Umbraco 8.15 Release Candidate

Overview:

• What’s in Umbraco 8.15?
• Performance enhancements
• Media picker updates
• Breaking changes
• How to test
• How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.15
• When is the public release?

To help you provide us with feedback, I’ve gathered an overview of some of the items that you can help test for this RC. We have run internal testing and are very happy with the current state of the build - but extra polishing and testing are always helpful. So if you have time to help - or just find yourself super curious, feel free to dive into the 8.15. RC today. 

Update: There's currently an issue with installing the RC from NuGet, so we refer to the .zip download if you want to test Umbraco 8.15.

What’s in Umbraco 8.15?

Performance enhancements

Umbraco has just gotten way faster. No less than 10 issues/fixes are performance-related and some of them are big changes and big improvements. It runs the gamut from optimizing how content is loaded in the Blocklist editor with fewer database calls, to improving memory allocation, startup time and cache optimization. Just take a look at this beautiful list:

• Content and media load twice from SQL to nucache on a fresh server
• Optimize array and dictionary memory allocations for nucache deserialization by specifying capacity.
• Fix startup issues and timing with Examine and Nucache
• Optimizations related to BlockEditorPropertyEditor.ToEditor()
• Nested content optimizations
• Avoid repeated reloads of content and media cache following Deploy operations.
• Reduce sql queries when rendering blocklists in the content panel
• Performance improvements mainly around front-end caching
• Reduce memory allocations and speed up text localization
• Reduce memory use and speed up queries by only fetching required properties from examine

You’ll find detailed descriptions of the fixes and improvements as well as benchmarks in many of the above-listed issues if you want to dive deeper into how the optimizations were achieved.

With all these improvements it will be highly valuable to get feedback from existing implementations - SO if you have Umbraco 8 sites you can test the RC on, any feedback would be highly appreciated. 

A huge thanks and HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK to Chad (@nzdev3 on Twitter), who has generously contributed a lot of his time to both implement and test a lot of the performance-enhancing features in 8.15. A truly massive contribution!

You can also see details and benchmarks in the Performance Tuning talk from this year's Codegarden.

Media picker updates

In Umbraco 8.14 a new Media picker was introduced, bringing a new UI and some great new features to both editors and developers. Unfortunately, the new media picker was not backwards compatible, which meant it could only be used for new implementations or you’d have to do considerable work in order to migrate to the new picker.

The new and improved Media picker UI/UX introduced in Umbraco 8.14. Click here for full-screen video.

This has now been addressed in 8.15. You can switch the property editor from an old “mediapicker2” to “mediapicker3” and it should just work 🎉 If you want to make use of the new local cropping feature, just be aware that you will potentially need to update your frontend code to render specific crops. You can see examples directly on this issue (it’s now IPublishedContent) and we’ll have updated documentation for the final release.

We’d appreciate feedback on the data “migration” from the old to the new Media picker, so if you can try the switch out with the release candidate installed and report any issues that would be really helpful.

And much more…

There are quite a few additional improvements in the release, see the full list on the download page.

Breaking changes

There are a few breaking changes in relation to the updates for the new Media picker. These should be minor and are mostly functional changes but can be good to be aware of if you’ve already implemented the new Media picker using Umbraco 8.14: 

• MediaWithCrops model: no parameterless constructor and properties don't have a setter anymore
• Removed ambiguous method: IHtmlString GetCropUrl(this UrlHelper urlHelper, ImageCropperValue imageCropperValue, string cropAlias, bool htmlEncode = true) (was also available as separate PR #10527)

Functional changes:

• Local crops are merged with media crops when using the GetCropUrl() extension methods on MediaWithCrops
• The GetLocalCropUrl() extension methods are now obsoleted because of this
• The concrete implementation of MediaWithCrops model is now MediaWithCrops<T> and implements IPublishedContent
• The MediaItem property is obsoleted, as it's now recommended to use the Content property (that is of a specific type when using the generic model)
• Only configured crops are returned in the ImageCropperValue and MediaWithCrops models

See the original issue for more information.

How to test

First, you need to make a new Umbraco installation from 8.15RC (links below) or upgrade an existing project, both scenarios can provide valuable feedback.

If you find things in the RC that are not working, we’d be grateful for feedback on the Github issue tracker. You’re welcome to add comments to the features and fixes listed under 8.15 release or submit new bug reports (click New Issue and select Bug Report), please prefix the issue with 8.15RC:.

As mentioned previously, the RC is feature complete, so we’re not going to add additional features but will, of course, fix bugs that prevent a stable release.

How to get your hands on the Umbraco 8.15 RC

As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/download/releases/8150 

This release candidate is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.15.0-rc 

Update: There's currently an issue with installing the RC from NuGet, so we refer to the .zip download if you want to test Umbraco 8.15.

When is the public release?

We’re aiming for a full public release on July 15th, 2021. This means Umbraco 8.15 will be available for upgrade on Umbraco Cloud and via Nuget or the download page. We need a couple of days to wrap up the release so the sooner we get your feedback the better 🙂

Big H5YR 🙌 to everyone who has contributed to Umbraco 8.15 and thanks to everyone willing to lend a hand in testing it out. It means the world to get it validated by the users.

Bug reports are best handled on the issue tracker and as always, we welcome you to submit product feedback and questions to product@umbraco.com