Umbraco Product Update - July 22nd, 2021

Overview: 

• New release: Umbraco 9 release candidate
• New release: Umbraco 8.15
• Improved usage metrics on Umbraco Cloud
• Security advisory and patches for Umbraco Forms 4+ and Contour 3
• Product Roadmap updates
• More Codegarden 2021 videos

New release: Umbraco 9 release candidate

Umbraco 9 is now feature complete, all official packages and a number of community packages are available and more on the way.

The release candidate includes: 

• The new package format (NuGet)
• Package migrations to help you control what is configured and updated when installing a package
• Content can now be exported to an XML document and included in package migrations
• All the benefits of developing and hosting that comes with .NET 5/ASP .NET Core framework
• All the features that make Umbraco the friendly CMS 

You can get the full rundown of what’s new in the release candidate as well as an extensive Q&A section in the launch live stream:

Read the release blog post for all the details and how to get started with Umbraco 9.

New release: Umbraco 8.15

A new minor version of Umbraco CMS is out and it packs quite a punch 🥊 Umbraco 8.15 has a bunch performance enhancements, memory optimisation and more efficient database queries that’ll help make Umbraco faster and consume less resources. All these improvements were gathered under the Reduced Footprint item on the product Roadmap and have now been moved to the Roadmap History page.

There are also some big changes to the new Media Picker (introduced in Umbraco 8.14), based on community feedback. These help existing Umbraco 8 installations by making it easier to switch to the new Media picker. Prior to 8.15, you had to manually migrate data in existing properties, now, you can simply switch to the new Media picker and your data will be automatically migrated.

You also find deep-linking to dashboards, the ability to add a default user when using Unattended Installs and more improvements and bugfixes.

You can find all the details and how to get your hands on it in the Umbraco 8.15 release blog post.

Improved usage metrics on Umbraco Cloud

The ‘Usage’ page on your Umbraco Cloud, Uno and Heartcore projects has been updated with clearer indication of when a project is nearing or exceeding usage limits for a given plan.

This page shows the amount of Content Nodes, custom domains, Media storage and bandwidth currently in use on the project. This small UX update provides a better overview using progress bars and badges to clearly indicate if plan limits are close to being, or has been, exceeded. You can access the Usage page for an Umbraco Cloud project in the Settings drop-down.

Security advisory and patches for Umbraco Forms 4+ and Contour 3

As announced on the blog last week, on July 15th, a critical security issue has been identified in Umbraco Forms 4+, including all versions of Umbraco Forms 4, 6, 7, 8, and Contour 3.

This week, we have released a fix and we highly advise you to upgrade Umbraco Forms to a patched version in your Umbraco sites/projects. Since publishing the initial information last week we have also identified that the issue partially exists in Contour (the predecessor to Umbraco Forms) and a patch is now available to help address this.

The patches have been released, applied on Umbraco Cloud and are ready for use for everyone else. If you haven’t done so, we highly recommend that you make time to upgrade to a patched version on your site(s) running Umbraco Forms.

Instructions on patch availability and how to implement the fix is available in the security advisory blog post.

A full description of the issue will be made available in 4 weeks in order to give you, and everyone else, time to implement the patch.

Updates to the Roadmap 

A few updates to the Product Roadmap. This time around a bunch of items are done and moved to the Roadmap History page:

Umbraco 9, it’s getting closer 🚀

With the release of Umbraco 9 Release Candidate the item for public release has been moved to now and the Release Candidate to the Roadmap History page.

New projects created on the new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure

We're happy to report that all new projects and trials created on Umbraco Cloud are now running on the new infrastructure 🎉The item has been moved to the Roadmap History page.

If you have existing projects on Umbraco Cloud be aware there are some minimum requirements before these can be migrated to the new infrastructure. You can find the details in the migration documentation and read about the journey to the new Cloud on the blog.

Reduced footprint for Umbraco CMS

With Umbraco 8.15, months of hard work has come to fruition, with some impressive and important performance updates that benefits both Umbraco 8 and Umbraco 9. Released on Thursday, July 15th, 2021 and the item has been moved to the Roadmap History page.

Did you miss out on Codegarden?

Back in June we held the official Umbraco conference and it was a great success with more than 2300 attendees over 3 days. We're working hard at uploading the 60+ (!) sessions, there's already plenty go through AND look forward to.

Keep an eye on the Codegarden 2021 YouTube playlist and subscribe to the channel if you don't want to miss when new talks are publishe. The first batch of the week contained:

• Campaign Builder with Umbraco Content Apps by Luke Fribbens
  
• Yes, Umbraco is an Enterprise Platform by Leon de Wildt, Smart Creative at Perplex Digital
  
• Storefront Accelerator by Sofie Hedman, E-commerce Project Manager and Business Developer at Nexer
  
• Building a Sustainable SMB MarTech OS Using Umbraco by Paul Sterling, CTO at Mold Inspection Sciences
  
• Unconference Q&A session with the speakers hosted by Andy Butland

… 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.