Releasing on a steady cadence

As an important open source project and critical software vendor for many businesses today, we want to make sure that you can have more predictability when we release new versions. We also want to further encourage contributions by ensuring they will see the way to an actual release within a reasonable time.

A Minor change to the release process

Starting from Umbraco version 8.10, we will be releasing new minor-versions on a fixed cadence of 6 weeks. In practice, we are aligning the releases with the internal structure at Umbraco HQ where we work in cycles, with a 6 week duration, that consist of three 2-week sprints.

This means that we will no longer commit to what any particular release consists of until 3 weeks before its release. Features are worked on and released in the first coming release after they are done. The same goes for incoming contributions - they will be released in the first upcoming release after they have been merged. 

What about future Release Candidates?

We will keep releasing Release Candidates two weeks before a scheduled minor release and take feedback up until 4 days before the release. This gives us time to fix issues and prepare the release.

What will the new release cadence be?

Given our current internal cadence, this means you can expect the following minor releases going forward:

Just like today, we can and will delay a release if we deem it necessary – primarily for stability, performance or security reasons.

We might move dates around to not collide with holidays etc. This will only happen rarely, and we’ll notify you on changes on the @umbracoproject twitter account and we are going to continually keep the release progress page on Our Umbraco up to date with expectations.

What about Patches? 

Patch-versions will be released as the need occurs. It is crucial that we get fixes out to you as soon as possible, so we do not want to put these on a fixed cadence.

In this post we have talked about how we want to handle minor and patch versions going forward. You might be asking yourself: "What about major versions?" We do actually have some news on this as well but that's a story for next time!

So look out for the next step in making the releases predictable which will be a move to "proper" semantic versioning (blog post coming your way in two weeks time🚀).

We hope you are as excited about this as we are, and that this will help you keeping your Umbraco installs up-to-date and easier to plan for.