TL;DR: We’re introducing a new format for product communication on the Umbraco blog. You can look forward to 4 big pieces of product updates a year, once every quarter, that’ll keep you informed about the latest and most significant features and improvements across all Umbraco products and services.
You can find a more detailed explanation when you get to the “...Until next time” bit of this post. But first, let’s get you updated on all the exciting updates:
Overview:
Since the latest Product Update in December, where we had just released Umbraco version 13 - the latest LTS of Umbraco, we've released Umbraco version 13.1. Besides various bug fixes and performance improvements, Umbraco 13.1 includes support for TinyMCE Cloud-Hosted Premium Plugins.
Every week since January we have sought to release a preview of Umbraco 14 with the new backoffice - also known as Bellissima.
On March 6, you will see these preview releases change their nature and become the first beta releases of Umbraco 14. The final release is slated for May 30, so there is still some time for us to finish up all the missing pieces - and make it ready for editors and implementers. But on March 6, you can rely on the public APIs in both Server and Client to be stable. If we need to create breaking changes, these changes will be documented thoroughly.
From this day, you - as a package developer - should jump on board, start updating your existing packages, and start building new ones. Bellissima includes a lot of new extension points and because everything within Bellissima itself is built as extensions, you’ll have our codebase as inspiration - as well as the Umbraco Bellisima Docs.
On a more high-level note, bear in mind that version 14 includes many changes. All Backoffice client code is new and supported by a new Management API. From an editor's perspective, most things should look and work the same, and as such, there should be no rush to upgrade existing projects to version 14. Instead, we encourage you to make your packages compatible, so that they are ready for new projects starting on Umbraco 14.
Talking about the technology, here are some of the headlines for version 14:
Target release beta: March 6 2024
Target release RC: April 17 2024
Target release Umbraco 14: May 30 2024
Over the last three months, Umbraco Cloud has been bustling with activity, rolling out new features designed to enhance security, improve user experience, and streamline collaboration across projects. While our team has primarily focused on developing larger features set to launch soon (stay tuned for the "Coming Up" section in a minute ;) ) we've also introduced several smaller, yet impactful, updates that you can start taking advantage of today.
To further streamline collaboration and reduce friction during project invitations, you can now take advantage of this feature that allows users to easily request a resend of expired Umbraco Cloud project invitations. Found under the "Pending Invites" page of your profile, the "Request New Invitation" button simplifies the process of re-inviting team members, ensuring seamless and uninterrupted collaboration.
This feature highlights our commitment to improving user experience and operational efficiency on the Umbraco Cloud platform.
Managing your project's security settings is now more straightforward than ever with our new Self-Service Cipher Suite Management feature. This feature is accessible from the Cloud Portal's "Security Page," this feature allows you to effortlessly enable or disable cipher suites through a user-friendly interface.
By offering a "Ciphers" dropdown menu, we provide you with the flexibility to tailor your security settings to meet your project's specific needs, ensuring you start with robust security measures by default. This update aims to save you time and effort, allowing you to focus on the critical aspects of your work with an enhanced level of efficiency.
Security is paramount, and to that end, we're thrilled to announce that Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 is now available for all Umbraco Cloud plans. This update provides advanced protection for every project plan, allowing you to activate TLS 1.3 for your custom hostnames. With TLS 1.3 as the new standard protocol, alongside HTTP/2 and the forthcoming default enabled HTTP/3, your projects will benefit from enhanced security and performance, contributing to more sustainable digital operations.
Exciting updates are coming to Umbraco Cloud! Driven by innovation and community feedback, we're preparing to roll out big features that will enhance your experience when working with Umbraco Cloud. Below, you’ll find some of the upcoming highlights, and remember that you can always get the full overview of upcoming Cloud features and improvements in the Umbraco Cloud release notes.
Here are some of the features to look forward to:
Taking flexibility and reliability to new heights, we're excited to introduce "Dedicated Environments" in Umbraco Cloud. This adds a significant layer of customization to our dedicated resources offering. You'll have the freedom to decide where your Development and Staging environments reside, be it on shared or dedicated resources, providing a tailored approach that meets your specific needs. Most notably, this ensures that the Live environment can operate in total isolation, guaranteeing enhanced reliability and performance.
Target release: Q2, 2024.
Prepare to navigate through a completely revitalized Umbraco Cloud Portal. We're rolling out a fresh look and feel with an intuitive navigation system, a vibrant color scheme that echoes the Umbraco brand design, and an overall user experience designed to be more modern, engaging, and user-friendly. This overhaul represents our ongoing dedication of making Umbraco Cloud not only powerful but also a pleasure to use.
Target release: April 2024.
Understanding the need for transparency and efficiency, we're enhancing the visibility of long-running operations within Umbraco Cloud. Whether you're upgrading your plan, transitioning to dedicated resources, or implementing platform upgrades, our new user experience design ensures that you're kept in the loop from start to finish. This streamlined approach means less guessing and more doing, with updates provided in real time to keep you informed every step of the way.
Target release: March 2024.
In our effort to provide you with comprehensive control and oversight over your projects, we're introducing the "Project History Page." Envisioned as a hub where you can access a complete record of all activities and significant upgrade events for your cloud project, this feature aims to offer a transparent overview, ensuring you're always in command. The "Project History" page will continuously evolve and the future feature vision will offer a comprehensive history of all relevant actions and events, whether triggered by users or automatically by Umbraco Cloud, Azure, or Cloudflare, ensuring you have a full understanding and control over your project's operational integrity.
Target release: March 2024.
We recently rolled out a big update for new Umbraco Heartcore sites. You’ll now see the following features if you create a new project with our headless SaaS offering, Heartcore.
The popular property editor from the core CMS has made it to Heartcore, so you’ll be able to build out page-like content structures with ease. Similar to its predecessor the Block List Editor, the Block Grid adds a new dimension to the editing experience; letting you drag, drop, resize, and rearrange blocks in two dimensions. In an upcoming rollout, we’ll also support custom backoffice views for your Block Grid elements so that you can create a true WYSIWYG experience for your content authors.
One issue that can arise in Heartcore is that whenever you delete a media or content item, you may be creating broken links in your application. This happens when the deleted item was referenced by another item, for example using the multi-node tree picker. Now, whenever you attempt to delete an item that is referenced by another, you will be prompted to confirm deletion with a summary of potential broken links if you go ahead. Say goodbye to those pesky 404s!
We’ve added support for configuring the language of selected text in the Rich Text Editor. This means you can mark sections of your rich text content with a behind-the-scenes attribute that can help screen readers and browsers better understand how they should present that content to the user. Additionally, we’ve made it possible for content authors to select foreground and background text colors using a picker, without having to set up stylesheets in advance.
With this rollout comes a lot of under-the-hood improvements to performance across the entire backoffice. Developers and content authors alike should notice quicker response times for nearly every action they carry out!
If your Heartcore site was created on or after February 12th, you should be able to take advantage of all these features immediately. We’re working hard to make these changes available to older projects and you can expect a rollout early in Q2 if your site is one of those.
For more information, check out the brand-new Heartcore release notes!
Flexible and real-time shipping rates. That’s what you get with the Dynamic and Real Time Shipping Rates available in Umbraco Commerce version 13.1.0.
The latest release of Umbraco Commerce gave you not only one but two new strategies for handling shipping calculations when you are sending orders to your customers. Your flexibility for calculating shipping costs has increased, giving you better control over your shipping fees.
With the new dynamic shipping rates feature, it is now possible to configure different range-based shipping rates. This allows you to adjust shipping costs based on the state of your customer’s order.
On top of the range-based shipping rates, you can now add rules for adding extra cost per order or an extra percentage of the order subtotal.
With dynamic shipping rates, you aren't only tied to the ranges and rate options built into Umbraco Commerce. As with much of the Umbraco Commerce API, we've made these fully pluggable to allow you to define your own ranges and rates. With pluggable range/rate providers, you can truly make dynamic shipping rates flexible to your customers' needs.
Suppose you don’t calculate shipping rates yourself but get these directly from shipping providers, such as DHL, UPS, or FedEx. In that case, it is now possible to fetch real-time, up-to-the-minute shipping rates directly from your favorite shipping provider.
You can use the new Shipping Providers API to set real-time shipping rates or use one of the Shipping Providers available with this release, you find them all on Umbraco Marketplace:
You can read all about the Dynamic and Real Time Shipping Rates in the release notes of Umbraco Commerce v13.1.0.
Expand your product reach and show your products to a larger audience with the help of product feeds. This feature will seamlessly integrate with the Google Merchant Center Feed, offering you a direct pathway to showcase your products and ensuring that your products are prominently displayed in Google searches when relevant keywords match your product descriptions.
Shortly, Umbraco Commerce will empower you to configure product feeds, exposing them in an XML-format feed containing comprehensive product information. This means your products will be easily discoverable by potential customers across various platforms.
Moreover, the feature will be available as a package and fully open-sourced so you can see exactly how it works, and use them as a starting point for any custom integration to other platforms.
Target release: Q1 2024
Shortly, you'll be able to take advantage of many-to-many relationships for editing collections of data in Umbraco UI Builder. This means that you can manage more complex data models that require relationships where one entity can be related to multiple instances of another entity, and vice versa.
Imagine you have two entities: “Students” and “Courses”. A many-to-many relationship between them means that one student can be enrolled in multiple courses, and one course can have multiple students enrolled in it.
With this feature, Umbraco UI Builder supports all the different relationships within data structures 🤝
You can read more about the feature and how you define a related collection of data here.
We know that there are still some projects out there lingering on the end-of-life Umbraco version 7. We also appreciate that migrating to a newer version can be a time-consuming task.
With Umbraco Deploy, migrating your content and structure has just become a lot smoother for you.
With the already available import and export feature, you can export Umbraco content, files, and schema from any version 8+ project and import it into a higher version, all while ensuring that obsolete code is updated to comply with the version you're migrating to.
And here’s the good news: the Export feature will also be available for Umbraco 7 projects!
If you’re on a licensed version of Umbraco Deploy, the version 7 Export feature will soon be accessible for your project as a downloaded UmbracoDeploy.Contrib.Export component on our.umbraco.com. You can find instructions on how to use the feature in the existing Umbraco Deploy docs, along with information about the migration hooks that are available in the Umbraco.Deploy.Contrib.
And remember, if you decide to migrate the project to Umbraco Cloud, Umbraco Deploy is part of this offering, meaning you can take full advantage of the Import/Export features at no additional cost.
Target release: Q1 2024
As always the add-ons receive the usual, but thorough, maintenance in the form of patch releases taking care of small bugs reported on the issue tracker or from Umbraco Support🧹💦
Get the full overview of the patch release since the last product update on docs.umbraco.com:
That’s the name of our upcoming webinar on March 19th. At this webinar, we are super honored to have 4 external experts joining this webinar for an interesting and insightful discussion about green tech:
A great webinar for you who’s curious about greener tech - and maybe a webinar you’d want to share with your colleagues and boss too?
Looking for more hands-on/technical sustainability tips? Then we highly recommend watching the recording of the brilliant webinar hosted by the Umbraco Sustainability Team “How to make your Umbraco website more sustainable”.
If so, we've just released this telemetry article on our docs platform. Give it a read if you’re curious about how an average project looks, what versions of Umbraco projects are running, and see who is now on the list of top two external packages.
Codegarden is getting closer! We already have a great lineup of 18+ speakers and more are on their way.
Codegarden is the best place to catch up on the latest product news as well as a unique opportunity to come and talk directly to the people behind all the Umbraco products. And we love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!
We hope to see you in June - it’s going to be a blast as always!
Did you notice the difference? The above is the first of our new format for Product Updates.
We've shifted our focus from monthly posts and minor release announcements on the Umbraco blog to a new approach that emphasizes quality and impactful features. Moving forward, expect two Product Updates annually in February and August/September, starting with this February 2024 edition.
Additionally, we're planning Major release communication with Umbraco 14 in May 2024 and Umbraco 15 in November 2024. These release updates will be in a renewed format that will cover all product news. This ensures that you’ll have four pieces of significant product communication to look forward to each year. This new format aims to provide a more streamlined and relevant experience, helping you stay informed about the latest and most significant features and improvements across all Umbraco products and services.
So until next time (Umbraco 14 release, May 2024), remember that you can always keep yourself updated on what we’re working on “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” on the Umbraco Product Roadmap - which has recently been given a small makeover which allows you to pick which product you want to be updated on!
A large part of the work we do is inspired by the feedback we get from you. If you find issues or have 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 at product@umbraco.com.
We're proud to introduce Umbraco 13, the newest Long Term Supported (LTS) version of Umbraco CMS, perfectly synchronized with the latest Microsoft LTS release .NET 8, and C# 12. But that’s not all, as mentioned on UmbraCoffee recently: “Umbraco 13 is LTS and if you look at what’s included, I think it’s one of the most exciting Umbraco releases we’ve had in years.” Go on and check for yourself: