- Upcoming release: UUI Library
- Upcoming releases: Umbraco Forms and Deploy minors
- Shaping up Umbraco 8.18
- RFC: Define backoffice extension API
- Hacktoberfest Highlights
Upcoming release: Umbraco UI Library
The Umbraco UI Library is a component library for building out an Umbraco user interface and will serve as the building blocks for Umbraco backoffice in the future. This is the first phase of Future-proofing Umbraco’s backoffice. Next week you can find a blog post with details on the progress, how it can be utilised and how you can contribute to it (it’s all open-source).
If you can’t wait for the blog post you can already see the components that have been published so far in the interactive documentation/style guide available right here: https://uui.umbraco.com/
Target release: Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021
Upcoming releases: Umbraco Forms and Deploy minors
Some great updates are coming to Umbraco Forms and Deploy very soon and from next week you can try them out when release candidates for Umbraco Forms 8.1/9.1 and Umbraco Deploy 4.4/9.1 are available. Both the release candidates and all features and fixes in the final releases are available for both Umbraco 8 and 9 versions.
You can look forward to transferring entire trees (Content, Media or Forms) with Umbraco Deploy as well as a bunch of improvements, optimization and bug fixes.
Umbraco Forms adds more features and tools to make your forms even better such as Page Based Conditions (for multi-page forms), added data to the Send Form Details workflow, improvements to the spreadsheet export, enhanced accessibility and much more.
So keep your eye on the blog next Tuesday for a combined RC blog post with all the details and the final release 2 weeks later.
If you’re contemplating adding Umbraco Deploy to an upcoming project, remember we’ve got a 50% discount for the rest of 2021, so now is the perfect time to get a license. All of the features and fixes will of course also be available to your Umbraco Cloud projects on the day of release.
Target release date: Tuesday, November 16th, 2021
Shaping up Umbraco 8.18
As we mentioned in previous product updates and the Umbraco 8.17 release blog post, Umbraco 8.18 will be the last minor release for Umbraco 8 and the Long-Term Support (LTS) version.
We’re blessed with a lot of great PRs for Umbraco 8, some of them has been gathering dust for a while and some are brand new as part of the ongoing Hacktoberfest 🎃 To make sure the community contributions get the love and attention they deserve, we just finished a PR workshop to triage as much as possible and will be working on giving feedback and closing/merging Umbraco 8 related PRs in the coming months. So if you’re waiting for feedback, you might have already gotten a notification or will get it in the near future. In short there be a lot of activity on the tracker 🚀
Catch all the details in the Shaping up Umbraco 8.18 blog post. We currently do not have a target release date for Umbraco 8.18, it needs some time to get ready. As soon as we have news on this, we’ll let you know and of course also prepare a release candidate so you can test it out.
And, just as a side note, all the relevant PRs for Umbraco 8 will be merged up to Umbraco 9 as well.
Request for comments: Define the backoffice extension API
A couple of weeks ago we published a new request for comments (RFC) for defining a new extension API for Umbraco’s backoffice. This will essentially be the way package authors and developers create extensions for Umbraco such as property editors, dashboards, trees, and so forth.
The RFC details the new approach with plenty of examples. It’s all very exciting and, combined with the above-mentioned UI Library, brings us closer to start implementing the new backoffice API.
We’ve already received some really good feedback and would love your input on the new approach. So head over to Github where you can find the full RFC for Defining a new Extension API and join the discussion.
Hacktoberfest highlights
In the spirit of open-source, Umbraco has once again joined Hacktoberfest. We’ve had great success (and great contributions) the past couple of years and 2021 is no different. In fact, it’s really great!
So far there are 165(!) eligible pull requests for both the Umbraco CMS and documentation repository and they’re all really high quality (thankfully no spam this year 😅). Just as exciting there are 15 first time contributors until now - HIGH FIVE you rock 🙌
There’s still time to get your contribution in and if you have questions, need some help or looking for inspiration there are a couple of events coming up you can join:
Hacktoberfest community Discord session
This afternoon Emma and Sebastiaan are hosting the last Hacktober live session on the community Discord channel at 13.00 CET.
Last week 15 people joined in chatted to Warren Buckley about TagHelpers in Umbraco 9, which resulted in creating a repository for these: https://github.com/umbraco-community/Our-Umbraco-TagHelpers
There’s room for plenty more, so don’t be shy and if you aren’t on the Discord channel, it’s a great opportunity to join in. There’s a lot of great community activity happening there (also outside of Hacktoberfest).
24hr Hacktober-thon
Following up on last year's successful Umbracothon, the wonderful cast of Candid Contributions, the Skrift team and some community stars from all over the globe have once again planned a virtual get-together for the Umbraco community. This year it’s a 24hr event, but don’t worry, you don’t have to participate the whole time. It’s to make sure there is something for everyone in all timezones ;)
You can read more about the event and sign up (form at the bottom of the post) in The 24-hour Hacktoberthon blog post.
… 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.
