Umbraco Product Update - January 15th 2021

New release: Umbraco 8.10

Umbraco 8.10 has more than 100 features and fixes that’ll make Umbraco even friendlier for editors and developers alike. You get a bunch of bug fixes, accessibility improvements, updates to the block editor and a whole lot more! The bulk of additions in this release was contributed by the wonderful and hard-working Umbraco community during this year’s Hacktoberfest.

See the Umbraco 8.10 release blog post for all the details.

Upcoming release: Umbraco 8.11 (Release candidate is out 🎉) 

The last round of Hacktoberfest contributions are contained in Umbraco 8.11 along with the ability to do unattended installs. The release candidate is out now, so you can get your hands on the latest and greatest. 

See the Umbraco 8.11 release candidate blog post for more details and how to get your hands on it. We appreciate all the feedback you can give before the final release.

Expected release date: January 28th, 2021

Upcoming release: Patches for Umbraco CMS 

We’ve got a bunch of patches coming out for Umbraco CMS in a couple of weeks. The content has not been finalised yet but you can follow along on the In Progress page. Here are the patch versions we’re looking to release:

• 8.6.7

• 8.7.2

• 8.8.3

• 8.9.2

• 8.10.2

Expected release date: January 26th, 2021

Upcoming Release: Umbraco on .NET Core Alpha3

Things are moving along nicely in the migration of Umbraco CMS to the .NET Core framework. In fact, we’ve got a release coming up later this month (might be early February). It will be the 3rd alpha release for project Unicore, with the long awaited routing and frontend rendering ready for testing. This means you’ll be able to try the complete experience of creating content and rendering the content in razor templates. This is a big milestone and we look forward to releasing it. Keep your eye on the blog for the next update.

Expected release date: February, 2021

If you want to read up on the latest progress see Status of migration to .NET Core, December 2020 blog post. There’s also been to great community blog posts published in December on the topic:

• Running Umbraco on a Raspberry Pi or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Linux
• Demystifying config in Umbraco .NET Core

New items on the Product Roadmap

A new batch of items have been added to the Product Roadmap. These reflect some of the big changes that will be coming to Umbraco Cloud in 2021. As described in The Future of Umbraco Cloud blog post we have a plan to roll out a new infrastructure that will add a multitude of improvements and new features. 

We’ve already taken steps and added functionality that improves the Cloud experience as well as helps prepare for a smooth transition to the new infrastructure. Since last time we’ve released Single Sign-on functionality for the Umbraco Cloud portal and all new Umbraco 8 projects. As a consequence we’ve moved the Authentication improvements for new Umbraco Cloud projects to the Roadmap History page.

The new  items are as as follows:

New in “Now”

• Authentication improvements for existing Umbraco Cloud projects
• New infrastructure for Umbraco Cloud
• Improved subscription management for Umbraco Cloud

New in “Next”

• Migrate existing projects to new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure

New in “Later”

• Scheduled upgrades for Umbraco Cloud
• Expanded CDN capabilities for Umbraco Cloud
• Regional hosting options for Umbraco Cloud

Head over to the Product Roadmap for details on each of the items. Later this month we’ll publish another blog post on the upcoming improvements for Umbraco Cloud.

Final comment period for Future-proofing the Umbraco Backoffice

In the last Product Update of 2020 we announced a new Request for Comments (RFC) for Future-proofing the Umbraco backoffice. This has sparked a great discussion and we appreciate all the feedback. 

We’ve put the RFC in a final comment period, which means you have until January 29th to add your comments before we move on to the next phase. We’re working on the next RFC for the UI Library and will post this as soon as possible.

If you want a “quick” introduction to the project I recommend watching this UmbraCoffee episode where Filip Bech, CMS Program Manager at Umbraco HQ, explains all the details. You can find the RFC and full discussion here.

Speaking of frontend things, we’re happy to announce that Mads Rasmussen has re-joined Umbraco HQ and will be working on the frontend team along with Niels Lyngsø and Julia Gruszczynska. They’ll be working on lifting the user experience across all our products including CMS, Cloud and the new backoffice project.

… 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.