Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco 8.16
- Custom dashboard for User dialog
- Checkered image background for file uploads
- SVG icons everywhere
- Color picker for tables
- Updated dependencies
- Changes from 8.16 RC
- Community Contributions
- How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.16
What’s new in Umbraco 8.16
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.
Custom dashboard for User dialog
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.
Checkered image background for file uploads
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.
SVG icons everywhere
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 🙌
Color picker for tables
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.
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
Changes from 8.16 release candidate to the public release
- 10919 - Update Serilog.Enrichers.Process to 2.0.2 as it fixes a leak
- 10907 - Can't copy content at root because menu panel collapses prematurely
- 10910 - Block List doesn’t save values in newly added blocks
- 10876 - Umbraco style changes makes image cropper look different
- 10879 - Cannot copy page with Block List block with property that 'looks like' JSON
- 10774 - Adding content in multiple threads from composer cause IOException
- 10918 - Performance: dispose Process properly in a few areas where this was missing
We also fixed the annoying problem in the Release Candidate where typos in the NuGet dependencies made it difficult to do a NuGet upgrade.
Community Contributions
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. 🌳🌲🌴
How to get your hands Umbraco 8.16
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:
- 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 8.16!
- 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/8160
This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.16.0
