Umbraco Product Update - February 3, 2022

Overview: 

• Upcoming Release: 9.3 (Release Candidate is out 🎉)
• Upcoming Release: 8.18 (Release Candidate is out 🎉)
• Umbraco Cloud Update
• Patch releases
• Security Advisory published on January 18th, 2022
• (A lot of) Updates to the Roadmap
• Turn off Umbraco TV and say hi to free tutorials on YouTube👋

Upcoming release: Umbraco 9.3 (release candidate is out 🎉)

In exactly one week you get a new minor release for Umbraco 9 with some big improvements to Member authentication, additional options for serving Media and assets, updated dependencies and some great tweaks and fixes.

A release candidate is available and you’re more than welcome to give it a spin. The full list of features and improvements is in the release notes, and you can find more details in the Umbraco 9.3 release candidate blog post.

Umbraco 9.3 is scheduled for release on Thursday, February 10, 2022 

Upcoming release: Umbraco 8.18 (release candidate is out 🎉)

As mentioned in the last Product Update, Umbraco 8.18 is being wrapped up and ready for delivery to a Cloud or NuGet feed near you. In fact, the release candidate for Umbraco 8.18 is out so you can try the more than 100 new features improvements and fixes today. You can read more about the History Cleanup, a new Health Check, Package Telemetry and more in the Umbraco 8.18 release candidate blog post.

Umbraco 8.18 is the last planned minor release for Umbraco 8 and is considered as long-term support (LTS). We’ll still release patches and security to address regression issues and ensure your Umbraco 8 installations are secure. Going forward, the focus of Umbraco 8 releases will be to increase stability, compatibility and security / new features and improvements will be targeted for Umbraco 9+.

Umbraco 8.18 is targeted for release on Thursday, February 17, 2022

Umbraco Cloud Updates

New features continue to be rolled out to the Umbraco Cloud portal, where you can now enjoy some ease of life improvements.

The Connection Details page is useful if you need to connect to one of the SQL databases and now it’s even more useful with the addition of blob storage connection details. These were previously only available through the KUDU interface. Now, it’s all right there and even has copy-to-clipboard actions for all the details so you can get on with your work.

If you’re using the project invite feature a lot, you might have had issues with the invites ending up in spam filters. We're happy to report that after some investigation, we’ve updated the configuration for delivering mail, and that should in turn result in more emails ending up where they should. For those edge cases where there are still issues, you can now copy the invite link and send it to them directly (via mail, DM or🕊️)

You can read more in the latest Cloud Release Notes for January 31, 2022, and take a look at some of the new features coming for Umbraco Cloud and Heartcore in the Roadmap Update section below.

Patch releases

New patches have been released for Umbraco CMS and Forms:

• Umbraco 8.17.2
• Umbraco Forms 8.10.2

All patches are available day-of release on Umbraco Cloud and rolled out, automagically, to all eligible projects. You can find release notes with more details and download options by following the links above.

Security Advisory published on January 20th, 2022 

On Tuesday, January 18th, 2022, AppCheck published a blog post about a vulnerability in Umbraco’s password reset mechanism. We have subsequently published a security advisory explaining in detail how to find out if your site(s) are secure and how to address any vulnerability concerns In Umbraco 7, 8 and 9.

It is evaluated as medium-level vulnerability and we estimate a low number of sites are affected and the Umbraco Cloud, Heartcore and Uno projects are not affected.

Details and documentation on how to address the vulnerability have been published in a security advisory blog post.

Updates to the Roadmap 

The Product Roadmap continues to get populated with some really exciting things and there are a number of additions and updates once again.

New in “Now”

Semrush integration for Umbraco CMS (DXP)

As part of our Composable DXP (Digital Experience Platform) strategy, we’re building a package that provides easy integration with SemRush adding additional SEO capabilities to Umbraco.

Target release: Q1, 2022

Custom hostname security options for Umbraco Cloud

A number of new options for custom hostnames will be available such as HTTP/2, HTTP/3, TLS and more. AND, it’s on a per hostname basis for your Umbraco Cloud Projects.

Target release: Q1, 2022

Expanded CDN capabilities for Umbraco Cloud

Adding new caching features, on a per hostname basis, and allowing for the CDN cache to be purged. This item has been moved from “Next” to “Now”.

Target release: Q1, 2022

New in “Next”

There are also new items added to the “Next” category. These are all in the active planning phase at the moment. You can look forward to:

• Improved Permissions for Umbraco Forms, with improved support for User Group permissions and Folder access.
• Umbraco Cloud, Heartcore and Deploy users will be excited to see that Content Comparison is coming soon (or at the very least “Next” 😉). This will allow you to preview changes before they are transferred to another environment. 
• More integrations are also coming your way. The next DXP add-on for Umbraco will be integration for Hubspot Forms, making it easier and more seamless to add forms from the popular CRM to your favourite CMS.

New in “Later”

And a little further down the line will be looking to add an additional two new projects to support the Composable DXP strategy.

• Design and build of new marketplace solution for Umbraco 9+ packages and to replace the existing Umbraco Apps. This will include new functionality to integrate with NuGet as well as a combination of existing features found in both the package section of Our.umbraco.com and Apps on umbraco.com. 
• Wouldn’t it be great to be able to take a demo of Umbraco and have that include functionality from a package? That’s what we aim to address with Technical partner trials on Umbraco Cloud, which will open up for trials with pre-installed packages and content.

Wow, that was quite the round 😅 In order to make room for all these exciting new features and possibilities, we are also moving items to the Roadmap History page as they are released. Since last time, the item for Block List Editor with GraphQL support in Umbraco Heartcore has been moved to the History page. The feature was finalized earlier this year and is now available to new and existing projects.

 

Turn off Umbraco TV and say hi to free tutorials on YouTube👋

As announced earlier this week we’re launching a new HQ-driven YouTube channel with tutorials and guides on how to get started with all things Umbraco. Currently, you’ll find a mix of re-uploaded Umbraco TV videos and brand new content covering Umbraco 8 and 9, Cloud, Heartcore, Forms and Deploy. 

There is a dedicated team at Umbraco HQ working on delivering new content every month with a focus on making it as easy as possible to get started with the various Umbraco products. Older videos will still be available on Umbraco.tv but no new content will be added here.

So help make this a success by liking, subscribing, hitting that notification bell 🔔 The more the merrier! You can read more about the new channel and team in the blog post or head directly over to YouTube and subscribe to the Umbraco Learning Base.

… 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 at product@umbraco.com.