Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco 8.17?
- How to test
- How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.17
- Umbraco 9 RC3
- 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 in the two release candidates that are out today. We have run internal testing and are very happy with the current state - 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 8.17. RC today or give Umbraco 9 RC3 a go.
What’s new in Umbraco 8.17?
Tabs for organizing properties
With Umbraco 8.17 you get more options for organizing properties in the backoffice and provide an even more tailored and efficient workflow for editors creating and maintaining Content, Media, and Members.
In addition to property groups, you can now also add property tabs. While groups are good for vertical organization, tabs allow you to add horizontal organization as well. This is especially handy for Content Types that need a more defined hierarchy or have many properties and groups. So how does it work?
Adding tabs
Tabs can be added through the Settings section when you’re building out your Document Type (or Media/Member Type).
When adding the first tab, all existing groups will be automatically added to the tab.
Sorting and reordering
You can sort and reorder tabs by clicking the reorder button in the designer, exactly the same way you do with groups, allowing you to seamlessly move tabs and groups around at the same time.
The sorting functionality in Umbraco 8.17 has been updated to make it a bit more predictable. The numeric values won't be reset to 0 and incremented. This is especially important when using compositions, as you might want to always display a tab/group at a certain position by setting a manual numeric value.
Tabs and/or groups
That is the question…Luckily, it’s up to you :) You choose whether you want to use tabs or groups, or both. For simple Document Types adding the tabs interface might not be warranted and you can use groups as you’re used to in Umbraco 8. You can also organize your properties exclusively in tabs similar to how this worked prior to Umbraco 8.
You can even convert an existing group to a tab, by dragging a group onto the 'Convert to tab' zone, when in reorder mode.
Support and validation
The new tabs feature supports the Block List editor in both inline and overlay editing modes. Simply add tabs to your Element Types and they will show up in the editor.
Validation works as you’ve come to expect, highlighting specific tabs and properties that are not valid.
Nested Content does not have a tabbed interface but you can select either a group or tab to display properties from.
The generic tab
Once you start adding tabs, you might see a “Generic” tab appear. This is done to hold groups and properties that are not assigned to a tab. For example, a group of properties coming from a composition that has no tab. In order to display the groups and properties correctly and have a solid data structure, they will be displayed under the generic tab.
In this case, the recommended approach would be to create an appropriately named tab on the composition Document Type and move the groups and properties to this tab. Once the generic tab is empty, it will no longer be displayed.
Backwards compatible
The new tabs feature is backwards compatible with earlier versions of Umbraco 8 and upgrading to the 8.17 version will not change any behavior. Groups will appear as normal.
One thing to be aware of is that the data structure has changed slightly, introducing an Alias and a Type property, to facilitate both tabs and groups. When upgrading to Umbraco 8.17 (or Umbraco 9 RC3), a migration will run to update the data structure.
Packages that have been created through the backoffice prior to Umbraco 8.17, and contain content, should be upgraded with the new data structure.
You can find additional details on what has changed on the GitHub PR for reintroducing tabs.
What to test?
We hope you like the new tab feature and will take some time to give it a go - If you encounter any issues please add them to the tracker so we can address them. The new feature adds quite a lot of functionality but we would especially like to hear how upgrading to 8.17 or Umbraco 9 goes. The migration should handle everything but do let us know if anything pops up.
Configurable overlays
You can now configure the width of the overlaps when adding links through the MultiUrl Picker, the Richtext Editor, and the Markdown editor.
This can be used to give more room for editing in the overlay and is especially helpful if working with long external links and long query strings.
Updated dependencies
Another release, another update to noUiSlider, in fact, it’s two upgrades:
This should not interfere with your Umbraco implementation but if you are using noUISlider IE. for a property editor, you’ve now been notified and can test before the release.
How to test
First, you need to make a new Umbraco installation from 8.17RC (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 8.17 release or submit new bug reports (click New Issue and select Bug Report), please prefix the issue with 8.17RC:.
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 8.17 RC
As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/contribute/releases/8170
This release candidate is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.17.0-rc
What’s in Umbraco 9 RC3?
The third release candidate for Umbraco 9 is also out today! All the features mentioned above from Umbraco 8.17 RC are included in this Umbraco 9 RC3. This means that tabs will be available in Umbraco 9 at launch and if you’re upgrading from Umbraco 8 to 9, the content will be upgraded to work with tabs.
Aside from all the 8.17 goodies, there’s also a bunch of fixes and improvements with more than 25 issues addressed since RC2. Thanks for all the testing and for submitting issues and pull requests for Umbraco 9 - It’s a massive help as we head towards the final release date 🙏
How to get your hands on Umbraco 9 RC3
You can find the installation instructions and release notes in the Umbraco on .NET 5+ documentation article.
When is the public release?
We’re aiming for a full public release of Umbraco 8.17 on October 7th, 2021. This means Umbraco 8.17 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 🙂
Umbraco 9 is targeted for release on September 28th, 2021.
Big H5YR 🙌 to everyone who has contributed to Umbraco 8.17/Umbraco 9 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