Overview:
- What’s in Umbraco 9.3?
- Two-factor Authentication for Members
- Improved External Login Provider Integration for Members
- Custom Media Folder
- How to test
- How to get your hands on Umbraco 9.3
- 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 9.3RC today.
What’s in Umbraco 9.3?
Umbraco 9.3 is a small and focused release. There are a couple of new features, mainly focusing on improving the developer experience for setting up two-factor authentication (2FA) and integrating Members with external login. As always, there are also a bunch of smaller improvements and fixes, many of them from the community 💪
Two-factor Authentication (2FA) for Members
Enabling two-factor authentication is a great way to increase the security of a system. With Umbraco 9.3 it is a lot easier to enable for Umbraco Members. You can set up 2FA to use an authentication service (available from many vendors such as Microsoft, Google and many more) or even create your own codes and send them via email/sms. Using an authentication app/service is viewed as the more secure option and the recommended approach unless you have specific requirements.
Documentation has been updated with the new improvements. See the specific docs for 2FA for Members here.
Easier integration with external login providers for Members
There are more improvements to the developer experience when working with Members. Aside from improved 2FA, you’ll also find that it is much easier to integrate with external login providers such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. This is now aligned with the standard way of doing this in ASP.NET Core and works pretty much exactly the same way as it does for backoffice users.
The new Member functionality allows you to configure one or more external login providers. These can be used to create and authenticate Members, add a single-sign-on experience and more. Note that the Macro snippets for Login and EditMemberProfile have been updated to support configured external login providers to make it even easier to get started with.
You can find detailed information and examples on how to implement this in the updated security documentation:
If you're looking to try this out, the Microsoft documentation on using login providers can also be helpful.
You can find more information on the PR: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/pull/11738
Custom Media Folder
You’ll also find improvements to the configuration of where Media is stored. This has been easy, with Umbraco 9, as long as you’re storing it somewhere inside the wwwroot folder of your site. If you wanted to store it outside the wwwroot folder it required a lot more configuration to ensure ImageSharp continued to work as expected.
This has now been addressed to work in the same way in both scenarios. All you need to do is update UmbracoMediaPath and it will work as expected. This can be done in configuration as shown below or via a composer.
You can find more information on the PR: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/pull/11738
And a whole lot more…
You can see all the other updates, improvements and fixes in the release notes for Umbraco 9.3.
What to test
We welcome all the feedback we can get on our releases. For Umbraco 9.3 there are a few specific scenarios that we suggest focusing on. Not surprising they relate to the new features:
It would be great to get feedback on improvements made to Members, so both implementing 2FA and External Login Providers would be good tests. Also updating sites with external login providers configured for Users is as there is a migration for the ExternalUser database table. Aside from the documentation listed above, you might also find the login provider documentation from Microsoft useful.
Testing whether storing Media outside the root folder works, both with absolute and virtual paths works would be fantastic. There are also a couple of dependency updates to keep an eye on:
- Bump ImageSharp.Web version to v1.0.5
- Bump follow-redirects from 1.14.4 to 1.14.7 in /src/Umbraco.Web.UI.Client
Known issues
There are no known issues recorded for Umbraco 9.3. The only pending task is merging the updated documentation for 2FA and external login providers and adding it to the official documentation. This will be done prior to the public release.
How to test
First, you need to make a new Umbraco installation from 9.3RC (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 9.3 release or submit new bug reports (click New Issue and select Bug Report), please prefix the issue with 9.3RC:.
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 9.3 RC
As always, installation and release notes can be found on Our: https://our.umbraco.com/contribute/releases/930
The release candidate is available from Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Umbraco.Cms/9.3.0-rc
When is the public release?
We’re aiming for a full public release on February 10th, 2022. This means Umbraco 9.3 will be available on Umbraco Cloud for new projects and existing projects, and via Nuget. We need a couple of days to wrap up the release so the sooner we get your feedback the better 🙂
Big H5YR 🙌 to everyone who has contributed to Umbraco 9.3 and thanks to everyone willing to lend a hand in testing it out. It means the world to get it validated by the users.
Bug reports are best handled on the issue tracker and as always, we welcome you to submit product feedback and questions to product@umbraco.com