It’s now been four months since the release of Umbraco 8 and while we have been releasing a couple of patches since then, we have yet to release the much anticipated Umbraco 8.1 and will not be able to deliver it this quarter as previously expected.
With the current status of the project we expect to release Umbraco 8.1 Tuesday July 9th and we’ll initiate the related detailed release communication during next week.
We recognize that this is a challenge to many of you as you are waiting for some of the important updates for your next project, Umbraco extension development or other related projects and that this can be a frustrating situation to be in. We are doing everything we can to remedy this by finally releasing the new version.
On top of this, we’ve not done a great job of communicating on the situation as time passed and we apologize for this and the confusion it has created. We hope that this blog post and the upcoming release communication will give you the information and answers you need and we welcome any additional feedback as we continue to improve our transparency.
What’s the hold up?
So why has Umbraco 8.1 not been released yet? Here’s a couple of important reasons for the current situation:
- We’ve received a ton of good feedback from 8.0 adopters and wanted to include a lot of improvements based on that feedback in the first minor.
- We’ve recognized that Umbraco 8.0 was not solid enough in some key areas, which means we unfortunately have to introduce breaking changes in 8.1 (more details below).
- We wanted to give you the option of content migration from Umbraco 7 to 8 as part of the release, which has been holding back other improvements that could have been released earlier.
- We’ve had some recent important performance and security related issues that we wanted to address fully before the release to avoid a series of updates right after an already big and important release.
These events didn’t play out as we originally intended and we recognize that we should instead have had more frequent updates to Umbraco 8, as we would normally have done and have done previously with Umbraco 7, to avoid the extended delay on key functionality already ready to go.
Breaking Changes are needed in Umbraco 8.1
As mentioned, based on the evaluation of Umbraco 8 we’ve come to the conclusion that there are certain important improvements necessary in Umbraco 8 that require us to make breaking changes, which we would normally restrict to future major releases.
We’ve focused a lot on making only the absolutely necessary changes, include them all in 8.1 and reduce the impact on existing Umbraco 8.0 projects as much as possible.
Most noticeably are API changes to IPublishContent to make our APIs more streamlined, understandable and usable for all.
We will document fully all breaking changes as part of the release of Umbraco 8.1 and include further details and explanation on how to adopt them in the related release communication.
What are we doing to improve the current situation?
We are making the following changes as a consequence of the current situation:
- We’ve increased the focus on the final testing and bug-fixing for Umbraco 8.1 at Umbraco HQ to minimize any further delay.
- We are pushing the cutoff date for new Umbraco 7 projects on Umbraco Cloud to the end of 2019 (previous date was August 31st).
- We are re-evaluating our communication and release strategy to focus on pushing valuable changes and communication out more frequently than has been the case recently.
We hope you will enjoy the value of the release when it finally becomes available, in the meantime: Apologies for the unintended delay and thank you for your patience!