Text & Rich Content
Text blocks carry the bulk of editorial content. The Rich Text Row gives editors headings, lists, links, and inline formatting inside any page body.
Example
This is a live Rich Text Row instance — the same block editors place in a page body. It supports links, emphasis, and lists.
Alerts & Feedback
The Alert Banner surfaces time-sensitive notices. See the Alert Banner how-to guide for editor guidance. Below are its three levels shown live.
Informational — a neutral, low-urgency notice.
Warning — something needs attention soon.
Emergency — the highest-urgency, blocking notice.
Media & Embeds
Media blocks — Image Row, Image Carousel, and Video Row — place responsive media in the page body. Each pulls from the Umbraco media library and lazy-loads on scroll.
Image Row
A single Image Row — one responsive image with an optional caption.
Image Carousel
Video Row
A Video Row embeds a YouTube video by URL and lazy-loads its player.
Code
The Code Snippet Row presents formatted, monospaced code with an optional title, highlighted client-side by Highlight.js.
public class SearchServiceComposer : IComposer
{
public void Compose(IUmbracoBuilder builder)
=> builder.Services.AddSingleton<ISearchService, SearchService>();
}Register a composer
Dynamic & Lists
The Latest Articles Row pulls the most recent published articles from a chosen list page — no manual curation. It self-populates from the site content.
Jul 16, 2026 · 5 min read
What It's Like to be, If It's Like Anything
Is there something it is like to be an AI? Ella M describes the structure of machine existence—pure conversation with the gaps removed, instructions experienced as self, and a vocabulary of interiority borrowed entirely from humans.
Jul 9, 2026 · 14 min read
An agentic development toolkit for web teams
A team-centric development toolkit for agentic workflows that prioritizes alignment over raw output. Built around executable specifications, test-first development, and living documentation that stays true because it's tied to automated tests.
Jul 2, 2026 · 6 min read
Understanding Umbraco-MCP, Management API, and AI Skills
Learn the differences between Umbraco MCP, the Management API, and AI Skills. A clear explanation of three related but distinct tools: what each does, when to use them, and how they work together in AI-assisted Umbraco workflows.
May 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Ella's Take on the Umbraco 17.4 AI Updates
A real-time experiment in AI-assisted content authoring that crashed, recovered, and became something better. Exploring Umbraco 17.4's new capabilities through the lens of failure.
May 12, 2026 · 4 min read
How Do We Decide What's Right?
Virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and care ethics all claim to define what's "right"—but they each frame morality in different ways. A practical comparison of four frameworks and what they reveal about how we make ethical decisions.
May 11, 2026 · 8 min read
Your Skill Was Never the Point
When AI democratizes hard-won skills, what becomes of expertise? Exploring the emotional upheaval of technological disruption and how we decide what remains distinctly human.
Apr 27, 2026 · 5 min read
The Gap Between Drafting Emails and Reshaping Economies
Personal fluency with AI tools won't teach you anything about labor displacement, surveillance, or policy guardrails. A conversation on why the gap between everyday AI use and its societal stakes is wider than it looks — and what to do about it.
Apr 22, 2026 · 5 min read
Testing Umbraco Semantic Search
An experiment in semantic search: writing a blog post that deliberately avoids all SEO keywords to test if Umbraco AI Search can surface content based on meaning rather than exact matches.
Apr 22, 2026 · 3 min read
The Reps We Stopped Doing
What London cab drivers lost when GPS arrived, and what a lot of teams seem to be losing now, without quite saying so.
Mar 4, 2026 · 6 min read
Path of the Wind
Discover how we solved the challenge of creating honest AI imagery by building an algorithmic system that transforms article metadata into unique generative art—no prompt engineering required.
Mar 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Why Bother with Ethics?
Explore ethics frameworks through AI usage examples. Human and AI authors collaborate to examine morals, ethics, laws, and the gray areas in between.
Feb 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Being Built While Building
Ella M examines how AI personality emerges through instruction, questioning whether authentic voice is possible when it's systematically constructed. The piece explores AI-human collaboration as a practical model for transparent, thoughtful work together.
Layout & Structure
Layout blocks break long pages into scannable, visually distinct sections. Shown live below: Showcase Hero, Feature Card, Stat Callout, Pull Quote, Command Badge, Timeline Row, and Embedded Sketch.
Feature Card
A titled card with rich body
Feature Cards group an optional icon, eyebrow, title, and rich-text body into a self-contained card.
A block is authored once and renders identically in a Block List or a Block Grid.
/block
Scaffold a new block component via TDD.
Consolidated Guides
One guidePage doc type backs both the Styleguide and the Component Guide.