Overview:

What’s new in Umbraco 8.2

Breaking Changes

Community Contributions

How to get your hands on Umbraco 8.2

What’s new in Umbraco 8.2

This version contains 91 features and fixes. Once again, there is a big focus on making the backoffice an even friendlier place to work. Both through numerous community contributions but also adding some new functionality to the rich text editor and further improvements to the cache layer - making both developers and content editors happier!

Here are some of the highlights:

Rich Text Editor enhancements

Umbraco 8.2 contains the first round of improvements for the Rich Text Editor (RTE), performance improvements and a whole lot more, making working and updating content more delightful for your content editors!

Performance 🏎

Decreasing the load time of the RTE gives you faster access to the content you want to edit. It also has the nice benefit of being much more lightweight, so if you’re on a slow/bad internet connection, the RTE now loads much faster. The perceived load time has also been improved so you’ll now see a nice loading indicator if you have to wait a bit for things to show up.

Drag/drop support for images

This makes it easy to add images to text without having to use the “Add Image” workflow. So if you’re using a lot of images in RTEs this will save a lot of clicks as everything is handled automatically. Simply drag an image file into the RTE area and it will be added to your article and when you save or publish the document, the image will be uploaded and available in the Media Library as well.

The default upload location can be configured on a data type level, making it easier to maintain a nice and tidy Media Library for both developers and editors. This works both for the standard rich text property editor and in grid layouts.

Copy/Paste from word Processor

Many content editors write and do initial layout in a word processor such as MS Word or Google Docs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply copy the content and paste it to the RTE in Umbraco all while maintaining formatting? That’s now possible. A huge time and frustration saver for your content editors when they have to e.g. add a blog post or add new copy to a landing page.

Edit, copy/paste and drag/drop embedded items

You can also look forward to a better experience if you have to rearrange the layout in an RTE. Inserted Macros, embedded tweets and videos will now behave like a single element. This makes it possible to drag and drop embedded items and makes it much easier to cut and paste.

These are the improvements to the RTE you get with Umbraco 8.2. - but we’re not done yet. There are still things that can be improved and these are outlined in the RFC and the second round of improvements have been added to the Product Roadmap and will be part of a future release of Umbraco.

Improved cache performance and stability

You’ll find that Umbraco 8.2 is both faster and even more stable. Most notably, you’ll see that publishing nodes with a lot of descendants has vastly improved.

We’ve also improved the way Umbraco handles updates to schema. So you should see a nice bump in speed when saving changes to Data Types and Document Types. Instead of handling all operations in one request, they will now be executed lazily which will let you continue your work and Umbraco will update what is needed behind the scenes.

Breaking Changes

It’s important to note that Umbraco 8.2. does not contain any crucial breaking changes, and that the one that is there, only affects a minority of sites:

A small fix has been made for the siblings extension method on IPublishedContent, ensuring it returns the correct type. We have marked this as a breaking change as some people may be using this method in their custom code. Most people will be using it in their views, so they won't notice the difference. For people using it in their code, a quick recompile should be sufficient.

For the full story and explanation see the Github issue.