On May 30th 2024, Umbraco will be releasing version 14, this version brings some rather big breaking changes to the CMS, in this post we will outline why we will not be offering development migrations, builds or development support for versions 14.
However, we will continue to offer hosting for versions 14.

Umbraco has been around a long time, and due to this, some parts of the CMS are written using ageing technologies, in this case, the backoffice (admin area) has been using AngularJs since version 7.
Replacing this with a newer framework has been on the cards for multiple years.

Before Umbraco could investigate replacing AngularJs they had to move the project off of .NET Framework and onto .NET Core (now just .NET), this was completed back in version 9.

The new backoffice (Bellissima) coming in version 14 makes use of Web Components and LIT, due to this there is a significant lack of knowledge and expertise working with these technologies in the Umbracosphere, there will also be minimal support for packages, every package which interacts with the backoffice will need to be rewritten to support the new backoffice, this is no small task, especially when most of the packages are written by community members in their spare time.

The other point is that Umbraco 14 is a short-term support version, this means that the maintenance required on these sites is significantly increased as they will need to be continually updated to ensure they remain on a supported version, the end of life date for this version is May 2025

The next version we will support for development will be Umbraco V17, this will be a long-term support version, so you can be sure that sites built on this version will be supported for a much longer time with a reduced maintenance schedule.

If you have a site running on V6, V7, V8, V9 or V10 we would recommend and be willing to help migrate or upgrade to Version 13, this version is a long-term support version, which will be supported right up until December 2026, and this aligns nicely with version 17 which will be released around November 2025.

You can read more about the Umbraco life-cycle here:
Umbraco Long-term Support (LTS) and End-of-Life (EOL)

You can read more about long-term support (LTS) and short-term support (STS) on Wikipedia here:
Long-term support - Wikipedia