Umbraco 8.9 Release Candidate

Written by Rune Strand

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!

Overview:

How to test
What’s in Umbraco 8.9?
How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.9
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 for this RC. We have run internal testing and are very happy with the current state of the build - 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 8.9. RC today.

What’s in Umbraco 8.9?

We have been working on improving the login experience across our Umbraco Cloud products and as you can see here, this work benefits everyone using Umbraco CMS. It’s a direct benefit to the open source project and is a cross-collaboration between the Cloud and Core teams at Umbraco HQ. We’ll naturally have more info about the upcoming improvements on Umbraco Cloud soon.

The changes in Umbraco 8.9 will help you provide a better experience when using external login providers. It basically allows you to handle authentication when logging in to the Umbraco backoffice by an external service provider. An external login provider could be Active Directory, Google, Okta, Facebook and so on.

While it has been possible to use external login providers with Umbraco for a long time, this release adds a bunch of new features that allow for better integration with the backoffice:

Custom angular view per provider

Allows you to have complete control over the view rendered on the login/logout screen and user profile overlay in the backoffice.

Disable local login

If needed, you can completely disable the ability to do a local login (the OOTB authentication in Umbraco) and you can define redirects to let the external provider handle the login flow. This allows you to create a truly seamless “single sign-on” experience.

Custom invite workflow

You will now be able to hook into the user invite workflow and integrate this with your external provider(s), making it possible to invite users from the backoffice and have the external provider manage password creation etc.

And more...

There are several other improvements and features added to the external login service and underlying repository such as better handling of user-related data, new database column to persist login/user-related data (migrations included) and tests to ensure it works. See the feature on Github for more detailed information.

What to test

There are 2 scenarios that we would like to get feedback on:

New configurations of external providers

Adding external login provider(s) to existing or new sites is one of the experiences we’d like for you to test. So if you have a project to test this out on or want to spin up a new site please do let us know how you get on.

If you want an “easy” way into this I can recommend installing the Umbraco Identity Extensions package. This provides the initial registration and boilerplate configuration for a number of popular providers. There is documentation in the package (look out for the readmes after installation) and there are extensive comments in the code/configuration examples.

I put “easy” in quotes as it still requires some knowledge of authentication flows, claims, etc. but can also be a great starting point to learn this.

Existing sites using external providers

Another area that is important to get feedback on is upgrading sites that already have external login providers configured. This should work but we know there are tonnes of different ways of doing things so getting your feedback on how the upgrade experience and how incorporating new features worked for you is really helpful.

How to test

First, you need to make a new Umbraco installation from 8.9RC (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 8.9 release or submit new bug reports (click New Issue and select Bug Report), please prefix the issue with 8.9RC:.

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 8.9 RC

As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/contribute/releases/890

This release candidate is also available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/UmbracoCms/8.9.0-rc

When is the public release?

We’re aiming for a full public release on October 19th, 2020 22nd, 2020. This means Umbraco 8.9 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 🙂

Bug reports are best handled on the issue tracker and as always, we welcome you to submit product feedback and questions on product@umbraco.com