Overview:
Update 2022-03-24: An unforeseen breaking change that can cause a boot exception was identified in the release. A patch, Umbraco 9.4.1, has been released with a fix for the regression issue. The links below have been updated with the latest patch release.
You might be familiar with the friendly warnings you get when trying to delete Media items or Data Types that are being used. If you are, you know it can be a big help in avoiding broken links and functionality in your Umbraco projects. There is nothing worse than deleting something only to find out at a later point that it was a dependency elsewhere.
That’s why, with Umbraco 9.4, this functionality has been extended and you now get notified when deleting or unpublishing content as well. And, just like with Media items, you now get an overview of where a content item is used on the Info app as well.
All relations, including the ones created when referencing items, will be displayed on the Info app for a detailed overview.
You’ll see new dialogs when deleting an item that is referenced by another item or has descendants that are referenced by other items.
The new dialog will contain information about referenced items and descendants and help predict the consequences of unpublishing the item.
The unpublishing dialog has also been updated to warn about potentially breaking references. It’s the same information used when deleting the item and is displayed similarly.
This also works for multiple items selected via a Listview when either deleting or unpublishing items.
You get a list of all the selected items in a listview that are used elsewhere and any descendant items that are referenced as well.
You also have the option to apply a stricter policy that prevents deletion and/or unpublishing entirely when references exist. This is done via two new configuration options in appSettings.json:
More information about those 2 settings can be found in the Content Settings configuration documentation.
Since the release candidate tracking has been added for Media items used via Macros in the Grid Layout editor and the Rich Text editor. These additional improvements were made by Marc Goodson for Umbraco 8, and are now included in the improvements in Umbraco 9.4 🙌
Furthermore, the “Relate on Copy” relation is now displayed on the Info app along with the other relation types.
A big thanks goes out to Dave Woestenborghs who did a lot of the initial work of adding this out-of-the-box for Umbraco CMS. Dave has offered the functionality for Umbraco 7 and 8 via his popular Nexu package and kindly spent time on porting the initial functionality for Item Tracking to content items, as well as warning the editors when there is a risk of breaking items relations. It has been a big help in adding these fantastic features. Additionally, Dave submitted feature requests for adding this functionality to listviews as well as the configuration to disable delete and unpublish.
HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK 🙌
Another interesting new feature is support for Content Apps on Dictionary Items. This allows developers to add new functionality related to Dictionary Items. This could for example be adding a translation tool to help out when adding new dictionary items or languages.
A Content App can be enabled for all or a subset of Dictionary items. It works in exactly the same way as other Content Apps, the only difference is where you “show” it:
There are quite a few useful UX improvements added with Umbraco 9.4 as well and they’ve all been submitted by the amazing Umbraco Community.
Bjarne Fyrstenborg has improved the experience when searching in the Block List editor. It now offers more relevant filtering as well as a message when no blocks match the search term.
For package developers and other people extending the backoffice you now get an additional size for your custom overlays. Previously it was possible to choose between Small, Medium, and Full-width. Anders Bjerner has added a Large option, that can be especially useful on high-resolution displays.
You’ll find more UX improvements and tweaks in the release that all help to make the Umbraco backoffice just a little bit nicer and friendlier to work with. See the release notes for all the details.
This release also includes a couple of dependency updates. These should not interfere with your Umbraco implementations:
Of the 84 bug fixes and feature additions in 9.4.0, a total of 49 of them have been contributed by the community, by 25 unique contributors.
We’re welcoming 4 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 Bartlomiej, Mehmet, Arul and Andy! 🏆
⭐ = 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 9.4.0 release to celebrate your contributions! 🌳🌲🌴
Update 2022-03-24: An unforeseen breaking change that can cause a boot exception was identified in the release. A patch, Umbraco 9.4.1, has been released with a fix for the regression issues. The links below have been updated with the latest patch release.
As always, from today, all new Umbraco 9 projects on Umbraco Cloud will be running 9.4. 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/941
This release is also available from NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Umbraco.Cms/9.4.1
65 new features, improvements, and fixes are ready for you in Umbraco 9.4, and no less than 48 have been submitted by our fantastic open-source community. You can see Item Tracking, complete with delete and unpublish warnings, in full effect, and a whole lot more. You’re welcome to take it for a test drive and let us know if anything needs attention before the final release.