The Umbraco Cloud Baseline

We are proud to have introduced new improvements to the Umbraco Cloud Baseline feature, making upgrading child projects to new minor versions of Umbraco a lot easier - some would even say it’s automagical ;)

This will make it much easier for you to take advantage of new features and important bug fixes released for Umbraco on all your projects connected to a baseline project. Something that’ll end up saving you a lot of time in your day-to-day tasks.

Now, what is “the Baseline feature”?

Many of our clients have already noticed this built-in feature in Umbraco Cloud. And for some, it was even their main reason for going with Cloud in the first place (Carlsberg Is a perfect example of this 🙂).

Why?

Simply because they got a tool that makes their job of updating and maintaining multiple Umbraco sites with a similar base structure a lot easier - and faster.

Some run multiple campaign sites, others run a bunch of similar Umbraco sites - and we’re talking anything from 10 - 1000+ sites! Now just think about all the hours you’d have to put in to maintaining and keeping each individual site up to date regularly. It actually doesn’t take a lot of projects before we’re talking a significant amount of time - time you’d much rather spend on creating great websites or take on a new project.

Because of these site’s structural similarities, we have created the Baseline feature to help make these tedious and time-consuming maintenance tasks a lot simpler and faster for you, so you can get on with the work you really enjoy.

How exactly?

To steal the description from Sofie in the Cloud; think of the Baseline as a conveyor belt for your projects.

With a baseline project in place, you can, with a few clicks, spin-up child projects that will be based on all the code from the baseline project - all Document Types, Templates, CSS files, JavaScript etc. CTRL+C, CTRL+V.

And as the simple gif above shows, the baseline structure also means that if you create changes in your baseline projects, you can easily deploy these changes to all your child projects, saving you a bunch of time from having to update this manually for each of them.  

However, it has not been that simple when having to upgrade minor releases to child projects…until now:

The minor (big!) Baseline improvement

Umbraco Baseline is already a part of Umbraco Cloud, so what’s the news here, you may ask? The answer is more “automation” to ease the job of upgrading multiple baseline child sites.

All projects on Umbraco Cloud, including the baseline project and child projects, automatically receive patch upgrades (e.g. 7.12.3), ensuring all sites are always on the newest and most secure patch version of Umbraco without you having to worry or lift a finger.

Minor upgrades of Umbraco (e.g. 7.12), are though not automatically rolled out as they often contain new features and larger bug fixes which means they sometimes need a bit more attention and care by you when upgrading.

With this new improvement, you are though able to initiate a minor upgrade on hundreds of baseline child sites with a click of a button. How? First, you need to manually upgrade your baseline project, and then you can push the upgrade out to all the associated child projects, saving you tons of time and hassle from having to upgrade all the child project individually.   

From a simple overview of the Umbraco Cloud portal, you can select which child projects you want to upgrade or you can simply select all of them!

This way, you don’t just save yourself a lot of time on doing the upgrades, you also ensure that your developers and your editors can take advantage of the new helpful features and bug fixes that gets added to Umbraco regularly. New features that might end up saving you even more time in your day-to-day job - or fix a bug that’s been causing you big sighs. 

How do you get this improvement to the Baseline feature?

It’s already part of Umbraco Cloud. So if you’re on Umbraco Cloud you can take advantage of it today. Follow the documentation for best practices and you are able to make your work with your Umbraco projects even more automagical.

Not on Umbraco Cloud yet?

If you have a project structure similar to what’s been described in this article, then now’s really the perfect time to give Umbraco Baseline on Umbraco Cloud a shot.

If you’d like some professional guidance before you start, we advise you to contact our support. They are experts in what’s possible with Umbraco Cloud and Baseline. Give a brief description of your project structure and they will help guide you to the right Baseline solution.

Another great tip is for you to sign up for our free Umbraco Cloud Webinar. On this webinar, Umbraco HQ Cloud specialists will guide you through the main features of Umbraco Cloud - including the Baseline feature, of course. And because it's a live webinar, you can even ask questions to these specialists so they can help guide you further. Sign-up for one of our weekly webinars here and get a lot wiser on Umbraco Cloud and the Baseline.