Overview:
8.12 is packed with good stuff created by both HQ and our wonderful community. We’ll go over a few highlights in the post but do have a look at the release notes to see all the improvements, features and fixes you get with this release.
Warren demos Unattended Upgrades and chats to Rune about the new features and improvements in Umbraco 8.12
Another feature to make the life of you and your clients a little easier. With Unattended upgrades you get the ability to configure your Umbraco installations to run upgrades (both for patches and minors without having to log in and use the installer. This is building on the concept of Unattended Installs introduced in Umbraco 8.11.
This feature was developed for Umbraco Cloud to make the upgrade experience smoother and it’s available for everyone using Umbraco CMS.
Configuring Unattended upgrades
In order to benefit from the new feature you have to add a few lines of configuration to the web.config of your site.
Umbraco.Core.RuntimeState.UpgradeUnattended in app settings set to true
You’ll also need to make sure the Umbraco.Core.ConfigurationStatus app setting matches the correct version (8.12.0) before unattended upgrades are run.
Note that the first request to the site initiates the upgrade and subsequent requests can take a little longer while the upgrade is running.
See the documentation for "Running an unattended upgrade" for more details.
“Pretty” and customisable boot error page
If a boot should fail, eg. during install or upgrading, you’ll now see a nicer error page when the site is not in debug mode:
You can override the default error page by creating an HTML file here ~/config/errors/BootFailed.html. Note that this page will only show if the site is not in debug mode. If you are debugging, you will of course get the full stack trace.
See the "Errors when booting a project" documentation for more details.
If you are making use of the multilingual features in Umbraco 8, you’ll see an overhaul of the various language dropdowns in the backoffice. This has been done to make it easier and more predictable to find the right variant to work on.
The sorting has been updated to always display the default language first. After this the mandatory language(s) are displayed in alphabetical order and finally the non-mandatory language(s) are listed.
Furthermore, each of these will be grouped by the state of the content. All “Published” pages are listed first, then “Draft” content and finally languages where content is “Not created” yet. These states are shown on each variant in the dropdown as well.
The new sorting has been applied to the following dialogs:
This should make it consistent across the backoffice and easier to find the content that you want to update or create.
Improvements have also been made to the Document Type “Create” menu. This has been in the making for quite some time and was actually available as a package for previous releases (Super Doc Type Create Menu). The updated menu was created to make it easier to learn about the different uses of Document Types and create a better flow for developers that use a lot of compositions and Element Types.
Previously the Document Type menu let you create a document type with or without a template, a Document Type collection (creating 2 Doc Types with parent/child relationship) and folders to organise your Doc Types. From Umbraco 8.12 the menu will look quite different:
Some new options have been added to the menu and descriptions for each of the menu items have also been added, making it easier to learn how to set up Umbraco for newcomers and improve the flow for everyone. You can still create a “standard” Document Type with or without a template and folders. You’ll notice 2 new options have been added, namely the ability to create an element type (for use with the Block List editor, Nested Content etc.) and you can create compositions directly from the menu as well (for property sets that are reusable across Document/Element Types.
In order to keep the menu as easy to understand as possible, the ability to create a Document Type collection has been removed. This gives a better overview and there were quite a lot of things that usually had to be configured on collections, meaning that, in a lot of cases, it did not really help improve the flow that much.
Huge thanks and a big ol HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK to Marc Goodson for putting a lot of thought and hard work into making this improvement. It will help everyone working with Doc Types in the future. And a big thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion, both on the original issue and the pull request, providing feedback and additional improvements 🙌
Note: If you are using the Super Doc Type Create Menu package in your Umbraco installation it is recommended that you uninstall this when upgrading to Umbraco 8.12.
Not that listviews were finite previously 😉 Søren Kottal has added the option to edit content items in a listview using infinite editing.
This can make updating content in listviews a lot faster and be a helpful tool for certain types of content. Enabling infinite editing for listviews can be done though the data type configuration for individual listviews, meaning you can have listviews that work as they always have and/or use the new infinite editing mode. You can also update existing listviews to make use of this.
Great idea and well executed; HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK Søren 🙌
Umbraco 8.12 also contains some nice performance enhancements regarding memory footprint, caching, improved boot time and other optimisations helping to make your Umbraco installations faster and more stable. You can find the details in the release notes under “Performance”. You can find all the performance enhancements in the release notes for Umbraco 8.12.
With 8.12 you’ll also get upgrades to a couple of dependencies:
While not the most exciting news in the world it’s good to stay on top of new releases for our dependencies and if you are using these in your implementation it’s good to be aware that they have been updated.
There’s a lot more to the release than listed above. More than 40 features, improvements and fixes have made it in to Umbraco 8.12. There are accessibility improvements, UI tweaks, improved documentation and more. You can find the full list of features and fixes on the 8.12 download page.
Of the 46 bug fixes and feature additions in 8.12.0, 32 of them have been contributed by the community created by 16 unique contributors. We have included 7 contributions that came in during last Hacktoberfest.
We’re welcoming 4 brand new contributors who have made their first pull request for Umbraco-CMS, they’re marked with stars below. Welcome to the contributor club Jim, Beard In A Suit, Jakob and Andrey! 🏆
⭐ = First pull request to any Umbraco repository
As part of re-arranging the Document Type Create menu, the PostCreateCollection endpoint has been removed from the backoffice API.
As always, from today, all new v8 Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 8.12. 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:
As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/contribute/releases/8120
This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.12.0
This time we’ve got a true sequel in the works. Following up from Unattended Installs brought to you in Umbraco 8.11, we’re now bringing you the 8.12 release candidate featuring Unattended Upgrades🎉 You’ll also find numerous performance enhancements, updated dependencies and a lot of great fixes and improvements from the community and HQ. We invite you to kick the tires and send any feedback our way - Let’s take a look 👀