Umbraco CMS is a .NET content management platform used by individuals and large enterprise for everything from personal blogs to global SaaS products. It's powerful, extensible, easy to use, and open source. And it's evolving to embrace AI in ways that genuinely improve developer and content author experiences.
The new features and capabilities are foundational, based on real world needs, taking advantage of the technical opportunities large language models (LLMs) provide, targeting discreet areas in the platform. There are official Umbraco blog posts that talk about philosophy, areas of focus, primers on the individual AI technologies, and more.
The goal of this post is to provide a high-level summary of the changes and who they affect.
Umbraco is constantly evolving, most notably releasing a new major version each year just after Microsoft likewise releases a new major version of .NET. This is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, Umbraco developers get to take advantage of new .NET performance, security, and other features. But supporting a sprawling ecosystem of Umbraco versions is a challenge, especially when the breaking changes and development patterns change so frequently and vary so much between major releases.
To address this, the Umbraco CMS team has added integrations to your AI agent platform of choice. These integrations provide additional technical information about Umbraco CMS, including best practices, as well as provide controlled access to your schema and data through the official Umbraco CMS APIs.
The MCP standard allows the hosting of very specific tools that can be used by AI agents to get things done in a more simple, direct way. Umbraco supports this by providing a separate MCP host application that developers can run to give their agents deep platform and data access through the Umbraco Management API.
There are a myriad of actions that your agent can perform using these MCP extensions, including categories from site structure and user permissions, to monitoring, analytics, localization, and advanced workflows.
They allow the agent to do things with the API that would normally be done using the back office. These are actions you perform during development, like creating document types and setting permissions.
Originally a Claude Code-only feature, but now available in other AI agent platforms like OpenAI Codex, agent skills are a way to tell the AI coding environment about a given technology, which speeds development and ensures that the correct development patterns (best practices) are followed.
Umbraco is providing agent skills that will allow you to better use your AI agent of choice to build on the latest versions of Umbraco (version 17+). It's important to note that as magical as they can appear to be, there are caveats:
Not a replacement for documentation. Skills point to the documentation and teach the AI how to apply it. You should still read the Umbraco documentation.
Not scaffolding tools. They don't generate boilerplate from templates. They teach the AI to write code that fits your specific requirements.
Not perfect. Skills improve results but cannot guarantee correctness. Always review generated code.
They allow you to work with your agent to write code for things like a back office property editor for a YouTube video picker, or an notification that adds metadata to uploaded media, etc.
You can also leverage AI tools in the Umbraco platform itself, through the platform agnostic AI integration in the back office. You simply add the official Umbraco AI package, and configure the appropriate AI provider. Supported providers include:
Anthropic
AWS Bedrock
Microsoft AI Foundry
OpenAI
You finish by adding a new profile (chat or embedding), which controls the type, usage, and behavior of the AI model instance. For example, you can set the model temperature to help with determinism. Note: the profile is the vehicle through which you use the AI instance in your own code.
You can use your configured AI tool in the back office through a chat interface, to help manage content and structure, clean up data, add media metadata, and more. You can also use the configured AI instance in your application code to provide AI-driven features with pipelines and guardrails, all using the Umbraco APIs (which use the Microsoft Extensions AI package under the hood).
The official Umbraco CMS documentation on AI features can be found at the links below. Though not exhaustive, these are key resources you should check out.
Umbraco in AI — Enhancements to make building with AI smarter.
Backoffice extension agent skills — install and use the Umbraco backoffice agent skills repository with Claude Code (and other AI coding agents)
AI in Umbraco — Add AI tools and capabilities to Umbraco CMS
There's usually more to the story so if you have questions or comments about this post let us know!
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