Overview:
This new release of Umbraco CMS has a few new features in addition to a bunch of great tweaks and bug fixes. This all helps to make Umbraco even better to work with. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights in the release. You can see the full list of new functionality and changes in the Umbraco 8.16 release notes.
You can now add a custom dashboard to the user dialog , just like you can with all of the sections in Umbraco. This allows you to tailor information, shortcuts and metrics for the logged-in user. The possibilities are endless, as you’re essentially adding a view to the user dialog and can add any HTML and power that with AngularJS to provide server-side data, integrate with third parties and so on.
It’s based on the conventions you already know from adding other dashboards, properties editors and similar via a package.manifest file.
{
"dashboards": [
{
"alias": "my-user-dashboard",
"view": "~/App_Plugins/my-user-dashboard/view.html",
"sections": ["user-dialog"]
}
]
}
As you can see above, you create a new dashboard object in the package.manifest file and under sections assign it to the user-dialog. That’s it! You‘ve got your custom dashboard up and running (assuming you’ve got the HTML file in place 😉 ) and can now proceed as you do with any other custom dashboard.
For inspiration, you can follow the custom dashboard tutorial in the documentation.
It’s now easier to see which images uploaded to the Media Section are transparent. The new Media Picker now shows a checkered background, as is standard when working with images.
This makes it much easier to determine how the image or SVG will work when selected.
Speaking of SVGs, this release adds further support for using SVG icons in the backoffice. Bjarne Fyrstenberg has a number of PRs to Umbraco of the last few releases that ensure this functionality is consistent across the backoffice. This time around he’s updated the min-listview (when picking browsing listview items in a picker), the search bar used in i.e. listviews and a number of other places such as the Examine dashboard and User Group list.
So great to see even further and consistent support for custom SVG icons in the backoffice - H5YR Bjarne 🙌
If you are using tables in the Rich Text editor you can now make use of a color picker to add some spice to your tables.
Previously you would have to add hex codes or color names, this can of course still be done, but now you can tweak or change colors using the standard color picker dialog.
This release also includes a couple of dependency updates. These should not interfere with your Umbraco implementations but if you are using any of them in your code, you’ve now been notified and can test before the release:
We also fixed the annoying problem in the Release Candidate where typos in the NuGet dependencies made it difficult to do a NuGet upgrade.
Of the 59 bug fixes and feature additions in 8.16.0, a total of 44 of them have been contributed by the community, by 19 unique contributors.
We’re welcoming six brand new contributors who have made their first pull request for Umbraco-CMS, they’re marked with a star below. Welcome to the contributor club Jamie, Robert, Henk Jan, Michel, Kevin and Philippe! 🏆
⭐ = First pull request to any Umbraco repository
As announced for the 8.14 release in early June, we’re planting trees for each contributor to a minor release. So we’ve added another clump of trees to our plot for today’s 8.16.0 release to celebrate your contributions. 🌳🌲🌴
As always, from today, all new v8 Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 8.16. 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/8160
This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.16.0
You get improvements in pretty much all areas with Umbraco 8.16. There might not be a big and shiny stand-out feature but sometimes the sum is greater than its parts 😉 There are performance enhancements, better dev experience, updated dependencies, and a long list of smaller improvements and bug fixes - And best of all, you can try it out now!