Umbraco Product Update

What's new in product-land?

Written by Rune Strand

The end of 2019 is approaching and with this, also the last Product Update of the year. And what a year it has been - especially when we’re talking “product”! Two major product launches with Umbraco 8 and Umbraco Heartcore. 2019 also saw a record-breaking amount of PRs submitted, mainly due to a record-shattering Hacktoberfest 🙌 It’s absolutely amazing to see how much Umbraco 8 has evolved in the past 10 months, not least thanks to the friendly and very productive Umbraco community. I cannot wait to see what happens in 2020! But, before we get to that, let’s have a look at what we’ve been working on and what you can expect in the near future.

Overview:

New Releases

Forms API & Content Filtering for Umbraco Heartcore

Upcoming Releases

Deploy 3.3
Umbraco 8.5

What’s new on Umbraco Cloud

Organisation Refresh

Updates to the Roadmap

New Release: Forms API & Content Filtering for Umbraco Heartcore

Yesterday, December 17th, we released two new features for our headless saas offering, Umbraco Heartcore; Form API and Content Filtering.

Forms API

You’ll find that the REST API has been expanded to include forms created with Umbraco Forms. This means you can create forms (contact forms, questionnaires etc.) directly in the backoffice, complete with conditionals and validation, and get all you need to render these forms in your presentation layer. All you need to do is include a form on a content node using the Form Picker and you’ll see the form data necessary to render the form as part of the JSON response - you can also retrieve forms independent of content. This also includes endpoints for posting form entries, so they will be stored in your Heartcore project and can utilise multi-step workflows.

This new Forms API has already been included in both the NodeJs and .NET Core client libraries, and you can find documentation for using the 3 approaches (REST API, NodeJs and .NET Core) in the following article: https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Umbraco-Heartcore/Getting-Started-Cloud/Using-The-Forms-API/

You can find the API documentation for the new Forms related endpoints here: https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Umbraco-Heartcore/API-Documentation/Content-Management/forms/

Umbraco Forms is automatically included in the Starter, Professional and Enterprise Heartcore plans and you’re able to test out this forms feature in your free 14 day trial of Heartcore.

Content Filtering

The REST API also includes a new endpoint for content delivery that lets you do more advanced filtering. Previously, if you wanted to filter content based on a search term, you could utilise the search endpoint. This is still possible, and useful, but if you want to be more precise and filter the content server side before it’s returned, the new filter endpoint might be what you’re looking for. Let’s say you only want to retrieve content of a specific Document Type that contains a specific phrase in a specific property. You can do this by posting a JSON object with filtering parameters to the content filter endpoint:

{

"contentTypeAlias": "textPage",

"properties": [{

"alias": "bodyText",

"value": "Heartcore",

"match": "CONTAINS"

}]

}

This will filter all content based on the textpage document type and return nodes that contain “Heartcore” in the body text property.

You can find the API documentation for the new Content Filter endpoint here:

https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Umbraco-Heartcore/API-Documentation/Content-Delivery/content/#content-filter

As mentioned, Umbraco Heartcore is our new headless CMS offering and If you haven’t tried it out yet, now is a great time, and it couldn’t be easier with the 14 day free trial.

Upcoming Release: Umbraco Deploy 3.3

As mentioned in previous Product Updates we have been working on an improved Partial Restore feature for Umbraco Cloud making it a breeze to get existing projects up and running with real content. This feature is now complete and undergoing the last round of testing.

We aim to release this on January 7th with a new minor version of Umbraco Deploy.

From this date, all existing projects on Umbraco Cloud can get this by upgrading Umbraco Deploy on the project page and all new projects will be running the latest version of Deploy when it is released. This release will be for version 8 and we’ll release this functionality for version 7 projects as soon as it’s backported and tested.

Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.5

The first Umbraco release of 2020 will contain the new built-in version of ModelsBuilder, Umbraco Modelsbuilder. This is a slimmed down version of the the current ZBU ModelsBuilder that has been bundled with Umbraco since version 7.4. Umbraco will now have the basic functionality, Purelive and AppData models, directly in the core of the CMS. For advanced features such as Dll mode, API and more you can still add the third party ModelsBuilder via NuGet.

All existing projects will not see any changes and will continue to use the full version of ModelsBuilder as before, so an upgrade to 8.5 doesn’t mean you automatically switch to Umbraco ModelsBuilder. All new installations will default to Umbraco ModelsBuilder and you’re then free to switch to the full version if advanced functionality is needed.

You can find the full version of ModelsBuilder here: https://github.com/zpqrtbnk/Zbu.ModelsBuilder

We’ll provide all the details for Umbraco ModelsBuilder with the release of Umbraco 8.5, which is scheduled for January 14th.

What’s new on Umbraco Cloud

If you have an organisation set up on Umbraco Cloud, you’ll find that the overview of projects and members of an organisation has been given an overhaul to provide you with a better overview. This is done in line with the overall brand “make-over”of the Umbraco Cloud portal which we released in November. You’ll now see easy access to the different views for your organisation in a menu on the left.

This overhaul also includes a new feature:

Access Rights for Organisations

Aside from an overview of the members and projects in your Cloud organisation you can also get a report on Access Rights:

This means that admins for an organisation can get a complete overview of all the projects and an overview of who has access and what type of permission they have for each environment. This can be really helpful when reviewing access rights, data policies and for those of you that have to create GDPR reports, this should give you a helping hand as well.

Updates to the Roadmap

The only item that has moved since the last Product Update blog post is Forms API for Umbraco Heartcore, which has been released and moved from the Product Roadmap to the Roadmap History page.

That’s it for this update...

As mentioned, this is the last Product Update for 2019 - thank you for a great year! I aim to be back with regular bi-weekly updates starting mid-January 2020.

And as always - If you have product feedback you’re welcome to reach out to us on product@umbraco.com, contribute to the RFCs and if you want to get personal, you can find me on Twitter (@hemraker).

Happy holidays!

… Until next year.