Umbraco 7.8 Beta is out

Today we are releasing a beta version of Umbraco 7.8 which comes with some pretty impressive features, but unlike some other minor releases this one is a real "minor" release so there's not much to be afraid of when it comes to upgrades.

What's new in 7.8?

Back office tour & contextual help

Finally the learning curve of Umbraco will be flattened. When you startup Umbraco for the first time you'll be greeted by a quick tour intro which will interactively guide you through the back office interface. Once you've completed that you can take various other interactive lessons through the back office from creating document types to setting up templates. You'll be able to re-take any lesson at any time and of course if you're a hardened Umbraco cadet, you won't be bothered by the lessons at all but they'll be on hand just in case.

Version 7.8 also comes equipped with contextual help! Finally that Help section in the back office is going to come in super handy. At any time you can click on the question mark in the bottom left of the back office and you can see any articles that are relevant to the current interface you are working with. This dialog is also sticky so as you navigate the back office you can see the contextual help adjust to what you are working on.

Even better news is that all of this is extensible! Do you want to create a back office tour for your editors for that new Property Editor you've created? Sure you can! You can even create contextual help articles for your users when using your new editor.

Info tab

So long "Generic Properties" tab.... hello "Info" tab! The old Generic Properties tab is... well... super old! There isn't any very good reasons to keep it the old way and plenty of great reasons for making it look and work awesome. The new Info tab gives us more information in a smaller space and we now also get a page's history visible right there!

Enhanced support for Load Balancing

A couple of small fixes have been made that are sure to have big benefits in your Load Balancing setup.

We now have the load balancing engine that processes 'instructions' running in a more robust way which prevents timeout issues and avoids the dreaded "DISTRIBUTED CACHE IS NOT UPDATED" error message. I plan on writing up a more technical post on the underlying details soon. In the meantime here's the interesting links:

Security improvements

We've put in place better cookie session tracking which is some added security for those folks not running over HTTPS and for new installs we'll have a stronger password hashing format by default

Installation & Release notes

As always, installation and release notes can be found on OUR: https://our.umbraco.org/contribute/releases/780

This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/7.8.0-beta

We'd love to hear your feedback! Please log any issues on the issue tracker: http://issues.umbraco.org

Update: To give plenty of time for testing and get enough feedback on the contents of the Back Office Tour and contextual help, the expected final release of 7.8 will take a little longer than normal. We're planning on a final release of 7.8 during January 2018.