Umbraco

Umbraco Product Update - March 12th, 2021

The latest product news

Rune Strand
Written by Rune Strand

It’s an exciting time in the Umbraco world. We’ve just release Umbraco 8.12 this week and in the coming weeks you can look forward to even more great releases for Cloud, Umbraco Deploy on premises, Umbraco Forms and then there’s all the other news and updates - Let’s get to it 🎉

Overview: 

  • New release: Umbraco 8.12
  • Upcoming release: Forms 8.7
  • Upcoming release: Umbraco Deploy on-premises
  • Upcoming release(s): Patches for Umbraco CMS, Forms and Deploy
  • .NET Core BETA postponed
  • New Request for Comments (RFC): UI Component Library
  • Upcoming release: Improved subscription management for Umbraco Cloud, Heartcore and Uno
  • New roadmap item: Tabs

New release: Umbraco 8.12

More than 40 features, improvements and fixes are in this brand new release of Umbraco CMS. Unattended Upgrades, Improved Document Type menu, infinite editing in listviews, performance enhancements are just some of the things included.


See the Umbraco 8.12 release blog post for all the details or watch the video run-down of the features... or both 😉

Released on March 11th, 2021 

Upcoming release: Umbraco Forms 8.7

A new minor release for Umbraco Forms is currently brewing and it’s a very exciting release. There are many new features, UI tweaks and bug fixes to look forward to. 

In fact, it’s so great that we think it warrants a release candidate. So you can look forward to testing out the new minor which includes a new ReCaptcha3 field, configuration for single/multiple file upload, editing pre-values, copy form fields and groups, faster form rendering and A LOT more! 

We’ll publish a blog post along with the release candidate so you know exactly what’s new and what to test. We’re aiming to get the release candidate out on Tuesday, March 23rd.

Target release date: April 6th, 2021 

Upcoming release: Umbraco Deploy on-premises 

We’re happy to announce that we have a release date for Umbraco Deploy for on-premises setups: March 25th 2021.
This is the deployment engine for Umbraco, developed by HQ, that lets you deploy schema and configuration and transfer content between environments. Deploy on-premises is especially designed for enterprise setups and setups that require multiple environments and is fully integratable with CI/CD setups. 

After the last round of testing and feedback we have worked on getting the last bits ready for the final release. You’ll get all the details in the release blog post, documentation and more, all of which should be available very, very soon.

Target release date: March 25th, 2021

Upcoming release(s): Patches for Umbraco CMS, Forms and Deploy

As mentioned in the latest status blog post for the new infrastructure on Umbraco Cloud we are on track with the project and are currently working on migration plans and testing. Part of the preparation is small tweaks to Umbraco CMS as well as Forms and Deploy to ensure they are optimised for the new infrastructure (the CMS patches also contain a bug fix, see the release notes below for more information). This means there will be a number of patches rolled out next Tuesday:

The patches will be rolled out automatically for all eligible Umbraco Cloud projects, see the Cloud status page for more details.

.NET Core beta release postponed

Our developers and the Unicore community team have been working hard getting ready for the beta release of Umbraco on .NET Core. Unfortunately, there are a few things that are still missing and the decision has been made to postpone the beta release for a month.

We know that many of you (especially package developers) are looking forward to the beta release and so are we! It’s important for us to ship a beta version that’s ready for proper testing - that’s why, together with the Unicore Team, we have found it necessary to postpone the beta release as more work is needed on certain functionality before it’s ready for public testing. 

We’re still on track for the Release Candidate (ETA around Codegarden) and the final release (ETA Q3), as functionality specific to these releases have already started and we are also getting more hands on deck in the coming months.

If you are a package developer and are looking forward to trying out the beta we highly recommend signing up for our Package Newsletter. Here you’ll get updates on new and ongoing initiatives, product heads-up and the latest news regarding package development from Umbraco HQ and the Package community team.

Target (beta) release: End of April, 2021

New Request for Comments (RFC): UI Component Library

A new RFC was published last week. It’s next step detailed in the Future-proofing the Umbraco backoffice RFC and revolves around the first part of the project which is building a UI Component Library that will serve as building blocks for BackOffice but also as documentation, design guide and help make all Umbraco products more consistent.

It’s quite a detailed read on how we propose to structure and develop the UI Component Library but we hope you’ll give it a go and join the exciting discussion on the RFC.

You can see an introduction to the library and how it works here:


In the RFC you’ll find additional videos as well as a link to the demo repository if you want to try it out for yourself. If you’re interested in frontend development and/or package development for Umbraco we’d love to get your input. You can read the full RFC here and join the discussion here.

Niels Lyngsø and Julia Gruszczynska, from the Umbraco HQ frontend team, are joining our friends on UmbraCoffee today, March 12th, for a conversation on the UI Component Library. You can watch it live at 12.30 CET!

 

Upcoming release: Improved subscription management for Umbraco Cloud, Heartcore and Uno

Next month (April, 2021) we’ll be rolling out a new way of handling subscription management on Umbraco Cloud. This will help create a more consistent and unified experience and is fully integrated with the single sign-on feature we’ve recently released. It will enable you to create and manage your subscriptions directly in the portal. We’ll initially make it available for new users on Umbraco Cloud and subsequently migrate existing clients to the new and improved subscription management. 

Target release: April 2021

New roadmap item: Tabs for Umbraco CMS

Tabs will be (re-)introduced to help you organise your Umbraco installations and make the backoffice an even friendlier place to work for developers and editors alike. We have received a lot of feedback since property groups were introduced with Umbraco 8 and this has helped guide the solution that is being worked on. 

Tabs will be an optional tool to organise properties, you can still continue to use property groups as you’re used to in Umbraco 8. We’ll have more information about this in coming product updates and release communication.

Tabs for the backoffice has been added as an item on the product roadmap in “Next”, with Q2, 2021, as the target release window. 

… 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.