Please note our content disclaimer in relation to blog posts.
Daniel Nelson is a Senior Developer at Cantarus. Here, he shares his experience of travelling to Codegarden 2026 as part of Umbraco's Green Track initiative, reflects on the conference's biggest announcements, and explains why taking the slower route made the journey just as rewarding as the destination.
For many Umbraco developers, Codegarden is the highlight event of the year. For the 2026 event, I took part in the Green Track scheme, which required me to travel to the event by train. In this blog post, I’ll share my perspective on Codegarden, Umbraco’s sustainability principles, and the 1,000-plus-mile journey that took me through 3 capital cities and 5 countries.
As a Senior Developer at Cantarus, I’ve worked with the Umbraco CMS for around seven years. It continues to offer the best CMS developer experience with its combination of open-source core and an expanding suite of premium products, including Commerce, Engage and Workflow. As a platform, it continues to improve, with new features being steadily introduced throughout the year – some of which I’ll come back to later.
Umbraco also has the most welcoming developer community I’ve ever been part of – from the Manchester meetup group to larger events like UK Fest and last year’s inaugural Umbraco in the City: Manchester. I’ve met countless friendly, encouraging, and knowledgeable people since I dipped my toes into the community a few years ago. Many of the developers behind the community's most popular packages are active contributors or now even work for Umbraco itself, and they're always happy to share their expertise.
Codegarden is Umbraco's annual conference and the largest of the community events through the year, hosted in Denmark every June since 2005. I had the pleasure of attending in 2025 when it was held in Odense, Umbraco's hometown, and spent 3 days enjoying rich technical talks, informal socialising, and experiencing what I’ve come to understand as Umbraco’s own brand of official chaos in their Thursday night celebrations, complete with costumes, bingo and an enormous wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano.
After last year, I couldn't wait to return, especially when it was announced that Codegarden 2025 would be held in a much larger venue in Copenhagen.
By early May, I'd sadly been unable to secure a ticket to Codegarden 2026. Then, the Umbraco Sustainability Community Team announced the Green Track scheme, offering 10 free tickets to people willing to travel to the event by train rather than by plane. The initiative formed part of Umbraco's ambition to make Codegarden 2026 its greenest event yet, with rail travel from the UK estimated to reduce the journey's CO2 emissions by up to 90%.
As someone who already travels by train a lot – in fact, I even did a similar rail journey back from Odense to Amsterdam after Codegarden last year – this was a very appealing opportunity. A few weeks later, I received confirmation that my application had been successful!
I decided to make the most of the trip by spending two nights in Brussels, a city I’d always wanted to visit.
To simplify the journey, I bought an Interrail pass which provides flexible rail travel across more than 30 European countries. They also have a handy app to plan multi-leg journeys and the additional reservations required for some high-speed trains within the network. This made the potential complexity of handling train bookings across multiple rail networks and languages much more straightforward.
The first leg of my journey began on Saturday 6th June with a morning train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. As one of the few high-speed sections of the UK’s rail network, this is always a quick and relatively comfortable journey.
The second leg was the Eurostar from London St Pancras to Brussels. While going through airport-like border control at a train station felt surreal, the overall journey was very convenient and comfortable. The Eurostar operates on the High Speed 1 line through to mainland Europe and is therefore the fastest train journey you can take in the UK. The often quite expensive Eurostar tickets were much cheaper when booked through the Interrail scheme, another benefit of the pass.
After covering almost 400 miles, I arrived in Brussels and checked into the Warwick Grand-Place hotel. Over the following two days, I explored the stunning Grand-Place, sampled the local beers, enjoyed a late-night jam at Toots Jazz Club and combined perhaps two of my most niche interests by visiting the Franco-Belgian Comic Art Museum, housed in an iconic Art Nouveau warehouse designed by Victor Horta.
.jpeg?mode=crop&width=960&height=960&rxy=0.6056727170944214,0.7025549411773682&format=webP)
.jpeg?mode=crop&width=960&height=960&format=webP)
Leaving Brussels on Monday 8th June, I started my next journey with a blunder, missing my train from Brussels-Nord to Cologne by a matter of minutes after not leaving quite enough time between stations. Rookie mistake!
Once underway, I had a nearly 14-hour trip from Brussels to Cologne, then to Hamburg, and finally to Copenhagen aboard Germany’s Intercity Express high-speed trains. I had roughly one-hour stopovers in Cologne and Hamburg – enough time to quickly take in the beautiful Cologne Cathedral and Hamburg Town Hall, eat, and take a few photos.
The final five-hour stretch from Hamburg into Denmark started just before 7pm. This was on the EuroCity-Express, another high-speed service that took me through northern Germany and over Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula and Funen Island, and finally terminated at Copenhagen on Zealand Island. This leg of the journey was much more rural, quieter and sleepier. Amazingly, around half of Denmark’s electricity comes from wind power, and I saw a great deal of evidence of that throughout the roughly 200 miles of picturesque countryside the journey sped through.
Checking into my hotel in Copenhagen around midnight, I then spent Tuesday visiting some museums (the brilliant Designmuseum Denmark and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a sculpture and statue museum with some amazing history of its own) with a colleague and preparing for the official kick-off of Codegarden at the Tuesday night pre-party hosted by Knowit.
After a fun night catching up with people in the community, Codegarden officially began with a keynote from CTO Filip Bech-Larsen, VP of Developer Relations Emma Burstow and CEO Mats Persson. Across two packed days, the conference offered sessions on four stages alongside open Q&A spaces, the DevRel Den, and even a dedicated silent zone.
A few announcements and sessions stood out in particular.
Announced during the event was Umbraco Automate, a new open-source automation engine built into the back office. It allows multi-step drag-and-drop flows to be built using actions and triggers. Out of the box, it supports core Umbraco functionality as well as packages like Commerce, Forms and Engage, alongside webhooks and AI agents.
One of the highlights for me was Principal Engineer Kenn Jacobsen’s talk on the Elements functionality coming in Umbraco v18. This will provide a Library section to manage reusable content and insert it into pages as Elements, removing the need to keep non-page-like content within the main Content Tree, a bugbear of mine and many other developers for a long time!
Another particularly interesting talk came from DR, Denmark's public broadcaster. Their team walked through their migration from Drupal to Umbraco 17, highlighting the extensive back-office customisation available in Umbraco and how it supports a huge number of journalist contributors.
I also attended several talks by prominent community members: James Hobbs’ talk on whether AI is reducing our ability to learn and think critically, Owain Williams’ talk on the Umbraco Management API, and Paul Seal’s talk on using that API to improve package release automation.
The evening entertainment was the Umbraco Awards dinner on Wednesday, followed by the chaotic and fun Thursday night dinner. Our 700-strong crowd participated in bingo and a giant game of musical chairs, watched live performances including a full orchestra and enjoyed the fantastic atmosphere of the community cutting loose. And, as always, a lot of Hammerschlagen was played.
As with last year, Codegarden was an absolute joy to attend, and being in Copenhagen this year meant it was a great opportunity to explore the city during downtime between talks – I made sure to hit Warpigs a few times!
.jpeg?mode=crop&width=960&height=960&format=webP)
One thing that stood out throughout the event was how seriously Umbraco continues to take sustainability. The Green Track scheme is just one of several initiatives by the Community Sustainability Team. Its annual Impact Report covers digital efficiency, operational footprint, knowledge impact and company emissions, while the team has also published Sustainability Best Practices, guidance for editors and their use of content and assets, and the Umbraco Community Sustainability package, which provides a dashboard of carbon-emission estimates for website pages.
Codegarden continues to be the highlight of the developer conference year, and attending via the Green Track is not only a great way to reduce your personal emissions but also an opportunity to see parts of Europe you might otherwise fly over.
Seeing real-life evidence of how heavily carbon-free energy sources are used throughout Europe, particularly in Denmark, was an apt reminder of the great progress we’re making towards net zero, but also how much work still lies ahead.
If the Green Track scheme returns next year, I'd happily do it all again. The slower journey became part of the experience, and I'd recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity.
Learn more about Cantarus' digital offering or get in touch to see how we can help you unlock the full potential of your organisation with Umbraco.