Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco Forms 8.12/9.4?
- And Umbraco Deploy 4.6/9.4?
- How to get your hands on the new Umbraco Forms and Deploy
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 8.12 and Deploy 4.6. If you’ve started projects with Umbraco 9 running on .NET 5, version 9.4 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.
What’s new in Umbraco Forms 8.12/9.4?
Start Folders for User Groups
You can now set start folders at the user group level. This builds upon the permissions improvements added in Forms 9.3 and allows to set different permissions to achieve specific requirements.
Start folders can be added to a User or User group. Specific User permissions will supersede User Group permissions. If no Start folders are set on either Groups or your User, you will have access to the root of the forms tree. For installations with many user accounts and/or many forms, this will be a welcome timesaver.
If you do want to make use of Group level permissions you will need to configure it. This can be enabled 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.
Import/Export of Forms (for Umbraco 9)
In Umbraco 9 forms are stored in the database. This means there is no easy way to add a form to source control, which can be useful if you want to move these between environments. There are packages that support this, not least Umbraco Deploy which is included in all Umbraco Cloud projects, and can be added to on-premises projects as well.
If you don't wish to use those you can include them in source control, with the new ability to import and export form definitions to and from disk files. You can select a form and via the actions menu choose to export it to disk.
By right-clicking on the root of the forms tree, or on a folder, you can choose to import a form from a disk file to the selected location.
Set default email template
When creating a new (empty) form the “Send Email” workflow is used and by default. This uses the example email template that ships with Umbraco Forms. You can select your own custom email template manually, and now, you can also set a custom template as the default for all new forms.
This means the chosen template will be used by default forms and makes it easier for editors to get on with their work. If needed, a different template can be chosen in the workflow settings as per usual.
Documentation for how to set a default email template can be found for both Umbraco 8 and Umbraco 9 projects.
Conditionals with dates
The final improvement to highlight in Forms 9.4 is for the popular conditional fields feature. This now supports using dates as well as strings as conditions. So, you can use the date picker field and set a condition if a submitted date is greater/less than a specific date.
And much more
There are many more improvements and fixes included with Umbraco Forms. See the release notes for more details.
And Umbraco Deploy 4.6/9.4?
Improvements to Content Comparison
In the last release, we added a feature that allowed you to compare the status of a content item between environments, in order to see what would be changed if proceeding with a transfer or restore operations.
With this release we have added some additional information. Firstly, there's a summary table showing when and who edited the content, its URL, and its position in the tree.
And secondly, we've added buttons to the dialog so, after reviewing the changes, you can click to carry out the action you've now decided to proceed with. This update was based on some useful feedback we received - thanks Heather!
Partial Restore For Forms
Umbraco Deploy offers a feature called "partial restore", 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 Forms, the integration is offered in an extensible way for third-party packages to utilize.Documentation can be found here.
Extensions to the Deploy "Settings" Dashboard
Within the Settings section of Umbraco, a Deploy dashboard is available that allows for the manual triggering of operations such as the extraction of schema files to update the Umbraco installation.
We've added further sections to this dashboard, providing further information about your installation and potentially helping with debugging any issues you may encounter. These are of course available on Umbraco Cloud as well as for on-premises installations.
Configuration Details
Firstly, there's a section titled "Configuration Details". The idea here is to surface the current environment's configuration, such that we can make clearer potential other options available or features that aren't yet being used. Each setting shows the current configuration, alternative options, and provides some notes and links to documentation.
Schema Comparison
The second addition is a section titled "Schema Comparison". This shows a record for all the items managed as schema within the installation, along with an indication if there are any differences between the information held in Umbraco and that in the serialized files on disk. If there are discrepancies, a "diff view" that allows them to be compared is available.
As well as displaying details of Umbraco's core entity types such as document and data types, the schema comparison for Umbraco Forms entities are also displayed.Again this hooks into a generic mechanism for integrating third-party packages with Umbraco Deploy, and is documented here.
Deployment of Culture & Hostnames Details
With this release, we've added the option of including the information managed under "Culture & Hostnames" within Umbraco, 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
And much more
There are many more improvements and fixes included with Umbraco Deploy. See the release notes for more details.
How to get your hands Umbraco Forms 8.12/9.4 and Deploy 4.6/9.4
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:
- 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 Forms and 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 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.