A look back at the milestones along the way
Had a pull request merged on Conditional Displayers, the Umbraco property editor package that shows or hides other properties on a Document Type — fixing an auto-height textarea that collapsed to 2px when shown again after being hidden.
Named by Luuk Peters in the Umbraco community forum's announcement of UmbraDesktop 17.3.0, crediting the unending stream of pull requests behind several of the release's headline features — including the taskbar full screen button and the window-restore-on-reopen behaviour.
Had a pull request merged on God Mode, the Umbraco 17 developer-tools package — adding server time zone and date/time diagnostics, a Local/Server/UTC date display toggle, a Scheduled Publishing view, and related Health & Risk rules.
Had four pull requests merged on Umbuntu.Automate.ManualTriggerInput, which adds a Manual Trigger (with Input) to Umbraco Automate — covering the test site's database connection, seeding a service account and test automation, the input size limit config, and tidying up unused template views.
A small but welcome delivery — two t-shirts from the Umbraco Tee Shop.
Had five pull requests merged on UmbraDesktop, a windowed desktop environment for the Umbraco backoffice — adding a full screen button, restoring previously open windows, giving app windows keyboard focus when active, an Accessories add-on (Notepad, Paint, Calculator, Clock and more), and a Snake game for the Entertainment add-on.
Attended "Automation for the People", hosted by Owain Williams, on Umbraco Automate at the Umbraco India User Group.
Watched Lee Kelleher talk about Contentment at the Umbraco Kent Meetup.
Upgraded understandingthegospel.org from Umbraco 7 all the way to Umbraco 18.
Had a pull request merged adding Umbraco 18 support to the AWS S3 media storage provider for Umbraco.
Joined "Diving into Umbraco Automate", the US Umbraco meetup group's session on Umbraco Automate, contributing input from the floor.
Gave an impromptu presentation at the Umbraco Kent Meetup showcasing the Umbraco.Automate plugins built this year — Brickset, Pushover, Clockify, ntfy and more.
Named in a Paul Seal video about automating the Clean Starter Kit's package workflow with Umbraco 17's Management API, for contributing to the Clean Starter Kit.
Started an Umbraco developer contract with Webreality, based in Jersey.
Released a connector that pulls LEGO set data from the Brickset API straight into an Umbraco.Automate workflow, including a "Save Set To Content" action.
Released a connector bringing Clockify time-tracking actions and connection validation into Umbraco.Automate.
Released a QR code generation connector for Umbraco.Automate, later extended with vCard QR code support.
The baachart data visualisation project was used in an official government report on sheep methane emissions.
Watched Luke Brown talk about the Umbraco MCP server at the Umbraco Kent Meetup.
Had a pull request merged enhancing the UI for sending a post on the LinkedIn connector for Umbraco.Automate.
Named in Umbraco's "Launching Umbraco Automate" blog post for building the Pushover connector, which lets Umbraco Automate send instant push notifications straight to your phone.
Had a pull request merged updating the UI and README for Umbraco 18 on the Bluesky connector for Umbraco.Automate.
Reported that the Delivery API wasn't exposing the Element Name in its OpenAPI model — a gap found while working on headless projects. Fixed by the Umbraco core team in the 18.1.0 release.
Identified that trigger.cultures was returning an
empty array in templates during Umbraco.Automate's beta.
Resolved via a merged fix.
Released a connector pulling live weather data from WeatherAPI.com straight into Umbraco.Automate workflows.
Released a connector adding self-hosted push notification support to Umbraco.Automate via ntfy.
Named in Owain Williams' "Umbraco Automate Workflows" post on owain.codes, thanked (alongside Mike Chambers and Warren Buckley) for helping talk through a no-code fix for a duplicate-publish workflow bug on the Umbraco Discord.
Had a pull request merged correcting the official Umbraco documentation's instructions for creating an automation, which incorrectly said to right-click.
Released a connector letting editors trigger Pushover push notifications straight from the Umbraco back office.
Identified that Umbraco.Automate wouldn't run any triggers
without an explicit UmbracoApplicationUrl set in
config, and reported it during the product's beta. Resolved.
Had pull requests merged fixing a mobile navigation z-index bug and refactoring the CSS for H5YR, the Umbraco community's peer-recognition platform.
Had a series of pull requests merged upgrading Phil Whittaker's headless implementation of the Clean Starter Kit for Umbraco to Umbraco 18 — including mobile navigation fixes, image and cache handling improvements, a sitemap update, and dependency upgrades. Made a joint collaborator on the repo off the back of the volume of merged fixes.
Had pull requests merged on Paul Seal's original Clean Starter Kit for Umbraco, fixing the Delivery API setup documentation, updating the API controllers and OpenAPI config, and improving cache revalidation on trash/delete in the headless Next.js integration.
Watched Markus Johansson talk about building packages for Umbraco at the Umbraco Kent Meetup.
Created baachart, a data visualisation project built with Next.js, pulling in external data via API.
Created csswind, a terminal-styled quiz app for learning CSS and Tailwind — ten rapid-fire questions per round, translating between CSS properties and their Tailwind classes.
Watched Aaron Sadler talk about UmbHost GreenStack web hosting, and Dean Leigh demo an AI back office extension he built with Claude, at the Umbraco Kent Meetup.
Became a member of the Creative Coding Club, a training membership dedicated to GSAP animation.
Started a new role as an Umbraco developer at Digital Gambit.
Delivered Beanie Friends, an Umbraco site with Vue.js components, live at beaniefriends.com.
Contributed to Umbraco's Hacktoberfest 2022 and received the event t-shirt for it.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training on load balancing for Umbraco 10.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training covering extending the backoffice, application integration, and searching and indexing for Umbraco 8.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training covering fundamentals and MVC/Visual Studio for Umbraco 8.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training in Umbraco 8 security, and Umbraco 7 Cloud Developer training.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training in content management for Umbraco 7.
Had a pull request merged into the core umbraco/Umbraco-CMS repository, fixing a typo ("automaticly" → "automatically").
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training covering MVC/Visual Studio, application integration, and searching and indexing for Umbraco 7.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training in the fundamentals of Umbraco 7.
Completed official Umbraco Certified Training, levels 1 and 2, for Umbraco 4.
25+ years building websites and 15+ years specialising in Umbraco CMS, including earning the Umbraco Certified Master accreditation and racking up 275+ posts and 702+ karma points helping others on the Our Umbraco community forum. Full milestone-by-milestone history coming soon.