Umbraco Workflow 12.1, 11.3, and 10.2 release candidates

Overview:

• What’s new in Umbraco Workflow 10.3, 11.3 and 12.1?
  • Scheduling improvements
  • Content review improvements
  • Breaking change!
  • Other updates
• How to test
• How to get your hands on the Release Candidates
• When is the public release?

As with previous releases, we’re publishing a release candidate for you to explore and evaluate. Any feedback on the new features is absolutely welcome.

These releases do come with “bonus” breaking changes which are expected to impact a minority of installations. The changes are explained in more detail below.

How to get access to the RCs and how to provide feedback are explained at the end of this post. Enough with the housekeeping, let’s have a look at what’s coming in the next Umbraco releases.

What’s new in Umbraco Workflow 10.3, 11.3 and 12.1?

Scheduling improvements

What started as a few related bugs on the Workflow issue tracker eventually converged into enough related work to warrant a minor release with a raft of improvements to content reviews and workflow scheduling.

While Workflow has always allowed scheduling publish or unpublish workflows, it was never previously possible to add both a release and expire date in a single workflow process. That changes in the RCs to allow setting a release and expire date as part of a publish workflow (unpublish workflows will still only allow setting an optional expire date).

These changes also ensure scheduling for variant workflows works correctly - it’s possible now to schedule concurrent workflows for different languages, to publish and/or unpublish with or without release and/or expire dates. If you love deep configuration, this should be right up your alley.

The `Applies to` property on the workflow configuration tab has been removed as, frankly, it didn’t make any sense. Via the Workflow settings section, we can choose to use Workflow for publish only, or for both publish and unpublish requests, which meant setting node configuration for publish-only could result in situations where the global setting required Workflow for unpublish, but nodes only had publish configuration. Confusing, right?

Instead, we now set the global option, save configuration on our nodes, and select the workflow type in the UI as part of the submission process. The UX here has had a bit of polishing to make it a more pleasant experience for users.

Content review improvements

Continuing the trend of improving rather than adding (although there is something new), the content review functionality has also seen some attention in the latest releases.

Improvements, in no particular order:

• Setting the global review period to 0 will now mark all content as non-reviewable, but still allow setting the review period for individual nodes. This means you can turn the feature on, set the global to 0, then set specific review periods for key content.
• Saving the content review settings has been split in two - save, and save and regenerate. The former saves the settings, the latter saves the settings and applies those changes to regenerate review dates.
• When choosing to regenerate dates, you now have the ability to select the baseline date - either now or the last-updated date - which is used when calculating the next review date (eg n days from now, or n days from the node’s last publish date). Similarly, you can also choose to force regeneration of existing dates (default behaviour has always been to generate dates only for nodes with no previous review).

• The new addition for content reviews is the ability to set external reviewers. Until now the review responsibility has been assignable to a Workflow approval group, but that’s not super useful when the review needs to come from a stakeholder who is not a CMS user.
  To remedy that scenario, we can provide email addresses for external reviewers, prompting them to visit the site and provide feedback on their content

Breaking change!

External Reviewers is a small feature, but should prove a useful addition to the Workflow toolkit. However, making it work did require some breaking changes. 

The `SentEntities` dictionary on `WorkflowContentReviewsEmailNotificationsSendingNotification` and `WorkflowContentReviewsEmailNotificationsSentNotification` was previously keyed by the type `UserGroupPoco`, this has changed to `IWorkflowGroup`. 

The same change is applied to the `reviews` parameter of the `SendReviewReminders` method on `IContentReviewReminderEmailer`. 

It’s functionally identical, but it is a change to the public API surface. `IWorkflowGroup` exposes a subset of properties from `UserGroupPoco`, but feel free to cast to the concrete type.

Other updates

• Fixes handling Swedish culture where negative numbers are represented with minus-sign versus hyphen-minus in other cultures
• Fixes javascript error in embedded licensing when the license is unable to validate
• Updates embedded licensing to align with Umbraco.Licenses UI

How to test

You can either create a new installation using the package available from the link below or upgrade an existing Umbraco 12, 11, or 10 project. All scenarios can provide valuable feedback. 

If you find anything in the RC that isn’t working as expected, please provide feedback on the GitHub issue tracker for Workflow.

If you’re new to Workflow, the documentation site will help get you up and running.

How to get your hands on the Release Candidates

The release candidate is available from the usual Nuget feed

When is the public release?

We’re aiming for a public release on Tuesday, September 5, 2023.