In this tutorial, you will learn about the pros and cons of upgrading your website to use Umbraco v9. Umbraco v9 has been a release that I have been waiting for since 2017 for a great.NET core powered CMS (read here) and as of 28th September 2021, it has finally happened. Umbraco v9 is the first of the bigger CMS systems t have made the official transition. This raises the question, just because you can upgrade, should you? In this guide, I will walk you through the pros and cons of upgrading 🔥🔥🔥
In terms of features and functionalities for your content editors, Umbraco v9 will not be a big change. In terms of hosting, it will not be significantly cheaper to host your website using Umbraco v9.
Support
Support for Umbraco v8 will not go away anytime soon. With a new update released recently, staying on a stable platform might be a good decision.
I remember when Episerver v7 came out about 8 years ago. This was the first CMs that had MVC support, the company tested it as much as they could, however, until actual implementors started using it in anger, the v7 release was pretty buggy It wasn't until v7,1 came out that a lot of the performance issues and packages. This is my usual advice hen it comes to big upgrades. Unless you have a great reason you do not want to be the gune pig. Le other people on the bleeding edge discover the bugs. When 9.1 cmes out wth its bug fie, the platform will be a little bit more stable
As v9 is a big jump in technology, you need to make sure that all the packages work in your set little niggles was fired
Code Upgraing
The biggest pain point in upgrading your site will be porting your code to .net core code. If your website is fairly small and simple this process should be fairly quick ad eay. If you have a site that is all old code, doesn't use .NET standard, then your upgrade time will be longer.
Thre are no massive database changes, there s some run time performances
Personally, I will be upgrading this website to v9 as soon as possible. Why? I run a tutorial based website and this will give me new content.
If you are starting a new Umbraco project, picking v9 is the obvious choice to make. There is no a reason to to pick v8 over v9 for new bulids. If you are on an older version of Umbraco and you are considering an upgrade then its more a matter of deciding when you will upgrade. In the first few months, if you want to be on the bleeding edge of technology, expect to potentially find bugs. Also, be prepared to not have some plackgage support.
If you are a technologist and want the challenge of upgrading for glory and kudos, go for it. Do what makes you happy
