Umbraco Forms Release 12.2 and Umbraco Deploy 4.9/10.3/11.2/12.1

Written by Andy Butland

Over the past few days, new releases for Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy were published. Each was available for a couple of weeks as release candidates before being released as new minor versions. Let’s take a look at what you get.

Overview:

What’s new in Umbraco Forms Deploy?
- Umbraco Forms 12.2
- Umbraco Deploy 4.9/10.3/11.2/12.1
Updates since the release candidates
How to get your hands on the new releases

What’s new in Umbraco Forms 12.2 and Deploy 4.9/10.3/11.2/12.1?

The Forms release is for solutions based on Umbraco CMS version 12 was released on Thursday December 7, 2023.

For Deploy, the releases are for solutions based on CMS versions 8, 10 and 12. If you are using the product in Umbraco 8, you can update it to the Deploy 4.9 release. As of Umbraco 10, the major version numbers of CMS and Deploy are aligned and you can update to the corresponding version. These releases are available today, Monday December 11th.

All these updates are also included in the latest release candidates for Forms and Deploy 13, and will be part of the final releases for Umbraco 13 (currently out as release candidate).

After both products are released, all new Umbraco Cloud projects will be running the latest versions, and one-click upgrades are available for existing projects.

Umbraco Forms 12.2

The latest version of Umbraco Forms boasts a number of new features to improve the experience for those creating and completing forms. Relation tracking will allow your editors to more easily locate where forms are used on the website.

Umbraco now helps keep track of where forms are used.

Dynamic response pages give more flexibility to re-use forms across the site and have the user's experience vary. And an additional form state provides more options for handling approvals of Forms submissions.

To read about these features, and the other items included in the release, please see the Umbraco Forms 12.2 release candidate blog post.

Umbraco Deploy 4.9/10.3/12.1

The main feature included in the latest Umbraco Deploy is a feature for content import and export between environments and projects via zip files. This new feature helps mitigate platform limitation on e.g. Azure when transferring and deploying large amounts of content and/or schema.

We also include new migration hooks, with common implementations provided, for migrating data types and content between Umbraco installations AND versions.This helps make it easier to move a site into Umbraco Cloud, and can help handle upgrading from older Umbraco versions (7 and 8). These migration hooks and implementations can also as well as updating from deprecated property editors to new ones, such as Nested Content to Block List Editor.

Aside from this the new releases includes the ability to properly attribute users for content operations such as publishing when transferring content between environments. You also have the ability control how and if Public Access rules set on content items are transferred.

A lot of great new features to help you be even more productive with Umbraco Deploy. You can read more about features and enhancements included in the releasein the Umbraco Deploy 4.9. 10.3 and 12.1 release candidate blog post.

Updates since the release candidates

During the release candidate period we made some further small updates to the releases.

For Umbraco Forms we've included the following additional items:

For Umbraco Deploy we've updated:

Fixed a regression introduced in RC1 that resulted in a JsonSerializationException when transferring/restoring content via the backoffice

Fixed assigning default permissions to administrators user group on a new install

Moved all permissions into a separate Deploy category (only affects the UI)

Added a TrashedContentDeploymentOperations setting to export/import trashed content (items in the recycle bin)

Updated default value connector to remove value type prefixes (to enhance compatibility when exporting/importing between major versions)

Added collection builder extension methods (DeployValueConnectors and DeployDataTypeConfigurationConnectors)

The full list of what’s included in the release can be found in the release notes for Forms and Deploy.

How to get your hands on the new releases

Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy come preinstalled on all Umbraco Cloud projects and as of today, all new projects will be running the latest versions. For all existing Umbraco Cloud projects, all the new features and fixes are just 2 minutes away with the upgrade minor version feature.

We’ve wrapped it all up for you, so all you have to do now is follow these steps:

Add a Development Environment to your project if you do not already have one (Add a Development environment by clicking “Manage Environments” in the project view)
Make sure you also restore the content to the Development Environment from your Live.
When the Development Environment is all set up and you’ve made sure you don’t have any pending changes on the Development Environment - you are now ready to upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco Forms!
It's as easy as clicking a button, literally. The "Upgrade Available" button on the Development Environment will start the automatic upgrade and we’ll take care of everything from here! 🚀
Once it's done, check the Development Environment to make sure everything is looking right.
When that's confirmed, you are ready to deploy the upgrade to the next environment - Live or Staging - and take full advantage of all the new features.

And remember, you can always spin up a new project on Umbraco Cloud to try the latest versions of Umbraco CMS, Forms, and Deploy, either from your existing Umbraco Cloud account or by taking a free Umbraco Cloud trial.

For self-hosted projects installation options can be found on the package pages on marketplace.umbraco.com for Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy On-Premise.

Or you can go directly to the appropriate NuGet feed:

Umbraco.Forms
Umbraco.Deploy.OnPrem (for Umbraco Deploy 10+)
UmbracoDeploy.OnPrem (for Umbraco Deploy 4 used with Umbraco 8)

More details are available in the documentation for Forms and Deploy.

Thanks to everyone testing out the release candidates 🙏 All issues reported have been addressed and listed in the release notes. For general feedback, you’re always welcome to contact us at product@umbraco.com and specific issues on the issue trackers for Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy.