Overview:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 💪
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.
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! ⭐
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! 👏
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 🙌
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:
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
So, what’s new? Well, quite a bit; a new published release of Umbraco Forms, an upcoming release of the CMS containing features that are sure to delight your editors and new movements and additions to the Umbraco Roadmap. Basically, a lot of great things, so let’s get to it: