Overview:
You could say Umbraco 8.9 is a very focused release. It contains improvements and updates to a very specific area of the CMS: User authentication.
We’ve been working for some time now on improving the login and authentication flow on Umbraco Cloud. As part of this work, we’ve identified some features for Umbraco CMS that could be updated and improved and even a couple of new features made it in there. It’s centred around backoffice users and how these can be linked to external login providers such as Active Directory, Okta, Google etc. A great example of how work on our SaaS platform feeds back to all users of Umbraco CMS.
So whether you're developing an enterprise solution with requirements around centralised login or want to offer editors easier (and more secure) login via Facebook or Google, this has now been enhanced to give you more control and more options.
Implementing external login providers for Umbraco is no mean feat. If you want to get up and running quickly (and with example code), I recommend installing the Identity Extensions package. You can also find a helpful introduction in this blog post on how to log in to Umbraco with Google authentication. While it’s not a new post, it should help with the basics.
The package also has snippets and configuration examples for using Facebook and Active Directory and should give a good idea on how to implement other external login providers.
We have updated the documentation for external login providers.
Once you have an external login provider configured, Umbraco 8.9 will offer a bunch of improvements and some new features to take advantage of:
Auto linking allows you to link an Umbraco user account to an external account. Prior to 8.9, it was not possible to do this automatically for existing users which meant that introducing features such as single sign-on or two-factor authentication to an existing project was not always a smooth transition.
With the new auto-linking capabilities you have more control over how things should work both for existing and new users. You can still make use of manual linking if needed (linking accounts manually from the backoffice), hook into events to update user data, control if local login should still be an option and more.
There is updated documentation for auto-linking with the new features. Here you’ll also find examples for:
Umbraco has its own implementation of the ASP.NET Identity User Manager. It’s called the Backoffice User Manager and contains a number of APIs and extension points that lets you control authentication, password handling, add two-factor authentication and more.
The Backoffice User Manager documentation has been updated with descriptions and examples of the new features in 8.9. This also includes events to:
While the above-mentioned feature has been developed by Umbraco HQ, we’ve had some good collaboration along the way. So here’s a big thank you and #h5yr to Lars-Erik Aabech from our Norwegian Gold Partner MarkedsPartner for feedback and to Merijn van Mourik for doing some thorough testing of the Release Candidate and taking the time to provide detailed feedback and suggestions. Finally, Ronald Barendse and Simon Hiort-Lorenzen pointed out some issues that needed to be fixed before the final release. Much appreciated!
As always, from today, all newly created version 8 Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 8.9. 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/890
This release is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.9.0
If you are interested in using external login providers, Umbraco 8.9 is for you. As of today, the release candidate is available, showcasing all the new features and we’d love to get your feedback on it!