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Umbraco Product Update - May 12th, 2021

Get yourself updated on the latest product development

Rune Strand
Written by Rune Strand

Two weeks have flown by and WOW, there’re a lot of great things to catch up on! The Umbraco 9 beta release is out 🎉, there’s a new update on the Umbraco Cloud platform migration and, of course, also new stuff to look forward to very soon. Get yourself updated on everything with this product run-down: 

Overview:

Upcoming release: Umbraco 8.14 Release Candidate

We’re going to start with the upcoming releases this time and first up: the next minor release of Umbraco CMS.  

Based on our regular release cadence, the final release for Umbraco 8.14 is expected to be June 3rd, 2021. But before this release, you can, as always, look forward to a Release Candidate where you’ll get to test and see what this new minor release includes. 

The RC is expected to be released Thursday next week, May 20th, so make sure to check the Umbraco blog if you want to know more about what Umbraco 8.14 includes and how you can help test it. 

If you can’t wait, you can always go and see what the release includes on the Umbraco 8.14 download page.

Upcoming releases: Forms and Deploy on Umbraco 9

Now that Umbraco 9 beta is out, we are hard at work migrating our own packages to .NET 5. 

Umbraco Forms is a dependency for our other packages, so we have started with that one, and we are getting close to a beta release of Forms for Umbraco 9. Look out for an announcement in the coming weeks or go play with the nightlies today already.

As for Umbraco Deploy, the migration has started and this week we are onboarding a new employee to accelerate this (and Forms) going forward - you will get to meet Ronald in an upcoming blog post soon. We plan to have a beta of Deploy for Umbraco 9 available around Codegarden i.e. beginning of June (remember to register for Codegarden for free if you haven’t already). 

The above is the plan for Umbraco HQ-owned packages - but your Umbraco project most likely also depends on other packages. We’re happy to share that the feedback we have gotten from external package developers is really positive, and we are confident that many of the popular packages for Umbraco 8 will be ready for Umbraco 9 before the release or soon after. If you rely on a specific community package for your project, we encourage you to reach out to the maintainer and offer your help in the migration to Umbraco 9.

Inspiration for package developers

And if you are a package developer looking to make the updates necessary for V9, there are a few community and HQ resources available to help. Kevin Jump, Lee Kelleher, Warren Buckley, Andy Butland have been “showing their working” in their efforts to migrate their open-source packages:

  • Browse Kevin’s code samples here.
  • Follow Lee’s progress here.
  • Watch Warren’s videos here.
  • Read Andy’s blog posts here.

New release: Umbraco Forms 8.7.2 

Since the last Product Update, Umbraco Forms 8.7.1 was released on April 27th, and yesterday, May 11th, another patch release for Forms was released: 8.7.2. 

This new release checks off 15 issues - find all the details in the Forms release notes. 

Upcoming Forms release: 8.7.3: Yes, there's already a new one planned. This one is scheduled for next week, May 18th, and includes 8 fixes. 

New release: Umbraco 9 beta

There was excitement on Twitter. There were party hats. And there was a live stream with eager attendees. 

On April 28th we celebrated the release of the first beta version of Umbraco version 9 AKA Umbraco on .NET 5/ASP. NET Core 🎉

The beta version is a huge milestone as it is feature-complete which means that all features and functionality available in Umbraco 8.13 (and even some of the planned features for 8.14 as of today’s beta 2 release) are available in Umbraco 9 and migrated to the latest versions of Microsoft’s tech stack - and now ready for you to try out!

To give an overview of this release, we did a live stream where I interviewed Bjarke Berg, lead developer for the Unicore project, and CMS Program manager, Filip Bech-Larsen. You can watch the live stream below or go to the Umbraco 9 beta release blog post for all the details. 


Beta 2 out today!

Like the alpha release, the beta consists of a series of releases as we fix things along the way. And we’re proud to announce that the second beta is out today. 

This beta release contains several small bug fixes and eliminated pain points, reported and highlighted by the community.

The release contains a few breaking changes that are all highlighted in the documentation and on GitHub. A few of the most interesting changes are:

  • `HideTopLevelNodeFromPath` default value changed to to `true`
  • All notifications moved to the same namespace to make them easily discoverable
  • The order of view location changes, so `/Views` is the first to search.
  • Fix for Modelsbuilder when having inherited document types
  • Added missing extension methods for `GetCropUrl`.

The full list is available on GitHub.

Join the Umbraco 9 learn-a-thons  

With the release of Umbraco 9 getting closer and closer, you might wonder what has changed and why? In the beta release blog post you will find some of the answers but there are areas where you can probably benefit from diving a bit deeper with help from others. In order to facilitate this, we have planned a row of Umbraco 9 learn-a-thons in May, each with a focus on a different topic. These are hosted by Carole Logan, Microsoft and Umbraco MVP, and Emma Burstow, developer advocate at Umbraco HQ. 

There are still 3 lean-a-thons left for you to join - the next one is already today at 7:30 PM CEST. 

Sign up for the learn-a-thons now

Umbraco 9 documentation 

The Umbraco documentation team is working hard to get documentation up to speed with the upcoming major release. A lot of documentation has already been updated but as always, we encourage you to help out! Especially if you’re testing out the beta anyway 😉

And if you're wondering how to add a new version of an existing article in order to update it to Umbraco 9 - 👈 there's a new helpful guide for this (and video)!

And if you want an overview of what's already been documented and where help is needed - check out the "Umbraco 9 help needed" issue tracker. 

What happens to feature development and contributions to Umbraco 8 after the release of Umbraco 9? 

There is a plan for this. In short, we’ll: 

  • (continue to) merge version 8 into version 9 until the final release (ETA Q3 2021) 
  • not backport new features from version 9 to version 8 
  • ship two minor versions of Umbraco 8 after the release of Umbraco 9. 

To get all the details and the reasoning behind this plan, read the “What happens to Umbraco 8 after 9” blog post. 

What’s new in Umbraco Cloud ⛅️

Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure

The migration to a new and improved Umbraco Cloud infrastructure is well on its way. The first internal projects have been moved successfully and we’re now working closely with select partners on the first round of migrations. 

In the latest status blog post, published on April 29th, you can get yourself updated on the next steps for migration and also get a clear overview of what this migration actually involves, so you know exactly what’s going to happen behind the scenes when we perform the migration (spoiler alert: no downtime).

Get yourself updated on the latest status right here.  

New in the Cloud portal: Add a name to your firewall rule

Managing your firewall rules on your Umbraco Cloud projects has now become easier. You can now add a name when you add your IP in the Umbraco Cloud portal. The name will then stick to your firewall rule in the overview and you will never forget which IP belongs to who again 😉 Side note: Your older firewall rules will not have a name, to add one, just delete the IP and add it again with your desired name.

As an Admin, you find this new option under your project in the "Settings" dropdown under the "Connection details" option. 

Introducing the Product Knowledge Center

What’s the release cadence again? For how long will Umbraco 8 be supported? And how do Umbraco handle community contributions?

This information has now been gathered in one place on Umbraco.com, so you don’t have to search around on the website or in previous blog posts to find the answers  - say hello to the Knowledge Center. 

On this page you can currently find information on:

  • Product Roadmap
  • Release cadence, Long-term support and End-of-life 
  • Open-source collaboration

The Knowledge Center will continue to develop and we plan to add more product-related content to this page within the coming months. You’re welcome to send us feedback and suggestions for the new section on product@umbraco.com. 

Join UMBRAAD!

To finish this long and exciting Product Update off, I want to encourage you to sign up for the upcoming Umbraco Accessibility Awareness Day 2021 on May 20th. 

UMBRAAD Umbraco Accessibility Day

This is a first-ever event created by the fantastic Umbraco Accessibility team, Umbraco A11Y.  UMBRAAD is a half-day of talks and discussion on Umbraco-related accessibility, as part of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). Learn more and sign up for the free event

And if you’re really into the Accessibility topic, why not join the Funka “Authoring tools with built-in accessibility!” event on May 19th where Umbraco will join the panel discussion on “The way forward”. 

…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.