Umbraco Product Update

Overview: 

• New Release: Deploy 3.4
• Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.6
• What’s new in Cloud?
• Add own IP to whitelist
• Disabling Support for TLS 1.0 and .1.1
• New Features for Umbraco Heartcore 
• Updates to the Roadmap
• New RFC for .NET Core Install Process
• New Community Initiative

New Release: Umbraco Deploy 3.4

Last Tuesday, February 25th, we released a new minor version of Deploy on Umbraco Cloud with a new feature and a couple of bug fixes to boot.

Ignore Member Groups

With this version, you will be able to ignore handling Member Groups if you do not wish to deploy these between your environments. This can be done by setting the exportMemberGroups attribute in DeploySettings.config to false. Really handy if you are e.g. synchronizing member groups from an external source such as Active Directory. It also means the member groups will not be serialized to file and stored in source control.

Aside from the new feature we have improved the error messaging in quite a few places and addressed issues relating to content transfers with Nested Content and Content/Media pickers in Macros used in the Rich Text Editor. 

Upcoming Release: Umbraco Deploy 3.4.1

Unfortunately, the last issue still fails in some cases - This has been addressed as well and we will be releasing a patch (Deploy 3.4.1) next Tuesday, March 10th. All Cloud sites running Deploy 3.4 will be automatically upgraded and new projects will come with the latest version.

Upcoming Release: Umbraco 8.6

Next week you can also look forward to a brand new minor version of Umbraco CMS, Umbraco 8.6. A release candidate has been out for a couple weeks and we think it’s ready for the final release. This version is packed full of great new features and a lot of tweaks, updates and fixes.

You can look forward to the ability to see where a Media Item is used (Media Tracking), adding custom validation messages to properties, updated UX for the Media Picker, new Preview UI and a whole lot more. See this previous Product Update for a little more info and the download page for the full list of features and fixes and you can download the release candidate if you want to give it a spin. The release will, as always, be accompanied by a blog post where I dive into the specifics.

We’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the release and helped to test the release candidate. High 5 You Rock 🙌 

What’s new in Umbraco Cloud

Over in Umbraco Cloud land we’ve also been busy whipping up some new features.

Add own IP to whitelist

We added a little quality of life improvement to the Public Access page. This is where you can control whether an environment should be publicly accessible or locked down behind basic authentication (meaning you have to enter your credentials when accessing the site). When you are working in an environment that is locked down it can be annoying to constantly have to authenticate which is why you can whitelist an IP address (or a range of IPs) and now you can easily add the IP address of your machine by simply clicking a button. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, you’re notified that your IP address is not whitelisted on the selected environment along with a link to add it automatically.

Disabling support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on Umbraco Cloud

We are disabling support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 as they are out-of-date protocols that don’t support many newer - and more secure - cryptographic algorithms.

Running the older TLS protocol means that sites won’t be validated as “secure” by the major browser providers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox or might get degraded security ratings on many online security portals.

This is a security update that will not just increase your site’s security by making sure your data is encrypted following the latest standards; it will also ensure that your site will be recognized as a secure site by browser provider and security portals, as it will be running the industries’ leading standards.

See the scheduled maintenance notification on status.umbraco.io for a full description and timing. 

New features for Umbraco Heartcore

Our headless offering on Cloud is also getting a couple of nice additions. 

Member Authentication

You’ll now be able to use the Umbraco built-in Member functionality to control public access for content based on member authentication; i.e. add login and authentication for specific pages. The service API has also been updated to support setting, changing and resetting passwords for members.

Multilingual variant support

We’ve also added URLs for other languages to the content API, so now you’ll see a _urls attribute on the content object if you have a multilingual setup using variants.

So if you’re working on or planning to start a new Heartcore project, there are some extra tools available. We’re targeting Tuesday, March 10th, for the release.

If you want to check out Heartcore, you can find a whole lot more info about Umbraco Heartcore on the product page.

Updates to the Roadmap

After the introduction of no less than 4 new items to the Product Roadmap in the last product update, things are a little quieter this time around. No new items or movement but there is a new RFC for the .NET Core project.

New Request for Comments (RFC): Install Process for .NET Core

We’d love to get some feedback on how to handle the installation process for Umbraco when it runs on .Net Core, so we’ve added an RFC for how to install Umbraco on .NET Core and look forward to hearing your input.

If you really want to get your hands dirty and contribute with some code, we’ve also got up-for-grabs issues ready to be picked up over on Github, and the Unicore team is ready to help out if there are questions. Bjarke, who is the team steward and lead on the .NET Core project is presenting Umbraco Spark tomorrow where he’ll give a status on the project so far. 

New Community Initiative 

Before I leave you to it I would like to give a shout out, a high 5 you rock and some kudos to Umbraco MVP, Nathan Woulfe for taking the first small steps towards improving the architecture of the Umbraco office by making it less framework dependent. It all started with an issue on Github and a tweet.

And what a response, it’s cool to see how many people are passionate about this and want to help out. Nathan has started organizing the work in a Trello board so if you’re interested, give it a look and join in. The A11Y team (Accessibility team) has had phenomenal success with this approach over the last year or so, doing a massive job to improve accessibility in the backoffice and obviously also showed the way for how to organize a community effort.

So again, massive high 5 to Nathan and everyone else joining in 🙌 

That’s it for this update…

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, contribute to the RFCs and if you want to get personal, you can find me on Twitter (@hemraker).

… Until next time.