Overview:
- New Release: Umbraco 8.7
- New release: Improved widgets for Umbraco Uno
- New Release: Umbraco Forms 8.5
- New Release: Alpha version of Umbraco running on .NET Core
- Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.8 RC
- What’s new in Umbraco Cloud?
- User Group Permission for content transfers
- Blob Storage for all!
- Updates to the Roadmap
- Deploy on Premise
- Preview API for Heartcore
- New RFC: Element Data
New Release: Umbraco 8.7
Thursday, September 10th, Umbraco 8.7 was released. This is a big minor release, and one we’re really proud of. A release with more than 200 features, fixes and improvements!
You can start using the new Block List Editor, segments, content apps for document types and look forward to a backoffice that is more performant and friendlier than ever before. Get all the details in the Umbraco 8.7 release blog post.
New release: Improved widgets for Umbraco Uno
Alongside Umbraco 8.7, a new version of Umbraco Uno was released. On the Roadmap we’ve called this “Improved Widgets for Uno”. And that is true - but when you try the new Uno, I’m sure you’ll agree that what you get is actually an “Improved editing experience”.
As a standard, we’ve now implemented the new Block List Editor functionality in Uno to give the users a true “what-you-see-if-what-you-get”- experience. This makes it more intuitive, fun and faster to spin up a website in Uno.
The new update to Uno also includes 8 additional SEO-features, to help support your ranking on Google.
Get all the details in the release blog post: WYSIWYG - editing experience in Uno
New Release: Forms 8.5 aka Forms in the database
Forms has also received a new minor update. This release enables you to store all your Forms data in the database and contains a few other fixes. Forms 8.5 was released on September 7th and you can read all about it in the Forms 8.5 release blog post.
New Release: .Net Core Alpha
Want to try Umbraco on your mac? Run it on Linux? Or explore how it works on .NET Core? All this is possible with the alpha released on September 3rd. It’s been great to see all the buzz surrounding this milestone. The launch was live-streamed in a special Alpha edition of Unicorner with Niels Hartvig, Bjarke Berg and Filip Bech-Larsen.
You can find all the details on how to try the future of Umbraco in the .NET Core alpha release blog post.
Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.8 Release Candidate
With the release of Umbraco 8.7 done, we can start focusing on Umbraco 8.8. The Core Collaborators team have been very busy and there are a lot of improvements for you to look forward to. The release is very close to being done and we expect to have a Release Candidate ready for you to test later this week!
Some of the thing you can look forward to are:
- Improved experience when using TAB to navigate overlays and Infinite Editing dialogues
- Replacing icon-fonts with SVGs
- Vastly improved image cropping in Grid Layouts
- The ability to get a large number of entities (content types, dictionary items, templates and many more) by GUID and UDI
- No less than 27 (!) accessibility improvements, making the backoffice even friendlier for everyone
You can find the full list of features, fixes and improvements on the Umbraco 8.8 download page.
And then keep your eyes on the Umbraco blog this week for a 8.8 Release Candidate blog post.
What’s new in Umbraco Cloud
We’ve already mentioned the update to Umbraco Uno but that’s not all that’s going on in Umbraco Cloud land:
User group permissions for transfers and restores
You can now control who has access to transferring and restoring content and media in your Umbraco Cloud site. This can be done on a User Group level, e.g. your content writers should only be able to restore content from live to staging.
You even get granular control on a per node basis, so you can disable restores and transfers for specific content. A great feature that can help avoid mistakes and ensure proper workflows for reviewing are followed.
Blob Storage for all!
Early in the year, we made media in blob storage the default of all new Umbraco Cloud projects. This has benefits in terms of performance, scalability and takes away the hassle of having to configure your own blob storage.
We’re currently in the process of rolling out media blob storage for existing projects on Umbraco Cloud, so that this setup becomes the standard for media storage. In the next 5-6 weeks, existing Cloud Projects will be contacted directly via email with more information regarding this.
Updates to the Roadmap
The last couple of weeks have been busy with release for all our products. This also means there has been quite a lot of activity on the Product Roadmap:
Updates in “Now”
Deploy on Premise
We have made many improvements recently to Umbraco Deploy, but it's becoming clear that the product does not yet reach the standards we aim for in order to make it public. The release ETA has therefore been moved to Q4.
We are planning to include some of our interested Gold Partners in test and review of the Deploy on Premises product as soon as possible.
Recently we added a Deploy Dashboard feature to the roadmap, which will be part of the final version. We’ll keep you posted on the progress in future Product Updates.
Preview API for Umbraco Heartcore
You’ll soon be able to configure preview URLs for your Umbraco Heartcore projects. This will enable developers to build a solid previewing experience, allowing content editors to easily preview content before it is published.
You can add one or more preview URLs for specific parts of the content tree.
The preview button will be available when you start adding preview URLs which can be done directly through the backoffice UI.
If you add multiple preview URLs, you can choose a default and select between the different previewing experiences in a dropdown. Perfect if your content is consumed in different apps.
We’ve updated the target release date to September 29th on the Product Roadmap.
Done
With all the recent releases we’ve moved quite a lot of items to the Product Roadmap History page:
- ✅ Forms in the database (Done with the release of Umbraco Forms 8.5)
- ✅ Block List Editor (Done with the release of Umbraco 8.7)
- ✅ Improved Widgets and Improved SEO capabilities for Umbraco Uno (Done with the latest update to Umbraco Uno)
- ✅ .NET Core: Backoffice Operational (Done with the alpha release of Umbraco on .NET Core)
New RFC on Element Data
Since the release of Umbraco 8 you have been able to create Element Types (for use with complex property editors like Nested Content, Block List and more). We want to continuously improve the experience of working with elements and the next big step is to make element data a first-class citizen. That’s why a new RFC (Request for Comments) has been added recently. We have an idea for how to approach this but we need your input and experience to ensure a good start to the implementation and that we’ve covered all angles (or as many as possible 😉).
The discussion is already well underway and we’d like to give a big H5YR to all of you who have commented already 🙌 Please give the RFC a read and add your comments, questions and suggestions. You can find the discussion here and there is a link to the latest version of the RFC in the first comment.
That’s it for this update…
A lot of new things to play with and a lot more to look forward to. We really appreciate all the testing and feedback you provide on the releases, RCs, RFCs etc. It makes a huge difference for all our products. For issues and specific feature requests, you can find the issue trackers for our products on the Umbraco Github account.
If you have product feedback, you’re welcome to reach out to us on product@umbraco.com.
… Until next time.
