Overview:
- New release: Umbraco on .NET Core alpha 4
- New release: Umbraco Deploy for on-premises setups
- Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure
- New releases: Patches for Umbraco CMS, Deploy and Forms
- Upcoming release: Umbraco Forms 8.7
- Upcoming release: Subscription management on Umbraco Cloud
- Future-proofing the Umbraco backoffice
New release: Umbraco on .NET Core alpha 4
In the last product update, we announced the decision to postpone the beta release of Umbraco on .NET Core for one month. So there’s something to look forward to at the end of April… It doesn’t mean we aren’t on track for a public release in Q3 2021, there were simply some parts that needed more work before we could comfortably call this a beta release.
While not having an impact on the final public release date is great, there are quite a few package developers that were looking to get started migrating their packages to the next major version of Umbraco. This was one of the goals of the beta release and the parts that were required to be ready for package development has been done, making it possible (and sensible) to wrap this up in another alpha release.
See the alpha 4 release blog post for all the details and features of this release. We look forward to getting your feedback, both on Umbraco on .NET Core and the package migration/development experience - If you have any questions for the Unicore team about the project you get the chance to ask them directly and get the answers in the next Community Office Hours QA session. It will be hosted by Bjarke (lead developer on the project) and the Unicore community team. You see what questions have already been asked and add your own, make sure to submit them before the live stream on Wednesday, April 7, 2021.
Released on March 24th, 2021
PS.: If you’re giving the new alpha a spin and looking for some help with configuration check out this video where Warren, developer advocate and resident hacker at Umbraco HQ, shows you some nice tips for configuring your .NET Core Umbraco site:
New release: Umbraco Deploy for on-premise setups
Umbraco Deploy is now available for on-premises installations. It is the deployment engine used on Umbraco Cloud and we’re happy to be able to offer the same great functionality for enterprise setups that exist outside of Umbraco Cloud.
You get the tried and tested features for deploying and synchronising your Umbraco configuration as well as built-in support for transferring and restoring content between environments. The on-premises version of Umbraco Deploy is fully integrable with CI/CD pipelines and also provides the ability to manually trigger import/export of schema.
Umbraco Deploy is developed by HQ and has full support for Umbraco Forms as well as a wide range of popular packages.
See the Umbraco Deploy on-premises release blog post for more details..
Released March 25th, 2021
Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure
The new infrastructure for Umbraco Cloud is ready and we’ve started the migration process for the first internal sites. This is a big milestone for us and we’re really excited to let the first clients loose on the new and improved platform very soon. You can get details on the progress in the latest status blog post.
As you can see in the blog post there are some prerequisites for projects to be ready for the new infrastructure. It’s been great to see so many clients already updating their DNS settings and ensuring they’re on an eligible version of Umbraco. We’re grateful for the work you’ve put in and look forward to facilitating the move to a new and improved infrastructure.
New releases: Patches for Umbraco CMS, Deploy and Forms
Part of getting ready for the Umbraco Cloud infrastructure on our end has been tweaking a coupling of minor things in both the CMS, Umbraco Forms and Umbraco Deploy. Along with a few other fixes, this has resulted in a bunch of patches across all our products that has been made available this week:
- Umbraco CMS 8.6+
- Umbraco Forms 8.1+
- 8.1.5
- 8.2.2
- 8.3.3
- 8.4.3
- Umbraco Deploy
- 2.0.17
- 2.1.2
- 4.0.5
Upcoming release: Umbraco Forms 8.7
A new minor for Umbraco Forms is on its way and it’s packed with new features and improvements. You get support for reCAPTCHA v3, helping you to manage abusive traffic and it has less impact on the website visitors. You’ll also find enhanced copy/paste abilities, a new workflow type and much more. Importantly there is also an update to the database schema that improves data integrity and performance.
Best of all: You can try it out today 🎉 As this is a sizable release with new functionality and updates to the database schema, we have published a release candidate so you can test out Forms 8.7. We’ve already gotten good feedback - Keep it coming 😊
For more details see the Umbraco Forms 8.7 release candidate blog post.
Target release date: April 6th. 2021
Upcoming release: Subscription management on Umbraco Cloud
We’ve been working on a new subscription management service for all our Umbraco Cloud products for quite some time and are very excited to launch this very soon. With the new subscription management, all your Umbraco Cloud subscriptions are managed, renewed and updated directly in the portal. It will support workflows for agencies/organisations, multiple payment methods and more.
It will be made available for new users first (ie. taking a trial for Cloud, Uno or Heartcore) and we’ll then make it available for existing users as well but more on that when we have exact timings.
Target release date for new users is April 7th, 2021
Future-proofing the Umbraco backoffice
We’ve added a final comment period to the RFC for a UI Component library. This is the first part detailed in the Future-proofing the Umbraco backoffice RFC and will serve as building blocks for Umbraco’s backoffice but also as documentation and help make all Umbraco products more consistent and accessible. We’re aiming to close (and accept) the RFC on April 8th, so there’s still time to add your input. It’s been a great discussion so far and we’ve received much valuable feedback that will help shape the project going forward. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed so far - HIGH FIVE YOU ROCK 🙌
If you want an overview of the UI Component Library, catch this episode of Umbraco where Niels Lyngsø and Julia Gruszczynska, from the Umbraco HQ frontend team, talk to Callumb and Marcin about the project.
Speaking of going forward… Within the next month, we will be announcing how we’ll be tackling part 2 of the project (Defining a new backoffice API). We’re looking to involve contributors, frontender- and package developers to provide feedback and help map the current state of backoffice API usage as well as define what will be needed going forward. So keep an eye on the blog for more information on this soon!
… 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.
