Umbraco Product Update

It's the most wonderful time of the year...

Written by Rune Strand

‘Tis the season to be jolly, launch new products, release new features and plan for next year. Don’t worry, I’m not going to sing it for you, but I’ll take you through recent product news and give you some insight as to what you can expect in December - and the beginning of 2020.

Overview:

New Releases

Umbraco Heartcore

Upcoming Releases

Umbraco 8.4

New in Umbraco Cloud
Updates to the Roadmap

New Release: Umbraco Heartcore 🎉

We’re incredibly proud to announce the public release of Umbraco Heartcore.

This is the brand new headless SaaS offering on Umbraco Cloud and it’s hot off the press as it was released this Monday (December 2nd). We’re excited to see what you will build with it. You can read all about it in the launch blog post and get started with your first Heartcore project here or through your Umbraco Cloud account.

If you missed the release celebrations you can catch the special Heartcore launch episode of umbracoCoffee on YouTube and make sure to read the 24 days in Umbraco post with some cool tips for how to get started with Heartcore written by the two lead Heartcore developers, Morten Christensen & Rasmus John Pedersen.

What a great way to kick off December 🎄

Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.4

There are more “presents” in store for December as Umbraco 8.4 is very close to being wrapped up. A release candidate is out right now and we are looking to make the final release on December 10th - we’re really thankful for all the feedback you’ve provided on the release candidate. It really helps ensure the quality of our releases - h5yr!

Umbraco 8.4 will add some great new functionality along with a slew of fixes, many of them coming from hackathons and the very successful Hactoberfest (read Sebastiaan's Hacktoberfest round-up here). There will be a release blog post with all the details on release day but if you can’t wait, check out the 8.4 release candidate and the accompanying blog post.

New in Umbraco Cloud

The Cloud team has been hard at work making sure Umbraco Cloud is ready for the Heartcore projects. Even if you're not creating Heartcore projects (yet), you'll still see these new improvements in the Umbraco Cloud Portal!

You might have noticed the new design of the header? Aside from looking great, this new design provides a better overview when there are portal notifications and projects specific notifications (automated upgrades etc.) by the help of the little bell in the top right corner.

The new design also adds a new project creation workflow that includes Umbraco Heartcore. This will show up whenever you want to create a new Cloud or Heartcore project - then you just make the pick.

Umbraco Cloud will also get some added functionality when we release an update to the Partial Restore feature. With this, you’ll now be able to restore specific content nodes or part of the content tree to an empty Umbraco installation. This is especially helpful if you have installations with a lot of content. Previously you had to restore the entire content tree but now you can browse content on the source site and choose exactly what you want to restore. We’re looking to make this available on December 17th. It will be included in a new minor version of Umbraco Deploy so you can add it to your Cloud projects by hitting the Upgrade button.

Updates to the Roadmap

A lot has happened on the Product Roadmap since the last update. We have introduced new items as well as moved some items into the next phase:

New in “Now”

Deploy on Premise

We have begun active development on Deploy on Premise, which will make Umbraco Deploy available for Umbraco 8. This item has been moved from “Next” to “Now” and we’ve added a target release window, Q1. I’ll keep you updated as the project moves forward and of course let you know when we have a public release date.

Forms API for Umbraco Heartcore

Heartcore is launched but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any future plans for it. We’re close to wrapping up development on making Umbraco Forms available through the REST API. This means that developers can create forms directly from the Heartcore Backoffice and have all the tools on API level to render and submit forms from any client.

New in “Next”:

Preview API for Umbraco Heartcore

Being able to preview content is a very handy tool but also an interesting challenge when the content lives in a headless CMS (such as Umbraco Heartcore) that isn’t (and shouldn’t be) aware of the frontend(s) consuming the content. The Preview API will provide you with the tools to build preview functionality so content can be seen in the right context before it is published.

GraphQL for Umbraco Heartcore

We’re also planning to provide Graph QL querying capabilities for Umbraco Heartcore. This feature will enable you to create complex queries that can be executed efficiently, return “just” the data you need and are reusable across different clients. It will not replace the existing REST API but will provide an alternative that can be implemented when needed.

New in “Later”:

Custom editors for Umbraco Heartcore

Last new feature on the Roadmap aims to make it possible to create custom property editors for Umbraco Heartcore in order to create a tailored editing experience for e.g. picking data from an external source.

That’s it for this update...

A large part of the work we do is inspired by the feedback we get from you. For issues and specific feature request, 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, contribute to the RFCs and if you want to get personal, you can find me on Twitter (@hemraker).

… Until next time.