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Umbraco 8.12 Release

Find out what you get with this brand new version of Umbraco

Filip Bech
Written by Filip Bech

New minor version is here and you get a bunch of great features as well as improvements and fixes with Umbraco 8.12. There's something for everyone in this release - wether you're a developer or an editor. Following up from Unattended Installs brought to you in Umbraco 8.11, we’re now bringing you the Unattended Upgrades 🎉 This and much more, available now - Let's take a look 👀

Overview:

What’s new in Umbraco 8.12

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

Unattended upgrades

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:

Screen shot of default error page boot has failed. White modal with error message on blue background with colored shapes.

The default boot failed screen in Umbraco 8.12

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.

Sorting language variants

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.

2432X1412 Sorting Variants Umbraco 8.12

Here you can see an example of the new sorting of language variants in effect.

The new sorting has been applied to the following dialogs:

  • Save
  • Publish
  • Publish with descendants
  • Unpublish
  • Send for approval
  • Schedule

This should make it consistent across the backoffice and easier to find the content that you want to update or create.

Improved Document Type menu

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.

Document Type Menu Prior To 8.12

The Document Type menu prior to Umbraco 8.12 has 4 options.

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:

Improved Document Type Menu 8.12

The improved Document Type menu in Umbraco 8.12.

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.

Infinite listviews

Not that listviews were finite previously 😉 Søren Kottal has added the option to edit content items in a listview using infinite editing.

Infinite Editing Listviews In Action 8.12

Listview with infinite editing enabled

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. 

Infinite Editing Listviews 8.12

Configuring infinte editing for listviews

Great idea and well executed; HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK Søren 🙌

Performance enhancements

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.

Upgraded Dependencies

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.

Community Contributions

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! 🏆

Bjarne Fyrstenborg - 8 PRs

Chad - 5 PRs

Nathan Woulfe - 3 PRs

mcl-sz - 2 PRs

Rachel Breeze - 2 PRs

Poornima Nayar - 2 PRs

⭐ Jim Lofgren - 1 PR

⭐ Jakob Bagterp - 1 PR

Mike Chambers - 1 PR

⭐ Andrey Karandashov - 1 PR

⭐ Beard In A Suit - 1 PR

Steve Van Eeckhout - 1 PR

David Brendel - 1 PR

Marc Goodson - 1 PR

Daniël Knippers - 1 PR

Søren Kottal - 1 PR

⭐ = First pull request to any Umbraco repository

Breaking Changes

As part of re-arranging the Document Type Create menu, the PostCreateCollection endpoint has been removed from the backoffice API.

How to get your hands Umbraco 8.12

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:

  • 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 8.12!
  • 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.

Non-Cloud and release notes:

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 

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