Umbraco Product Update - April 26th, 2021

Overview: 

• New release: Umbraco 8.13
• Upcoming release: Beta version of Umbraco on .NET Core
• Upcoming release: Umbraco Forms 8.7.1
• Upcoming release: Umbraco Deploy 4.1.1
• Join the Backoffice Community team
• Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure
• Updates to the Roadmap
  • Improved subscription management for Umbraco Cloud
  • Block editor in Heartcore with GraphQL support
• Codegarden 2021
  • Umbraco Awards
  • Umbraco MVPs

New release: Umbraco 8.13

A new minor has been released into the wild. Umbraco 8.13 was released on April 22nd and gives you a couple of great features and a long list of improvements and fixes, most of it made by community contributions - How wonderful is that? You can look forward to a new color picker, ability to copy Member Types, performance enhancement, accessibility improvements, translations and much more… Dive into the Umbraco 8.13 release blog post for more details or check out the rundown in video format:

 

Upcoming release: Beta version of Umbraco on .NET Core

The release date for the first beta of Umbraco 9 has been confirmed: Wednesday, April 28th, 2021. This marks a big milestone for the move to .NET 5/.NET Core and means the CMS is essentially feature-complete 🎉

It’s a big day for Umbraco and we invite you to join us for a live stream on Wednesday, where we’ll talk about the release, what’s coming up next, and answer questions. See the announcement blog post for details and register for the live stream. 

Target release: April 28th, 2021

Upcoming release: Umbraco Forms 7.5.1

Tommorow, Tuesday, April 27th, we’ll be releasing a patch for Umbraco Forms addressing regression issues in 7.5 regarding workflows and mandatory checkbox. Projects on Umbraco Cloud running Umbraco Forms 7.5 will be automatically patched. See the release notes for more details. 

Target release: April 27th, 2021

Upcoming release: Umbraco Deploy 4.1.1

Along with the above-mentioned patch for Forms, we’ll also release a patch for Umbraco Deploy. With version 4.1.1, you get increased stability with deployments/transfers, and a number of UX issues are addressed as well. Projects on Umbraco Cloud running Umbraco Deploy 4.1 will be automatically patched. See the release notes for more details. 

Target release: April 27th, 2021

Join the Backoffice Community Team

Last week we announced the formation of a new community team, the Backoffice Community Team, which will be responsible for defining how the backoffice extension API should work in the future. 

Are you a friendly, enthusiastic open source contributor with a fondness for collaboration? Then this is your chance to work closely with the frontend team at Umbraco HQ and help shape the future of the CMS. So if you, or someone you know, have experience in extending the backoffice, have a passion for frontend code and/or ideas for how this area can be improved don’t hesitate to sign up. 

The deadline for applications is on Tuesday, April 27th, 2021 (at 4 pm CEST). 

For those of you who’ve already submitted - thanks for your applications 🙏  we look forward to reviewing them.

You can read more about the project and the community team in the announcement blog post.

Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure

Next week we’ll publish a new status blog post on the new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure. We’re really excited about the progress.

As mentioned in the latest status on the new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure the new infrastructure is ready and we already have the first sites running on it 🎉 We’re collaborating closely with select partners and clients on the first migration of clients projects, to ensure each step of the migration is satisfactory.

If you have an Umbraco Cloud project, there are some requirements that need to be in place before they can move to the new infrastructure. These all help to ensure a smooth migration with minimum impact on running projects:

• Media served from blob storage - DONE
  We have completed the migration to Cloud storage for all eligible projects.
  
  
• Updated DNS settings - you might need to update settings
  Your projects need to be updated to use the new DNS settings. If you aren’t using this already you will be contacted directly to update your DNS entries. Please be aware that from May 1st, 2021, we will deprecate the old DNS settings. It will no longer be possible to setup a CNAME record pointing to the internal hostname for an Umbraco Cloud Project ie. project-alias.s1.umbraco.io nor will it be possible to set up an A-record pointing to the old Public IP (23.100.15.180). We continue to recommend that everyone updates their DNS settings as described above, see the Manage Hostnames documentation for more information.
  

• Minimum versions for Umbraco CMS - you might need to upgrade your project(s)
  As we get ready for the new infrastructure, we are aiming to reduce the number of versions currently present on Umbraco Cloud in order to improve security, stability and overall experience of Umbraco Cloud which the new infrastructure enables. If you have projects on versions 8.6.6, 7.7.7 or earlier, we highly encourage you to upgrade to the latest minor and patch version and if possible, do this within the next 2 months. Minimum supported versions on the new infrastructure will be:
• Umbraco 8.6.7 for version 8 projects
• Umbraco 7.7.8 for version 7 projects.

We’re really happy to see so many of the projects on Umbraco Cloud have been updated to meet the requirements 🙏 

Updates to the Roadmap

There are a few updates to the Product Roadmap: 

Improved subscription management for Umbraco Cloud 

This improvement now has a release date: April 28th. With the new subscription management, all your Umbraco Cloud subscriptions are managed, renewed and updated directly in the portal. It will support workflows for agencies/organisations, multiple payment methods and more.

On April 28th, it will be made available for new users (i.e. taking a trial for Cloud, Uno or Heartcore). Next step is to add this improved subscription management for existing users - we’ll keep you updated on this in future Product Updates. 

Block editor in Heartcore with GraphQL support

This item has been added to the “Next” status on the roadmap. 

The Block Editor functionality is similar to the one introduced in Umbraco 8.7 and allows you to structure the content in your Heartcore backoffice in a new way. The main concept of the editor is to manage lists of blocks that represent a web page's structure, where each block is both a collection of content and a way to configure that collection to be rendered. Each content block and configuration is defined by an Element Type to make administrating and editing with the new Block editor consistent.

The functionality will first be made available for new Umbraco Heartcore projects and then enabled for existing projects.

Target release: Q2

That’s all folks…almost ;) 

Remember to sign-up for the biggest Umbraco event of the year

As mentioned in the last product update, you can now register for Codegarden, the official Umbraco conference. This year's event will be online AND it’s completely free to join - So head on over to the Codegarden site and sign up! (Rumor has it that speakers will start to be announced very soon!)

Part of Codegarden is recognising all the wonderful work that is being done with Umbraco by our partners, MVPs and community. You can submit nominations for both the Umbraco Awards and Package Awards. More details on the award categories and how to submit your nominations can be found on the Codegarden website.

Nominate your favourite Umbracian (even if it’s yourself ;) )

We’ve also opened up for Umbraco MVP nominations, so if you know someone who deserves the recognition, either as a new MVP or a renewal, please don’t hesitate to let us know. 

Nominations are open to everyone. You can either nominate yourself or someone from the Community. We encourage self-nominations; don't be shy to share your story. 

You can read more about the MVP program and how to submit your nominations in the 2021 Umbraco MVP blog post.

… Until next time

A large part of the work we do is inspired by the feedback we get from you. For issues and specific feature requests, you can find the issue trackers for our products on the Umbraco Github account.

If you have product feedback, you’re welcome to reach out to us on product@umbraco.com.