Umbraco 8.11 Release

Written by Filip Bech

Installing Umbraco CMS without having to click through the installer, updated dependencies, accessibility improvements, customisations options and a lot of great fixes is what you get with Umbraco 8.11. It’s out now - let’s take a closer look 👀

Update: We have identified a breaking change in 8.11 and have released a patch (8.11.1) to address this

Overview

What’s new in Umbraco 8.11
Community Contributions
Breaking Changes
How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.11

What’s new in Umbraco 8.11

Unattended installs

With a few configuration changes, you can now install Umbraco without having to click through the installer. This new feature goes under the name unattended installs and was developed, in part, to help make the installation experience for our Umbraco Cloud products easier and faster. It certainly has use cases for on premises installations as well and it’s great to see the excitement around this feature.

To enable unattended installs you need to:

Set the correct Umbraco version in web.config
You need to have an Umbraco database connection string configured
Umbraco.Core.RuntimeState.InstallUnattended in app settings set to true.

When you boot the site we'll check if the database is empty (has no tables) and if it is, the database schema and default data will be created.

You will not be able to login to Umbraco since no password has been set for the default user, you either need to have an external login provider configured or set the password programmatically.

You can read more about how this works in the Unattended Install documentation.

This opens up for adding unattended upgrades in a future release (currently targeted for Umbraco 8.12), which means you can run upgrades on production sites without having to log in to the backoffice - Massive win!

Accessibility improvements

The A11Y accessibility team is continuously adding valuable updates to make Umbraco more accessible to everyone using the backoffice. This time around Jan Skovgaard has added 5 improvements and fixes - H5YR Jan 🙌

Remove all items for Multinode Treepicker (MNTP)

A new property action has been added for the MNTP property editor. This allows editors to remove all picked items in one go.

This is a great bit of functionality courtesy of Kenneth Jacobsen. He has cheekily promised to add this for other pickers if this was accepted - We look forward to it 😃 H5YR!

Custom backoffice login logo

With Umbraco 8.11 you now have the ability to change the logo on the backoffice login screen. This has been done in some cases in the past for various reasons but was only possible by overriding the CSS. It is now supported via a new setting in the UmbracoSettings config file: loginLogoImage

Thanks for adding a more standardised way of achieving this - Great work Patrick DeMooij 🙌

And much more!

There are a ton more fixes and improvements in large part thanks to community efforts and Hacktoberfest 2020 (see below).

There is a new bugfix that has been added since the release candidate relating to using the “Allow varying by culture” feature on a composition. This had the very much unintended effect of deleting field content and has now been fixed - Thanks to SouthCentralCode for reporting the issue.

There are also considerable performance enhancements made to Examine when indexing nodes with Public Access restrictions. The performance issues were due to a memory leak and have now been addressed. Huge thanks to Martin Rhodes for raising the issue that led to the discovery of this.

Community Contributions

Of the 50 bug fixes and feature additions in 8.11.0, 40 of them have been contributed by the community created by 23 unique contributors. We have included 23 contributions that came in during this year’s Hacktoberfest.

We’re welcoming 5 brand new contributors who have made their first pull request for Umbraco-CMS, they’re marked with stars below. Welcome to the contributor club fhatrifork, Büşra, vidyesh-phases, Martin and Maikel! 🏅

Speaking of Hacktoberfest, we’ve posted a comment for each Hacktoberfest contributor on their Hacktoberfest PRs last October. We’re now ready to ask for your t-shirt 👕 size or your preference on foregoing a reward to let us plant a tree 🌳 on your behalf instead. Check your email for a notification from GitHub on your PRs created in October!

Many thanks to all of the contributors to Umbraco 8.11, let’s give them a big #H5YR 🙌:

Bjarne Fyrstenborg - 7 PRs	Jan Skovgaard - 6 PRs
Poornima Nayar - 3 PRs	Patrick De Mooij - 2 PRs
Nathan Woulfe - 2 PRs	Rowan Bottema - 2 PRs
RonaldBarendse - 2 PRs	Nik Rimington - 1 PR
⭐ fhatrifork - 1 PR	Dave Woestenborghs - 1 PR
🌟 Büşra Şengül - 1 PR	⭐ vidyesh-phases - 1 PR
Jack Lawry - 1 PR	⭐ Martin Amsinck - 1 PR
Callum Whyte - 1 PR	Steve Van Eeckhout - 1 PR
⭐ Maikel Veen - 1 PR	Benjamin Carleski - 1 PR
Rasmus Olofsson - 1 PR	Rachel Breeze - 1 PR
Marc Goodson - 1 PR	David Brendel - 1 PR
Kenneth Jacobsen - 1 PR

⭐ = First pull request to any Umbraco repository

🌟 = First pull request to Umbraco CMS

Breaking Changes

There is one change identified as breaking in the 8.11 release. The app setting Umbraco.Core.RuntimeState.InstallEmptyDatabase that used to default to false is now obsolete and no longer used at all. Since this was a non-documented configuration we don't think this will affect anyone.

We’ve also updated NPoco to a newer version, updated from version 3.9.4 to 4.0.2, this should not incur any breaking changes but you might want to be aware of the update if you are using NPoco in your custom code.

Update: We have identified breaking changes in the new NPoco version. These changes were unfortunately undocumented, we do however apologise for not catching them earlier. A patch for 8.11 (8.11.1) has been released with a rollback of the NPoco upgrade.

How to get your hands Umbraco 8.11

As always, from today, all new v8 Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 8.11. For all our Umbraco Cloud customers with existing projects, this upgrade is only 2 minutes away:

We’ve wrapped it all up for you, so all you have to do now is follow these steps:

Add a Development Environment to your project, if you do not already have one (Add a Development environment by clicking “Manage Environments” in the project view)
Make sure you also restore the content to the Development Environment from your Live.
When the Development Environment is all set up and you’ve made sure you don’t have any pending changes on the Development Environment - you are all ready to upgrade to Umbraco 8.11!
It's as easy as clicking a button - like, literally clicking the "Upgrade Available" button on the Development Environment. The auto-upgrader will take care of everything from here! 🚀
Once it's done, check the Development Environment to make sure everything is looking right.
When that's confirmed, you are ready to deploy the upgrade to the next environment - Live or Staging, and start taking full advantage of all the new features.