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What is an Umbraco MVP? Plus, future AI & cloud roadmap insights

Manifesto

by manifesto

23/06/2026

3-minute read

  • Umbraco
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On a gradient background is an image of Nurhak Kaya. His name and the Umbraco MVP logo to the left

We sat down with 5-time Umbraco MVP Nurhak Kaya to find out more about MVP status and what’s coming up in the Umbraco development world.

What is an Umbraco MVP, and what does it mean for the developer community?

 It is always a real privilege to be recognised by Umbraco and the friendly Umbraco Community. Umbraco MVP stands for “Most Valuable People,” and it represents individuals who are deeply committed to supporting the Umbraco ecosystem.

The MVP award is a testament to community contribution. It means you are giving back in meaningful ways, whether that’s contributing to the core source code, organising local meet-ups, speaking at tech conferences, writing deep-dive articles, or simply spending time helping other community members solve complex problems on the forums.

How did your journey into this community-focused role begin?

I’ve been working with Umbraco since 2014, navigating its evolution through numerous version upgrades. Over the years, that hands-on experience naturally turned into a desire to share what I’d learned with others. I started answering community questions, writing about tricky technical and strategic problems and possible solutions for them, and attending events.

The real turning point for me was attending the Umbraco Spark event back in 2020. Meeting so many passionate people, including Umbraco’s founder Niels Hartvig, inspired me to step up, speak out, and become a more visible part of the community. That momentum carries forward into everything I do today.

What does maintaining this MVP status mean for you personally?

It’s a massive point of pride, but more than anything, it’s a brilliant motivator. It pushes me to keep learning, keep sharing, and keep driving innovation, not just for my own professional growth, but for the success of our clients and the broader Umbraco community.

Why should enterprise clients choose a CMS agency with an Umbraco MVP on the team? 

For Manifesto’s clients, it means peace of mind and a massive competitive advantage. When you work with an agency that has an active Umbraco MVP leading their architecture and strategy, you aren’t just getting standard implementation; you are getting a direct line to the heart of the platform.

  • Direct platform insights: We know where the platform is heading before the roadmap is public.

  • Architectural best practices: Solutions are built clean, scalable, and built to last.

  • Rapid problem solving: If a unique requirement comes up, we don't waste days guessing—we tap into our direct MVP network to solve it fast.

 

What does it mean for Manifesto?

Manifesto is an agency built on collaboration, where talented people openly share knowledge and ideas every single day. Having an Umbraco MVP on the team validates that culture. It shows that we aren't just consumers of technology; we are active participants in shaping it.

Enjoying this kind of recognition is a great boost for the agency. It proves we have the ambition, the technical expertise, and the vision to deliver top-tier, award-winning work. My colleagues and I have some fantastic projects in the pipeline right now, particularly around Umbraco Cloud projects, modern frontend integrations, and leveraging the full capabilities of Umbraco.

In your view, what’s next for the Umbraco roadmap regarding new AI features and Model Context Protocol (MCP)?

Umbraco is leaning heavily into AI, but not just with standard, surface-level text generators. They are adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that enables secure, two-way data sharing between AI models and local development tools, which gives AI agents deep, contextual awareness of the Umbraco ecosystem.

  • For Editors: The upcoming Editor MCP acts as a built-in assistant. Instead of running multiple manual commands, an editor can simply type, "Create a landing page for our autumn campaign, draft the hero copy, and pull in the latest product images from the media library," and the AI handles the entire sequence behind the scenes securely.

  • For Developers & Marketers: New Agent Skills are packaging hard-won development and content modeling wisdom into reusable guidance for AI coding tools. Furthermore, with Automated Content Workflows and the Content Delivery MCP Server, AI tools can safely read published live content to automate repetitive workflows, build structured reports, or audit media libraries for accessibility without modifying source data.

How is Umbraco upgrading enterprise search abstraction and Umbraco Cloud infrastructure?

Search is getting a massive architectural upgrade. Umbraco is introducing a new Search Abstraction Layer (initially as a standalone package for fast community-driven iterations, before embedding it directly into the core CMS). This makes it incredibly clean for developers to swap out the default Examine search provider (Umbraco's built-in, Lucene-based indexing engine) for external enterprise search engines like Elasticsearch.

For high-traffic, enterprise clients, Umbraco Cloud is dropping features that match the absolute gold standard of .NET deployment:

  • Infrastructure scaling: Real Load Balancing paired with dedicated Redis Caching is arriving to distribute heavy traffic seamlessly across servers.

  • Rolling updates & artifact deployments: Teams can build ready-to-run artifacts through their existing CI/CD tools and push them to Umbraco Cloud, where traffic cuts over automatically to new versions without zero-downtime visitor impact.

  • Sustainability & governance: A rebuilt Sustainability Dashboard offers highly accurate carbon emission tracking, organisation-level reporting, and period-on-period comparisons. Combined with proactive portal health checks, scheduled upgrades, and instant Slack/webhook alerts for DDoS mitigation, managing complex cloud environments is becoming safer and more transparent than ever.

Umbraco and manifesto

Manifesto is an award-winning UK digital agency and Umbraco Platinum Partner that is dedicated to delivering impactful digital experiences, partnering on a diverse range of projects spanning the private, public, and charitable sectors.

As a highly extensible, open-source solution, Umbraco is ideal for organisations that need to deliver immense business value in a flexible, cost-effective way without compromising on enterprise-grade quality. It hits the perfect sweet spot of speed, simplicity, and scalability.

Want to build for what’s next? 

Chat with our Umbraco MVP today to explore how upcoming AI features and cloud architectures can optimise your digital ecosystem.