Umbraco Product Update

Overview: 

• New Release: Umbraco 8.2
• Umbraco Cloud News 
• New Release: Deploy 3.1.5
• Information about end-of-life for Umbraco 7 added to the portal
• Umbraco 8.3 will be a Hacktoberfest celebration
• Updates to the Roadmap
• Updates on RFCs
• Data Type and Media Overview/Tracking

New Release: Umbraco 8.2

With Umbraco 8.2 you get some cool enhancements to the Rich Text Editor such as drag and drop support for images and improved handling of embedded items. These features aim to make it easier and faster to work with the rich text editors whether you’re using it as a single property or in Grid Layouts. 

Umbraco 8.2 also comes with faster publishing, especially for large sets of content, and improved speed and stability when creating and updating Document and Data types. 

You’ll also see a lot of fantastic improvements made by the Umbraco community including improved validation and another round of helpful accessibility improvements for the backoffice.

For the full story and all the details on how to get your hands on it, see the Umbraco 8.2 release blog post.

Umbraco Cloud News

New Release: Umbraco Deploy 3.1.5

Yesterday, October 22nd, Umbraco Cloud sites received a patch version of Umbraco Deploy. This release improves the way local links (i.e. references to content and images in a Rich Text Editor) are handled. There were some cases where the new local link format, introduced in Umbraco 8.1, wasn’t handled correctly. This has now been addressed in Deploy 3.1.5. We have also fixed an issue related to locating images used in the Rich Text Editor, ensuring the images you use will now get deployed correctly along with your content.

This new version of Deploy is part of all new Umbraco Cloud sites and existing sites running Umbraco 8.1+ have been upgraded automatically.

Information about end-of-life for Umbraco 7 added to the portal

You can now find detailed information on support and end-of-life for Umbraco 7 when you create a new Cloud project.

I’ve mentioned these deadlines in a previous Product Update, but just to make sure no one is left behind, here are the details again:

• We will end the option for creating new Cloud projects based on version 7 by December 31st, 2019.
  
  
• If you have Baselines projects based on Umbraco 7 you will be able to create Child projects in Umbraco 7 for these until February 28th 2021.
  
  
• We will continue to provide security updates for version 7 until September 23rd, 2023.

Umbraco 8.3 will be a Hacktoberfest celebration

Umbraco is once again part of the Hacktoberfest and we’re really impressed to see the high level of participation. There has been a lot of contributions to both Umbraco CMS and the documentation. Everyone participating help makes both Umbraco and the documentation better - and they will, of course, be rewarded with some limited edition Umbraco swag. There’s a week left of October so you can still join in the fun. If in doubt, you can see the details for participation in the Hacktoberfest blog post.

For the Umbraco Documentation, more than 100 PRs have been created in October alone! You can get the full scoop in the latest Docs Diary blog post by Sofie.

And for Umbraco CMS we’ve already received 10% more PRs than last year. 

Creating pull requests is one thing, the real prize is when a PR is accepted and ultimately released. The PR team is working hard at keeping up with all the contributions and have accepted 75 PRs so far and still counting. We’ve decided to get all these great additions released as soon as possible, so we’re preparing an 8.3 release to celebrate the end of Hacktoberfest - no release date yet, but I’ll keep you posted once Hacktoberfest is over. 

This means that the announced inclusion of Models Builder features to the core will be pushed to Umbraco 8.4 instead. 

Updates to the Roadmap

No items have been moved around or added to the Roadmap within the previous two weeks - but things are in progress:  

Updates to RFCs

We’ve closed and accepted the second RFC (Request For Comments) for Umbraco on .NET Core. This one detailed the proposed project structure and initial approach to moving from .NET Framework to .NET Core. We’d like to thank everyone who participated in the RFC with comments and feedback. High Five You Rock 🙌

The final document has been updated based on the feedback and you can find it here: Project Structure RFC.

Data Type and Media Overview/Tracking

In the last Product Update I mentioned this new item on the Roadmap which has been added to the “Now” stage, but what is Data Type Overview and Tracking actually? 

The reason for tracking Data Types is to provide a better experience when you are trying to get an overview of what is being used where and warn you if you’re trying to delete a Data Type that is being used on a Document Type (Works for Media and Members as well). 

The overview will be available when you select a Data Type in the Data Type tree.

 

You’ll notice we’ve added a References app in the top right corner and this will give you a nice overview of all the Types that use a specific Data Type and what the name of the property is. It is also possible to go directly to the type from the overview.

Aside from the hopefully obvious benefits of tracking Data Types, this feature has allowed us to get a head start on the UI/UX work for Media Tracking, which requires a lot more work in order to enable the tracking and surface where a Media item are referenced. Once the API layer for Media tracking is ready we will be able to re-use the UI from Data Type tracking.

The images above are not just mock-ups - I’m delighted to say that the Data Type Overview/Tracking has been reviewed and we’re looking to add it as part of the Umbraco 8.3 release. 

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 request, 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.