- New Features
- Managing CDN and Caching Optimizations
- Improved Organization Invite Flow
- Top 50 for Media Storage
- Graph QL for all
- Umbraco 10 LTS and .NET 6
- Upcoming: Customizable Projects Overview
- Improvements and fixes
- Projects dashboard
- Roadmap updates
- Automagic updates, new features, and more
New features
Since the last Cloud Update in April, new features and improvements have been added to Umbraco Cloud. If you haven’t tried out Umbraco Cloud yet, you can take a free trial and see all the benefits for yourself.
Managing CDN and Caching Optimizations on Umbraco Cloud
Umbraco Cloud projects just got a whole range of new features and options to help surface and manage options regarding CDN (Content Delivery Network) and caching. This means you are able to add, and purge, the caching of various assets, and it can be done on a per hostname basis.
You might have already noticed the new features in the Settings menu on your project(s), under CDN Caching and Optimization. Thorough documentation has been published describing all the available features.
This adds a new level of control and flexibility to your Umbraco Cloud projects, and allows you to tweak and increase performance in specific areas.
Released Friday, May 20, 2022
Improved Organization Invite Flow
The organization pages have received a facelift and are now based on the Umbraco UI Library web components. In the updated overview, you will find the organization information, members, pending invites, projects of your organization, and the access rights granted to members of the organization.
We have also added a new flow for inviting a user to an organization, where the user must accept an invitation before the user becomes a member. You already know this flow from inviting a user to a cloud project.
When a Umbraco Cloud portal user receives an invitation they can accept or decline the invitation on the “Pending invites” profile page.
Top 50 for Media Storage
On the “Usage” page of a Cloud project, we have added an option for you to see the top 50 media files that take up the most storage space in the blob storage of your project. The feature helps you to get an overview of which media files are candidates for deletion if you are running out of blob storage.
The sorted list is a real-time display of media files including file name, path, size, and type. If you delete one or more of the listed files in the backoffice or the blob storage you can refresh the page and select the option to load the media files again.
Enable client certificates from file system
If your cloud project needs to load a client certificate (such as an X.509 certificate) at runtime you can turn on this feature for one or more environments. By turning this feature on for an environment, you will be able to load a client certificate as a file during the run-time of your cloud project.
Umbraco Heartcore: GraphQL for all!
Potential and current Umbraco Heartcore users will be happy to know that the GraphQL feature is now available on all Heartcore plans - at no extra cost. This means you have more options to query content, no matter the size of the project. This decision to include GraphQL on all plans was based on user feedback and GraphQL being a key feature for headless projects.
It was unveiled at the keynote during Codegarden a couple of weeks back and is already effectuated. We’re excited to see what fantastic things you build on Umbraco Heartcore, and with the feature available there is even more flexibility in how you set up your projects. You can read more about Umbraco Heartcore here, and if you want to know more about the product-related announcements in the keynote check out the Codegarden 2022 Keynote Highlights blog post.
Partial Restore for Forms
You already know the "partial restore" feature for Content, which allows for the quick retrieval of a single item from an upstream environment, with or without its child items. For forms, although you could partially restore a single item that already existed in your current environment, it wasn't possible to select one from the remote environment that you didn't already have.
Now you can! By clicking the "Select folder or form to restore" button you can pick an item to restore from the remote environment.
Although this feature has been implemented for restoring forms, the integration is offered in an extensible way for third-party packages to utilize. Documentation can be found here.
Available for projects running Umbraco Deploy 9.4+ (or 4.6+)
Deployment of Culture & Hostnames Details
You’ll find an added feature for including the information managed under "Culture & Hostnames" within the Umbraco backoffice, highly relevant for culture invariant content.
The feature is opt-in by configuration, just to make sure we don't introduce any issues for existing installations that are upgraded and would then deploy this information by default.
For some setups, e.g. where specific hostnames are used in each environment, it may not make sense to have the information deployed. But, where language information is concerned and where language root paths like "/en" are used, it's likely useful to have this information included in transfers and restores and will save some manual setup.
This feature is highly configurable and allows you to choose what culture and hostname information is deployed. See the documentation for more details.
Available for projects running Umbraco Deploy 9.4+ (or 4.6+)
Umbraco 10 LTS and .NET 6
The final feature for this update is that you can now run Umbraco Cloud projects on .NET 6 with all the performance improvements, C#10 features, and more. This was made possible with the release of Umbraco 10, the first major release on the new major release cadence.
Umbraco 10 is now the default for new projects on Umbraco Cloud (you can still create Umbraco 8 or 9 projects, should you wish to), and it is a long-term support (LTS )version to boot. This means 24 months of support and an additional 12 months of security updates. Read more about the brand new major in the Umbraco 10 release blog post and about LTS and EOL policies in the Product Knowledge Center.
Upgrading from Umbraco 9 to Umbraco 10
If you’re running Umbraco 9 on your Cloud project(s) and want to upgrade immediately, you can find a guide on how to upgrade to Umbraco 10. It is a little more involved than the usual upgrade as each environment needs to be upgraded to run .NET 6 as well.
We’re working on automating part of the upgrade experience, which will also make it easier for future major releases. For now, the Upgrading your project from Umbraco 9 to 10 documentation provides step-by-step instructions on how to do this.
Improvements and fixes
During May and June, we have provided several small fixes and improvements to the Umbraco Cloud Portal. Here are some of the highlights.
- The much used project subpage “Edit team” has been updated with a fresh new look using the Umbraco UI Library based on web components. Go have a look today!
- For Umbraco 9 and Umbraco 10 projects you can on the project subpage “Advanced” toggle the runtime settings between .NET 5 til .NET 6 on a per environment basis.
- Custom hostnames for a few Umbraco 7 projects were not shown on the project subpage “Hostnames”.
- For Professional plans, the download of IIS logs required you to log into the Azure portal.
- Download of error logs at times opened in a new tab instead of starting downloading.
- A new project member could not instantly create a new cloud project.
Release Notes
Remember, you can read about the new features when they are released in the Umbraco Cloud release notes. They are available at our.umbraco.com under the Cloud documentation. You can also access them through the Umbraco Cloud in your profile menu:
We are constantly releasing features and fixes to the portal, release notes are added 1-3 times per month depending on how much there is to shout about.
Umbraco Cloud on the Product Roadmap
Make sure to check the Product Roadmap for the latest updates. Here’s a highlight of the items that are directly related to improving Umbraco Cloud and have been added or updated since the last Cloud Update:
New in “Now”
Dedicated Tiers for Umbraco Cloud
New features that will allow you to scale your Umbraco Cloud projects with more resources and dedicated hardware - at the click of a button. There will be dedicated options available for all plans.
Target release: Q3, 2022
2-factor Authentication (2FA) for Umbraco Cloud & Heartcore
You will be able to use 2FA for the Umbraco Cloud portal and backoffice logins on both Cloud and Heartcore projects. This item has been moved from “Next” to “Now”.
Target release: Q3, 2022
Regional Hosting Options for Umbraco Cloud
A lot of progress has been made on making hosting options available in other regions, starting with the US. You can get the latest news, launch date information, and be among the first to spin up a project in the new region by signing up for early access.
Customizable Projects Overview page in Umbraco Cloud
We’ve been talking about a new Projects Overview page for a long time, and after consulting with multiple partners and Cloud agencies we’ve got the first sneak-peak for you to see:
This shows the “Edit” mode where you can group projects, create filters, and more. We are currently working on implementing the “View” mode starting with making basic project info available on the Projects Overview page such as a number of environments, product versions, bandwidth and media usage, and more.
This will help keep track of all your Umbraco Cloud and Heartcore projects and we can’t wait to show you. If you can’t wait either, you’re welcome to reach out to the product owner for the Cloud Experience team, Søren Aamand Jørgensen. We’re happy to get additional feedback on the feature before launch.
New in “Next”
Secret management for Umbraco Cloud
We want to enhance the developer experience by introducing a secure way of storing secrets. A secret can be a connection string, credentials for a service or some other sensitive information to be used by the Umbraco CMS.
New in “Later”
API Keys independent of Backoffice Users for Umbraco Heartcore
As part of this feature, we will make API Keys independent of backoffice Users. Currently, an API Key is created for a backoffice User, so the key will get the same permissions as that user.
With this feature, we will enable the creation of API Keys and setting permissions on a per-key basis. We believe this will make it easier for developers to work with and more secure, as the key is not tied to a specific backoffice user.
Updates and history
The item for Projects secrets and application settings has been split in two as we have delivered Enable client certificates from file system as mentioned earlier, and the Secret management for Umbraco Cloud has been added for the remaining part of the feature set.
Media storage Top 50 and Expanded CDN capabilities for Umbraco Cloud have been released and added to the Roadmap History page.
Automagic updates, new features, and more
Aside from all the new features that have been added to the Umbraco Cloud platform, there has also been a number of releases for the core products used on Umbraco Cloud. Umbraco CMS, Umbraco Forms, and Umbraco Deploy are a huge part of the Umbraco Cloud offering. They come for free with all Cloud and Heartcore projects, and there have been great new additions to all of these products, meaning a whole bunch of new features for all Umbraco Cloud users.
Umbraco CMS
- 1 major release
- 1 minor release
- 3 automated patches rolled out for the CMS
The release of Umbraco 9.5 has brought new useful actions to the backoffice such as Copy Member Type and Move Dictionary Item. There is a new consent dashboard in the Settings section where you can adjust the level of telemetry in the installation and an improved way of working with custom error pages. Read more about it all in the Umbraco 9.5 release blog post.
Of course, the star of the show is Umbraco 10 bringing .NET 6 development to Umbraco Cloud and a bunch of other great features. Read all about it in the Umbraco 10 release blog post.
Aside from that, 2 patches for Umbraco 9 and 1 patch for Umbraco were rolled out automatically to all eligible projects.
Umbraco Forms
- 2 minor releases
- 4 automated patches rolled out
Umbraco Forms allows you to create and manage forms for your project, directly in the backoffice. With the latest release, you can now assign User Group permissions to Forms Foldersm set a default email template for email workflows, and much more. You can read more in the Umbraco Forms 9.4 & 8.12 release blog post.
All releases, also provide additional improvements and fixes - and patches were all immediately available or rolled out automatically on Cloud.
Umbraco Deploy
- 2 minor releases
- 1 automated patch rolled out for Umbraco Deploy Contrib
Umbraco Deploy is responsible for deploying schema and transferring content for Umbraco Cloud and Umbraco Heartcore and has received 1 patch and 2 minor releases since the last Cloud update including features such as Partial Restore of forms, further improvements to Content Comparison, and the ability to deploy Culture and Hostname Details. Read more on the new features available for your Umbraco Cloud projects in the Umbraco Deploy 9.4 & 4.6 release blog post.
See you in the Cloud 🌤️
The next Cloud Update will be out in August and we should be getting close to opening up for the US region - so there will be plenty to talk about!
If you haven’t done so already, or it’s been a while, you really should give Umbraco Cloud a go. You get a 14-day completely free trial, so why not give it a spin? You can a free trial right here.