2026-06-17
📰 OC.Automate.Mastodon released
At the Umbraco MVP Summit and Codegarden, Umbraco HQ introduced Umbraco.Automate, an event-driven automation engine. Inspired by its capabilities, Owain.Codes developed OC.Automate.Mastodon, a third-party package enabling automated blog sharing to Mastodon. The open-source project aims to expand with more connections, enhancing user workflows in Umbraco.
2026-06-03
📰 Speed up slow deployments to Umbraco Cloud
Owain.Codes shares a solution to speed up Umbraco Cloud deployments, which were taking 20 minutes. By pushing changes to a private GitHub repository and adjusting the project file to set CompressionEnabled to false, deployment times improved to 6 minutes. He advises against pushing directly to Cloud.
📰 Fixing the sort order in Content Pickers in Umbraco
After upgrading to Umbraco 17, Owain.Codes encountered an issue where the content picker no longer displayed recently published news articles at the top. He developed a notification handler to sort articles by their "News Date" upon publication, enhancing user experience in the content picker while addressing pagination concerns.
📰 Codegarden 2026 - not long now!
Owain.Codes expresses excitement for Codegarden 2026 in Copenhagen, where he will speak about the Management API with Umbraco CMS. He highlights the MVP Summit, the change in venue, and the importance of pacing during the event. Owain invites attendees to connect and join morning runs, fostering community engagement.
2026-05-20
2026-05-13
2026-05-06
📰 A weekend without internet access
Owain.Codes reflects on a recent Bank Holiday trip to Dundee, where limited internet access prompted a return to offline coding. He emphasizes the joy of problem-solving without AI assistance, advocating for unplugged time to rediscover personal creativity in programming. Owain encourages readers to experience a no-internet day for similar insights.
📰 The Silent Developer
Owain.Codes discusses the challenges of remote work for developers, particularly the loss of informal knowledge transfer that occurs in an office setting. He highlights the risks for junior developers relying on AI for coding without guidance from experienced colleagues, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking and community engagement to foster learning and growth.
2026-04-22
📰 OC.PowerSort 1.2.0
OC.PowerSort 17.2.0, released in April 2026, introduces recurring schedules for automated content sorting in Umbraco, enhancing efficiency and reducing manual tasks. This version supports various recurrence patterns, smart occurrence management, and maintains backward compatibility with previous versions. It aims to streamline content management workflows for diverse use cases.
2026-04-15
2026-04-01
📰 Optimizing Umbraco Member Pagination From Slow to Lightning Fast
Owain.Codes discusses optimizing a client intranet's member management page by implementing database-level pagination. The original approach loaded all members into memory, causing performance issues. The new method queries only necessary data, resulting in 31x faster page loads, 100x less memory usage, and improved code maintainability through single-responsibility methods.
2026-03-25
📰 GitKraken CLI Beginner's Guide: A Better Git CLI for Developers
GitKraken CLI, developed by Owain Williams, enhances Git's command line experience by simplifying workflows and reducing command memorization. It offers intuitive commands and guided workflows, allowing developers to work faster and avoid common mistakes. GitKraken CLI complements Git without replacing it, making it ideal for those familiar with Git's fundamentals.
📰 OC.PowerSort package
Owain Williams announces the release of OC.PowerSort, a complex package developed with Harrie Mayhem, designed for intuitive content ordering management via a dedicated dashboard. Features include scheduling sort orders and manual arrangement. Future enhancements are planned, including recurring scheduled orders. Full documentation and demonstration videos are available on GitHub and YouTube.
2026-03-18
📰 OC.UFMFallbacks Package
Owain.Codes announced the release of a new UFM package for fallback values in Umbraco, allowing users to set a primary value for a label that defaults to another property if empty. This package supports chaining properties, HTML string manipulation, and output truncation. For more features, visit GitHub.
📰 OC.UFMMembersLookup package
Umbraco Flavored Markdown (UFM) is utilized in Umbraco 17 for property descriptions and advanced labels in the CMS backoffice. Owain.Codes encountered an issue with Member Pickers and created a package to display member property information using {mnl:pickerAlias.propertyalias}. The package is now available via NuGet.