Umbraco 8 2 Header Light

Introducing Umbraco 8.2

Making the Rich Text Editor richer

Rune 1 (2)
Written by Rune Strand

Yet another great minor release of Umbraco CMS is upon us. There’s truly something for everyone; from backend developer to content editor, you’ll all see some great improvements, features and fixes. So without further ado; Let’s dive into all you get with Umbraco 8.2!

Overview:

  • What’s new in Umbraco 8.2
  • Breaking Changes
  • Community Contributions
  • How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.2

What’s new in Umbraco 8.2 

This version contains 91 features and fixes. Once again, there is a big focus on making the backoffice an even friendlier place to work. Both through numerous community contributions but also adding some new functionality to the rich text editor and further improvements to the cache layer - making both developers and content editors happier! 

Here are some of the highlights: 

Rich Text Editor enhancements

Umbraco 8 2 A

Umbraco 8.2 contains the first round of improvements for the Rich Text Editor (RTE), performance improvements and a whole lot more, making working and updating content more delightful for your content editors!

Performance 🏎
Decreasing the load time of the RTE gives you faster access to the content you want to edit. It also has the nice benefit of being much more lightweight, so if you’re on a slow/bad internet connection, the RTE now loads much faster. The perceived load time has also been improved so you’ll now see a nice loading indicator if you have to wait a bit for things to show up.

Drag/drop support for images 
This makes it easy to add images to text without having to use the “Add Image” workflow. So if you’re using a lot of images in RTEs this will save a lot of clicks as everything is handled automatically. Simply drag an image file into the RTE area and it will be added to your article and when you save or publish the document, the image will be uploaded and available in the Media Library as well. 

01 Drag Drop Image

The default upload location can be configured on a data type level, making it easier to maintain a nice and tidy Media Library for both developers and editors. This works both for the standard rich text property editor and in grid layouts.

Copy/Paste from word Processor
Many content editors write and do initial layout in a word processor such as MS Word or Google Docs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy the content and paste it to the RTE in Umbraco all while maintaining formatting? That’s now possible. A huge time and frustration saver for your content editors when they have to e.g. add a blog post or add new copy to a landing page.

Edit, copy/paste and drag/drop embedded items
You can also look forward to a better experience if you have to rearrange the layout in an RTE. Inserted Macros, embedded tweets and videos will now behave like a single element. This makes it possible to drag and drop embedded items and makes it much easier to cut and paste.

02 Drag Drop Embed

These are the improvements to the RTE you get with Umbraco 8.2. - but we’re not done yet. There are still things that can be improved and these are outlined in the RFC and the second round of improvements have been added to the Product Roadmap and will be part of a future release of Umbraco. 

Improved cache performance and stability

You’ll find that Umbraco 8.2 is both faster and even more stable. Most notably, you’ll see that publishing nodes with a lot of descendants has vastly improved. 

We’ve also improved the way Umbraco handles updates to schema. So you should see a nice bump in speed when saving changes to Data Types and Document Types. Instead of handling all operations in one request, they will now be executed lazily which will let you continue your work and Umbraco will update what is needed behind the scenes.

Breaking Changes

It’s important to note that Umbraco 8.2. does not contain any crucial breaking changes, and that the one that is there, only affects a minority of sites: 

A small fix has been made for the siblings extension method on IPublishedContent, ensuring it returns the correct type. We have marked this as a breaking change as some people may be using this method in their custom code. Most people will be using it in their views, so they won't notice the difference. For people using it in their code, a quick recompile should be sufficient.

For the full story and explanation see the Github issue.

 

 

Community Contributions

Members of the Umbraco community have been hard at work adding some great stuff in this release as well, here are some highlights: 

We have accepted 31 community pull requests into this release 💪

Highfive

A third of them came from our friend Kenn Jacobsen, who has been concentrating his efforts on improving validation of required properties and making sure you get the “there are unsaved changes” prompt more consistently.

Community pull-requests focused on improved accessibility 

Another third of changes are made by the wonderful Jan Skovgaard and they mainly consist of accessibility updates. As Sebastiaan recently shared in his PR Chronicles update, there’s a big team of people contributing to making Umbraco more accessible for people with disabilities. The 8.2.0 release will feature much better ways to navigate the Umbraco backoffice with a keyboard and some much needed helpful hints for screen readers 🤩

The keyboard navigation improvements are super helpful even if you don’t have any disabilities. There’s much fewer need to grab the mouse while doing your Umbraco work which can help a lot in productivity!

Apart from that, we’ve accepted a few cool fixes from the following great contributors:

If you meet any of these pull request stars, make sure to give them a big “high five you rock” for helping make your CMS better! ⭐

Community contributions focused on the Rich Text Editor 

Last, but not least we are ever so grateful for the people who have been involved in helping us shape the improved rich text editor implementation. There were two RFCs to get this one right and please say a big thank you to the following people who have helped out on those as well!

Thank you all, we know it takes significant time and effort to describe your proposed changes and we really appreciate all the help and feedback! 👏

Thanks for the feedback 🙏

For Umbraco 8.2 we put up a release candidate a week prior to the initial target release date. We’re so thankful for all the feedback we got for the release as well as the process. We actually ended up postponing the final release a week to make sure we covered all the feedback. So thanks to everyone who tested, commented and helped make Umbraco 8.2. a solid release: High Five You Rock 🙌

How to get your hands Umbraco 8.2

As always, starting today, all new version 8 Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 8.2.0. 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 8.2.0!

  • 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/820

This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.2.0

 

Loved by developers, used by thousands around the world!

One of the biggest benefits of using Umbraco is that we have the friendliest Open Source community on this planet. A community that's incredibly pro-active, extremely talented and helpful.

If you get an idea for something you would like to build in Umbraco, chances are that someone has already built it. And if you have a question, are looking for documentation or need friendly advice, go ahead and ask on the community forums.

Want to be updated on everything Umbraco?

Sign up for the Umbraco newsletter and get the latest news and special offers sent directly to your inbox