculations) and where AI struggled (UX polish, visual judgement, progressive enhancement).

Key highlights:

• An interesting case study of using AI in a spec driven way to turn an idea into software
• Themed on Accessibility but the talk was mroe about how we use AI to build code
• Very inspiring

Resources: Slides

Richard Jackson — Across The Cloudiverse

Richard Jackson, Platform Engineer at Rocket Science Group

A comparison of cloud service providers — Azure, AWS, GCP and Hetzner — and how Umbraco solutions can be architected in each. Richard shared his journey from an "Azure-only" mindset to a broader appreciation of different CSP offerings and their philosophical differences.

Key highlights:

• A rundown of the "big three" hosting providers and the nuance between each one
• Very engaging and funny
• Also mentioned smaller, Euro hosting providers with a focus on GDPR compliance and sustainability 

Resources: Slides

Niels Lyngsø — What's Next in the Backoffice

Niels Lyngsø, Technical Product Manager at Umbraco

With the backoffice transformation complete, the platform is ready for innovation. Niels previewed the next phase focused on collaboration — shared content blocks, content diff views, and simultaneous editing. Live demos of work in progress and conceptual walkthroughs.

Key highlights:

• A demo of the new Element Library so far
  • The ability to move block level data into a repository to be reused elsewhere
• Run through of wireframes
  • How to manage Element Library
  • Variants
  • Search
  • Diff/rollback
  • Published states
• More wireframes
  • Better diff view for rollback
  • Basic "concurrent user" support
    • User A opens doc
    • User B opens doc
    • User A changes heading and saves
    • User B changes heading and saves
      • User is asked to choose what version to accept
• More design around "references"
  • Anything that is a "reference" will be purple

Joe Glombek — Developers, Assemble! Community is Your Team's Superpower ⚡

Joe Glombek, Senior .NET Developer & Umbraco MVP at Bump Digital

A lightning talk on why community engagement is one of the highest-value investments a team can make. Drawing on his experience organising the Bristol Umbraco Meetup, Joe made the case that local meetups deliver insights that save development time, reduce risk, and keep teams learning — at a fraction of the cost of formal training.

Key highlights:

• Community is the heart of Umbraco's success
• Made business cases for why sending staff to events is good for business

Resources: Slides | Video

Package Awards

Presented by Lotte Pitcher (Umbraco) and Sophie Neale (Gibe Digital). Attendees from the Umbraco Hackathon & Package Jam on Thursday 19 March presented their packages.

Winners / Notable packages:

• Packages from the previous day's hackathon were demoed
• Some really interesting uses of AI
  • Add property labels based on wider data structure context
  • Change Icons for doctypes
  • "URL" to content importer
• "Favourites" for saving content into a favourites section of the backoffice for quick access
• Funny packages
  • "Gameify" the backoffice, points for cotnent creation and other CMS actions

Overall Takeaways

Umbraco Spark 2026 made one thing clear: AI is here to stay, and it’s being introduced into Umbraco in a considered and responsible way.

The new Search is also close, making it important to stay on top of the NuGet package and start using it across v17 sites.

As an Umbraco agency, Reading Room stays close to these developments. If you’d like to discuss your Umbraco platform, get in touch.