Umbraco 8.16 Release Candidate

Overview:

• What’s in Umbraco 8.16?
• How to test
• How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.16
• 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 is always helpful. So if you have time to help - or just find yourself super curious, feel free to dive into the 8.16. RC today. 

What’s in Umbraco 8.16?

50 improvements and fixes have made it into 8.16 and more than 80% of these come courtesy of the wonderful Umbraco community.

Updated Serilog dependencies

Serilog, the logging tool used in Umbraco 8, has unfortunately been the cause of a memory leak that could lead to performance degradation. If you’ve run into this you’ll be happy to know it has been fixed in 8.16 by updating some dependencies for Serilog. 

Checkered image background for file uploads

You might have noticed that it could be hard to determine whether a png had a transparent background when inspecting a Media Item.

This has now been mitigated in the new Media Picker by adding a checkered background, as is standard when working with images.

Custom dashboards for User dialog

You can now add a custom dashboard to the User profile dialog (opens when clicking your avatar in the backoffice). The foundation for this has actually been there since Umbraco 7 but there were a few bits missing. This has now been fixed ad you can add user dialog dashboards by registering a custom dashboard to sections: ['user-dialog']

Updated dependencies

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:

• Update noUiSlider to v15.2.0
• Install MessagePack's dependencies explicitly
• Update Serilog dependencies (versions can be found here)
• Updating to the latest versions of the ImageProcessor dependencies 
• Updating Flatpickr (date/time picker) to version 4.6.9

What to test

The nature of the improvements and fixes in this release means there won't be too much specifically to dive into testing-wise as they are mostly small fixes and updates. 

A memory leak has been fixed and while the things that are changed are very low level, we’d love to get feedback if any inconsistencies or errors in the caching layer are showing up.

You can see the full list of fixes and improvements on the download page, if you encounter any issues at all with the release candidate please report them on the issue tracker (See how below)

Known issues/Breaking Changes

This release does not contain breaking changes

How to test

First, you need to make a new Umbraco installation from 8.16RC (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 the 8.16 release or submit new bug reports (click New Issue and select Bug Report), please prefix the issue with 8.16RC:. 

Screenshot of bug report

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 8.16 RC

As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/contribute/releases/8160

This release candidate is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.16.0-rc

When is the public release?

We’re aiming for a full public release on August 26th, 2021. This means Umbraco 8.16 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 8.16 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

Heads up for 8.17 RC

We've been talking about adding tabs to document types for a while now and we aimed to have that feature ready for 8.16.0. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite ready yet for this release so we postponed that feature for 8.17.

Since tabs is going to be a big new feature that might touch a few packages as well, we will be releasing 8.17 RC earlier than usual, to give everyone a good chance of experimenting with tabs and seeing if it plays well with existing packages.

We know it's easy to install an RC and click around for a play, but we hope to see some real-life uses out there in the RC period. That way we get the feedback we need to make sure that the tabs feature is as excellent as it should be for the final release. So enjoy the new 8.16 RC release and stay tuned for more info around the 8.17 RC.