Overview:
The releases are available for solutions based on both CMS versions 8 and 9, and are functionally equivalent. As such if you are using one of both of the products in Umbraco 8, you can update to Forms 8.11 and Deploy 4.5. If you’ve started projects with Umbraco 9 running on .NET 5, version 9.3 of both products is available.
All new Umbraco Cloud projects will be running the latest versions of Umbraco Forms and Deploy, and one-click upgrades are available for existing projects.
You can now edit entries from forms submissions directly in the backoffice. This can be useful for editors or administrators to be able to correct data (e.g. a typo in an email) or as part of an approvement workflow.
By default the editing feature is disabled, but you can enable it for a given user or group via the Form Security section
If enabled for a user, they will be able to click to edit entries when viewing via the back-office, at which point the previously read-only view switches to an editable one. Changes can be made, saved, or canceled via the additional buttons available.
The intention of this feature is not so much to offer a full data entry experience, but more to allow for minor amends and fixes to entries after they have been received via website form submissions. Validation - as defined by mandatory fields and regular expressions - is enforced.
More advanced features though, such as conditions and multi-pages available when the form is rendered on the website, aren't supported in the backoffice.
Umbraco has for a while now offered the feature of user groups - where each user can be allocated to one or more groups, and the effective permissions they have are based on those assigned to the groups, not to the individual users. With this release, we can now take advantage of that in Umbraco Forms.
We've also introduced "start folders", which work in a similar way to CMS content and media start nodes, allowing users to be restricted to a subset of the forms available for editing. And lastly, we've taken steps to support more restricted access that was previously available, as well as split some responsibilities so they can be more finely assigned to users.
In all of this, we've taken care to ensure that existing installations work as they did previously following an upgrade. Users will continue to have their existing permissions until you opt-in to the new features. As there are a few, let's take them one at a time…
Firstly, and sticking with user-specific permissions to start with, we've provided an option to be more restrictive and secure when it comes to access to newly created forms. Currently, all users get access to new forms by default, and it's up to an administrator to remove access should they want to for each user.
We've also taken on board the observation that for some organizations, it makes sense to separate the responsibility for form creation and design from that for viewing the form entries. Some backoffice users may require one of these permissions, some the other, and some both.
You are now able to define that as you need as we now have an additional permission you can set for each user in the Form Security section:
By default for an upgraded project all users that have the "Manage Forms" permission will also be granted the one to "View Entries" - ensuring their immediate access remains unchanged. An administrator can then remove one or both as appropriate for different users.
With Umbraco Forms, it is possible to organize your forms in folders (for Umbraco 8 you need form definitions stored in the database to be able to use folders):
As well as providing for a better organized and more easily navigable tree, we can now use this for defining finer permissions for the users - restricting them to only the forms within one or more folders.
The start folders are set on the user permissions screen:
If no start folders are selected, which will be the case by default, the user will be able to access all forms in the backoffice according to their permissions. If a single start folder is selected, that will act as the root of the tree view of forms. The user will have access to all folders and forms below that selected folder.
Finally, if more than one start folder is selected, they will appear underneath the root of the tree view of forms. The user will have access to only those folders and their descendent folders and forms.
As mentioned, in introducing these new features we've made efforts to ensure that after upgrading, each user's permissions remain as they were previously. So if you are happy with the current setup, there's no reason not to upgrade to be able to get the benefits of other features and bug fixes available in the most recent version.
If you do want to make use of Group level permissions. You can see how to enable it in the documentation for User-Group-based permissions in Forms.
Once enabled, you'll see that the Users > Form Security section now renders three sub-sections. Group Permissions, User Permissions and Start Folders:
Access to a particular resource or feature is determined by the following:
With that in mind, following a new install or an upgrade, the first thing to do is to set the appropriate permissions for each user group, which is done under the Group permissions section of Form Security. Here each user group is listed and the same settings as available for individual users can be set here.
Under User permissions as before we have a list of users, but in this case, it's only users that have a specific user permission record saved. If migrating, this will likely be all of them, and you can now delete these records such that the user's effective permissions are defined by the combination of groups they are part of.
If necessary though, where a particular user needs a particular combination of permissions that you can't or don't want to provide via the user groups, you can retain, or re-create, the user-specific setting:
Finally, under Start folders, the start folders for each user can be set as described above. They are moved to this section simply as we may want to be able to set these for every user, irrespective of whether they have a specific user permission set.
You’ll find extensive documentation for all the new Permission settings in the Umbraco Forms Security documentation.
In Umbraco Forms 9.2 a localized backoffice section was introduced to provide an editing experience according to the user language. With version 9.3/8.11 you get two more languages to choose from as Danish and Czech are added to the list of translations. The Forms sections were already translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Polish, bringing the total number of supported languages for Umbraco Forms to 7.
Additional fixes and improvements in this release can be found in the release notes.
The new release of Umbraco Deploy brings some much-anticipated features to Umbraco Cloud and on-premises installations.
By default. member records held within Umbraco are created and managed in one environment. We've had requests to support the transfer and restore of member records via Umbraco Deploy, and have implemented that for this release.
Due to the potential privacy concern of handling member information, this is something that you need to opt into via configuration if it is a requirement.
When enabled, the feature enables you to handle and transfer Member data in the same way as Content. You have a few different configuration options to allow for more granular control of how the data can be moved between environments and conform to specific data policies:
It is also possible to enable Member Groups to be transferred via the backoffice. More details on how to configure Member Data and Member Groups in the Configuration documentation for Umbraco Deploy.
Being able to preview content changes prior to transferring them to another environment can be helpful in order to ensure the correct updates are transferred and improve predictability when working with content in multiple environments. This is now possible in Umbraco Deploy.
You access the new feature via the content tree and will see the following dialog:
You can see what has changed and when, and understand what will change if you proceed with a transfer upstream or a restore into the local environment.
Content comparison is now available in all Umbraco Cloud projects running Umbraco Deploy 9.3+ for Umbraco 9, and 4.5 + for Umbraco 8.
As always, from today, all new Umbraco Cloud projects will be running the latest versions of both Forms and Deploy. For all our Umbraco Cloud customers with existing projects, this upgrade is only 2 minutes away with the upgrade minor version feature.
We’ve wrapped it all up for you, so all you have to do now is follow these steps:
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.
Installation and release notes can be found on Our:
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 on product@umbraco.com and specific issues on the GitHub issue trackers for Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy.
Today, we are making minor release candidates for Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy available. They each contain several product improvements such as improved permissions for Forms and Content Comparison for Deploy. You can read more about these new features and more in this post.