The fifth annual Umbraco Spark Innovation Conference is set to take place on Friday 7th March 2025 at the We The Curious venue, located along Bristol’s iconic harbourside. This event, organised by local digital agency Gibe Digital, will bring together leading developers, coders, designers, and online user experience (UX) professionals from across the UK and Europe. The conference offers a unique opportunity for the open-source .NET content management system (CMS) community to connect, share knowledge, and shape the future of the Umbraco platform.
Steve Temple, technical director at Gibe Digital, emphasised the importance of the event: “Umbraco Spark brings developers together for a day of learning and inspiration. Past conferences have tackled key issues, including sustainable and accessible development, and this year’s presentations will explore a range of technical and innovative topics. Our conference is where innovation meets expertise, and it’s where the future direction of Umbraco is revealed.”
The Umbraco CMS, which has powered the websites of hundreds of thousands of public and private sector organisations globally, continues to be the largest open-source .NET CMS in the world. With more than a quarter of a million active contributors, Umbraco remains a flexible and extensible platform for creating digital experiences. The event will feature presentations by influential figures within the open-source development community, as well as Umbraco employees, on a diverse range of topics.
Key topics at Umbraco Spark 2025 will include:
- Managing Technical Debt
- Utilising OpenTelemetry for application visibility
- Exploring HybridCache for improved performance
- Sustainable hosting solutions using Azure Container Apps
- Understanding Binary Basics for better development
- Enhancing search functionality with Semantic Search
- Using Mermaid for visualising business processes as code
- The latest features in the Umbraco CMS platform
- Integrating data with Microsoft Fabric, AI, and machine learning
“Umbraco’s open-source community is our superpower,” said Filip Bech-Larsen, CTO of Umbraco. “Conversations at Umbraco Spark provide the perfect environment to explore new ideas and launch fresh projects, which ultimately help us maintain Umbraco as the most flexible and scalable platform available. This freedom enables developers to create extraordinary digital experiences for their clients.”
The event is an official UK Umbraco Foundation gathering, and the 2025 conference is sponsored by several key organisations including Moriyama, Crumpled Dog, Rock Solid Knowledge, Mentor Digital, Gibe Digital, and tinyMCE.
Attendees will also have the chance to network with fellow professionals, participate in hands-on workshops, and gain insights into the evolving role of the Umbraco CMS within the rapidly changing digital landscape. The event is expected to attract a broad spectrum of industry experts keen to influence the direction of the Umbraco platform and its growing community of developers.
