Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco 9.2
- Package Telemetry
- Markdown for Property Descriptions
- Updated Log Viewer
- Member properties moved to Content App
- Updated dependencies
- Community Contributions
- How to get your hands on Umbraco 9.2
What’s new in Umbraco 9.2
Once again the community has stepped up and provided a large part of the additions, not least thanks to the fantastic Hacktoberfest contributions - HIGH FIVE YOU ALL ROCK! Aside from all the great improvements provided by the Umbraco community, you’ll also find the foundation for better package statistics in this release as well as a new health check. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights:
Package Telemetry
This is a new feature adding the functionality to send anonymized, analytical data on package usage in Umbraco. Having solid data on package usage is important for both package developers and the Umbraco ecosystem. This new feature will send analytical data for packages and provide more reliable numbers for package authors than what we get from NuGet today - all out-of-the-box.
In order to do so, two new properties have been added to package manifests.
“allowPackageTelemetry” is enabled by default, also when not present in the manifest. Adding this property and setting it to false allows you to turn off telemetry for the package.
“Version” to indicate the version number of the package. This needs to be in place for version-specific telemetry to work. If not set, the data will still be recorded and the version number will be set as not specified.
The “name” property will be used to map telemetry to a package, if the name property is not set, the folder name will be used to map the data.
We’re not collecting any data yet but will start to do so in the near future and will of course give you updates on the progress in Product Updates and relevant release blog posts. The plan is to make the data available for the package owners so they have a better number than NuGet installs. They will be used on Our for the package section and will support the work on the upcoming Umbraco Marketplace.
Markdown for Property Descriptions
Umbraco MVP Søren Kottal is on a roll and has provided a new feature and some improvements to the log viewer - H5YR Søren 🙌 The feature allows you to write simple markdown in property descriptions. There is support for:
- **bold**
- *italics*
- 
- [links](links)
Additionally, you can add extended descriptions, that will only show if expanded, making it possible to add more helpful text and documentation in the backoffice without cluttering the interface. This is done by adding a double dash “--” to a new line, everything below the dashes will be hidden in a Read more link.
All in all, a really useful feature for making your property descriptions even more helpful and friendly.
You can find more information and examples on the PR: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/pull/11628
Updated Log Viewer
Every now and then we need to dig into the logs to identify an issue or just check that things are working as expected. Søren has tightened up the UI for the Backoffice log viewer to make it friendlier and easier to work with.
You can find before and after screenshots on the issue. Thanks again Søren!
New health check for Fixed Application Url
A new security health check has been added in the settings of Umbraco 9.2. You will now see a warning if the UmbracoApplicationUrl has not been set.
We highly recommend setting the UmbracoApplicationUrl to the desired default hostname as Umbraco will otherwise use the most recently used hostname to request the application.
The UmbracoApplicationUrl is set in AppSettings.json and you can read more about it in the documentation. Once the application URL is set, you’ll get I nice checkmark to verify the health check has passed.
Member properties moved to Content App
The default Member properties are now added to a Member Content App as opposed to a Member Group. This has been done to address some issues with the required Member properties when creating new Member types and/or working with tabs on your Member types.
As a nice benefit, this gives a clearer indication that these are indeed required properties and now, working with tabs and groups for custom properties works as expected.
Previously the login, email, password, and member groups fields were shown in a fixed "Properties" group that was added below all existing groups. If you started using tabs, this group would be displayed in a Generic tab (and couldn't be moved elsewhere). By moving these fields to their own Member Content App, you'll get a much better experience when using tabs!
Members also require some additional properties (comments, failed password attempts, is approved, is locked out, last lockout date, last login date, last password change date), which are added to the "Membership" group by default after the first save. You can now move these properties to other groups and even tabs. Because these properties are required for members to work correctly, they will show up as 'Locked' and can't be removed: this is now also enforced when using tabs. So if you don't see the delete icon on tabs/groups anymore, make sure to move any of these properties to another tab/group first.
You can find more information and examples on the PR: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/pull/11587
Updated dependencies
ImageSharp.Web is updated to version 1.0.4 in order to address an issue with custom crops not being created correctly. Additionally, ImageSharp.Web now processes the image based on the order of processors in the query string. It has allowed us to remove some workarounds in previous CMS releases and clean up the code.
You can find more information and examples on the PR:
https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/pull/11349
Community Contributions
Of the 59 bug fixes and feature additions in 9.2.0, a total of 41 of them have been contributed by the community, by 21 unique contributors. We’ve managed to include 8 more of your Hacktoberfest contributions as well. 🙌
We’re welcoming two brand new contributors who have made their first pull request for Umbraco CMS; they’re marked with a star below. Welcome to the contributor club Rasmus and Tyler! 🏆
⭐ = First pull request to any Umbraco repository
And of course, as a thank you, we’ve just added another bunch of trees to our growing plot for today’s 9.2.0 release to celebrate your contributions! 🌳🌲🌴
How to get your hands Umbraco 9.2
As always, from today, all new Umbraco Cloud projects will be running 9.2. 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 9.2!
- 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/920
This release is also available from NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Umbraco.Cms/9.2.0
