Issue N^o 130

Codegarden 2026 wrapped up in Copenhagen back in June, and if you missed a session (or just want to relive the keynote), the full set of recordings is now live on YouTube — talks, the opening keynote, and the aftermovie all in one place. It's a great way to catch up on everything from HQ's product direction to the community's own deep dives, at your own pace.

Dave Jonker went on holiday, left the laptop at home, and came back with something better than rested thumbs — a genuine look back at ten-plus years with Umbraco. From starting out on version 4 to watching the platform (and the community around it) transform completely, it's a warm, honest piece about how much can change when you're not looking, and what it means to stick with something long enough to see it evolve.

Bernadet ran into a classic problem: editors could search by page name, but not by a custom field value — even though it was clearly in the index. Her fix digs into UmbracoTreeSearcherFields, including a gotcha around variant field names for multilingual sites, and comes out the other side with a solution that's more future-proof than her first attempt. A great one to bookmark if you've got editors who rely on custom fields!

Justin got tired of reconstructing the same setup steps from memory every time he spun up a new server, so he turned it into a proper reference guide — the exact sequence for turning a clean Windows Server 2025 box into something happily running Umbraco on IIS and SQL Express. If you're the one standing up infrastructure on your team, this is the kind of post you'll want saved for next time!

Richard has built a lightweight, backoffice-native page view tracker — no external analytics service, no JS snippet, no cookies, just server-side counts shown right next to your content tree. What makes the write-up worth reading, though, is how it was built: he let Claude Code handle every step, from the original C# port through the design system, controllers, and even the marketplace listing, without writing a single line of code himself. A fun, candid look at what that process actually feels like in practice!