Umbraco Product Update - June 22nd, 2021

Overview: 

• New release: Umbraco 9 Beta 4
• New release: Umbraco Forms 8.7.4
• Upcoming release: Umbraco 8.14.1
• We’ve all got issues…
• Discussing tabs in the backoffice
• New migration documentation available
• Updates to the roadmap
• Did you miss out on Codegarden?

New release: Umbraco 9 beta 4

🎉 It’s release day - Another beta version of Umbraco 9 is out and brings several fixes to bugs reported since the last beta. No less than 21 issues have been addressed in this fourth beta and we’re getting really close to the release candidate, just a few more weeks and it should be out. We hope you’ll give beta 4 a spin and report if there are any issues, so we can get it fixed and have a solid RC release.

As mentioned in the last Product Update, Umbraco Forms 9 is also out in beta, so you can now use Forms with Umbraco 9. The last big tasks that need to be done before the RC is Umbraco Deploy 9, which is coming along nicely and package migrations, for installing content/media along with packages. If you missed it, packages will be handled exclusively via NuGet in Umbraco 9 and that’s why package migrations are being introduced.

If you want to try out Umbraco 9, you can find all the details on how to install it in the Umbraco 9/.Net Core documentation.

Released: Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 

New release: Umbraco Forms 8.7.4

A new patch for Umbraco Forms was released on Tuesday, June 15th, addressing some issues with reCaptcha v3 and other minor bugs. All Umbraco Cloud sites running Forms 8.7+ were automatically updated last Tuesday. You can see the full list of fixes in the release notes and get the latest version on the download page.  

Upcoming release: Umbraco 8.14.1

A patch for Umbraco CMS dealing with a regression issue from Umbraco 8.14 where the new Media Type aliases were clashing with common type names. This effectively reserves this alias and would not allow you to create custom types with e.g. the alias article. 

There has also been quite a big discussion around the obsoletion policy for Media Picker v2 and this has resulted in the picker being un-obsoleted, so it can be used easily and without confusion going forward. Thanks for all the feedback 🙏

Finally, support for SVG icons has been added in a lot of places in the backoffice. 

Not bad at all for a patch release 🙂 You can see the full list of fixes in the release notes.

Target release date: Tuesday, June 29th, 2021

We’ve all got issues…

It’s how we deal with them that matters 😉 We’re constantly trying to improve the way we handle (software) issues and recently quite a few new initiatives have been introduced on the issue tracker.

New templates for creating issues and feature requests are now available and we’ve expanded the role of the friendly bot to help everyone get a good start.We’ve also started using Github discussions to help us be more open and the community to provide feedback. Emma Burstow, developer advocate at Umbraco HQ, takes you through the new things and explains how they can help make Umbraco even better. See the blog post on Polishing up Github workflows for all the details. 

Discussing tabs in the backoffice

Speaking of Github discussions… We’ve opened up a discussion around the (re)introduction of tabs in the backoffice. Tabs are meant to help organise properties and create good editing workflows. We showed progress on the implementation in the last product update and we’d love to get some more feedback on exactly how this should work to make it the best possible experience. 

Watch in fullscreen

We’re thankful for all the great points and ideas that have been raised already 🙏 So head over to Github, join the conversation and help make this a great feature.

New documentation for Umbraco Cloud migration

You now have one place to go if you want to know what you need (or don’t need) to do before your Umbraco Cloud project(s) are migrated to the new and improved infrastructure. It contains all the requirements as well as what to be aware of before, during and after the migration.

Projects are being scheduled and migrated as we speak and we’re really happy with the progress. If you’re still waiting to be migrated, don’t worry, we’re doing it in batches over the coming months so it might be a little while before everyone is scheduled. Also, make sure to check if your projects fulfil the requirements and you’ll be notified directly when a project is scheduled for migration. 

See the new migration documentation page for all the details. We’ll update it if any new information surfaces.

Updates to the Roadmap

There’s been some movement on the product roadmap since last time, let’s take a look:

New in "Next"

With the new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure in place and migrations well underway, we can start looking at the new features that will be added later in the year. We are currently planning to make Umbraco Cloud hosting in the US available and the item for this work has been moved to “Next” on the Product roadmap. It’s exciting to be able to talk about new features in general and new regional hosting capabilities specifically - as soon as we have more details on how this will work (and when), we’ll share it 😀 

"New" in "Later"

We‘re currently focusing on the migration of Umbraco Cloud projects to the new infrastructure, making the above-mentioned regional hosting capabilities a reality and also continuously improving the new subscription management on Umbraco Cloud. To reflect current priorities we’ve moved the items for adding additional themes and multilingual support from “Next” to “Later”.

Did you miss out on Codegarden?

A couple of weeks back we held the official Umbraco conference and it was a great success with more than 2300 attendees over 3 days. It was all virtual this year and all the sessions have been recorded. So if you missed some or all of the talks, don’t worry, we’ll be uploading them over the next few weeks.

Make sure to subscribe to the Umbraco HQ YouTube channel, the opening keynote and first section of talks has already been uploaded to the Codegarden 2021 playlist.

… 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.