Overview
The pending arrival of Workflow 13 means the end of the road for Workflow 11, and while version 12 will move into the support phase when Umbraco 13 arrives, we still aim to backport changes and improvements when it makes sense (and isn’t overly arduous) to do so.
Given it’s getting close to the festive season, we’re including the new Advanced Search feature in Workflow 12 as an early Christmas gift from us to you.
How to get access to the new versions and how to provide feedback are explained at the end of this post.
What’s new in Umbraco Workflow 12.2 and 13?
Advanced Search
Workflow 12.2 and 13 come with a nifty new dashboard for searching deep into your content. While the Examine dashboard in the settings section provides some tooling for querying your indexes, Workflow’s Advanced Search provides a more user-centric approach, with UI tools for building complex queries.
Advanced Search allows searching one or more content types, optionally filtered by variant, for values present in one or more indexed fields.
The fields being searched can be one or more properties present on the selected content types, all fields indexed from properties using a particular data type or all fields indexed from properties using a particular property editor.
Which means what, exactly? It means lots of search recipes, like these examples:
- Search all French versions of Textpage, searching for ‘baguette’ in any field
- Search all BlogItems, searching for ‘Umbraco’ in the Main Content property, or ‘Workflow’ in the Page Title property
- Search all content types for ‘Umbraco’ appearing in any fields indexed from the Textstring data type
- Search Italian and Polish versions of all content types for ‘Workflow’ appearing in any fields indexed from the Umbraco.BlockGrid property editor
Queries can be refined to restrict results to content created or edited by a particular user, restricted to results created or updated in particular date ranges, or restricted to content in an active approval workflow.
On top of that, enabling approximate searching will catch near-miss queries and provide broader results.
This new feature further extends Umbraco Workflow’s functionality outside its original focus on content approvals, as we aim to add new and useful tools for improving the content management experience in larger, more complex websites.
Dependency updates 🙂
This one applies only to Workflow 13, for obvious reasons… Umbraco Workflow 13 is largely a dependency update to ensure everything works seamlessly with the latest and greatest CMS version.
Breaking changes
Workflow 13 comes with the expected major version code cleanup, which this time round entailed removing a few obsolete properties. These were all in code not typically expected to be referenced by third-parties, so should have no impact on the majority of Umbraco Workflow installations.
For full transparency, the changes are all listed in the Workflow documentation.
How to test
You can either create a new installation using the package available from the link below or upgrade an existing Umbraco 12, 11, or 10 project. All scenarios can provide valuable feedback.
If you find anything that isn’t working as expected, please provide feedback on the GitHub issue tracker for Workflow.
If you’re new to Workflow, the documentation site will help get you up and running.
How to get your hands on the new versions
Workflow 12.2 and 13 (release candidates) are available from the usual Nuget feed. The final release for 12.2 is set for November 28, and the final release for Workflow 13 will align with Umbraco 13, due on December 14.