Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco Deploy
- How to get your hands on the new release
The releases are available for solutions based on CMS versions 8, 9, and 10 and are functionally equivalent. As such if you are using the product in Umbraco 8, you can update to Deploy 4.7. With Umbraco 9, Deploy 9.5 should be used. And if you've started a project with Umbraco 10, then 10.1 is available as an upgrade.
What’s new in Umbraco Deploy
In terms of features in this release, the main focus has been on giving editors more control over how they transfer content between environments. Many customers make significant use of this option, allowing them to prepare and fully review content in a staging environment before deploying the updates into production.
Transfer Content for Scheduled Publishing
You can now transfer a content item with a scheduled publishing time and date. Previously you would simply transfer the publish status of the content item, draft or published, but now you can choose to schedule when the item is published.
This option is available now via a new addition to the Queue for transfer dialog, where a publish date can be set. If selected, when the queued items are transferred, the content changes will be saved but not published, and the selected publish date set. The content will then be published at the appropriate time, using the standard scheduled publishing feature of the CMS.
This is great for editors that have changes prepared and reviewed, want to schedule them for publishing in the future but don't want to remove the changes from being published in the staging environment.
If you do not set a Publish Date, the transfer will work just as it has always done, with changes and publish state taking immediate effect. So, to sum up, the default behavior for Content Transfers is unchanged and you have the additional option to schedule when content is published.
Single Language Content Transfer
It is now possible to transfer a single language update to another environment, i.e. Staging to Live. Previously all changes in all available languages were transferred automatically, so for example publishing and transferring changes to the English version meant that all edits made in a Danish variant would also be transferred.
With this new feature, you can choose whether to transfer updates to all languages or only transfer a single language.
This is done with a new addition to the Queue for transfer dialogue in the of a language dropdown. As with Scheduled Publishing, the default behavior stays the same but you now have the option to be more precise in what is being transferred.
The option is also available from the immediate "Transfer now" dialog available from the content editing screen.
Persisted Transfer Queue
As part of these efforts, we have improved the transfer queue feature, abstracting and re-implementing it using a database table. With this in place, the user's selections of items for transfer will persist even when the site restarts.
If for any reason there was a need to revert to the previous implementation, which uses an application in-memory cache, a configuration setting is available
Performance Improvements
Aside from the new features for Content Transfers, we have also been focusing a large part of our efforts in this release on improving the performance of transfers. This is mainly to help at sites with a large amount of content, extensive use of complex editors such as Nested Content and Block List, and/or multiple languages.
With this release we've introduced performance improvements to all Deploy operations, in the form of an internal cache allowing us to ensure repeated data requests - for example when checking the existence of dependencies, or looking up user information - don't need to go to the database each time.
For smaller sites, or sites not using the particular combinations of complex content Property Editors and multiple languages, there may be no noticeable difference. But we expect significant improvements to be apparent for customers making heavy use of these features.
Additional changes since the release candidates
We have addressed a couple of issues reported in release candidate phase. Thanks to everyone who has helped in testing out the release.
- Fixed issue with scheduled publish date being time-shifted on deployments when source and target servers are running in different timezones.
- Fixed issue with transfer for members of a given type (version 10 only) #139
- Fixed issue with transfer of nested content string values using item templates (i.e. commencing with "{{") that were erroneously considered as JSON (in Deploy Contrib)
All features, improvements, and fixes can be found in the release notes.
How to get your hands on the new Umbraco Deploy release
As always, from today, all new Umbraco Cloud projects will be running the latest version of Umbraco Deploy. For existing projects, this upgrade is only 2 minutes away with the minor version upgrade feature.
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 now ready to upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco Deploy!
- It's as easy as clicking a button, literally. The "Upgrade Available" button on the Development Environment will start the auto-upgrader and we’ll 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.
And remember, you can always spin up a new project on Umbraco Cloud to try the latest versions of Umbraco CMS, Forms, and Deploy, either from your existing Umbraco Cloud account or by taking a free Umbraco Cloud trial.
Non-Cloud and release notes:
Installation and release notes can be found on the Umbraco Deploy package page on Our.umbraco.com.
New releases of Deploy Contrib
The open-source package for value connectors has been updated to add improvements and fixes for Property Editors such as Block List and Nested Content. We recommend you upgrade this when upgrading to the latest version of Umbraco Deploy. This is handled automatically on Umbraco Cloud. For Deploy On-premise installations the corresponding packages can be found here:
Thanks to everyone testing out the release candidates 🙏 All issues reported have been addressed and listed in the release notes. For general feedback, you’re always welcome to contact us at product@umbraco.com and specific issues on the Umbraco Deploy GitHub issue tracker.