– All the Must-Knows of the New Umbraco Version at a Glance

It has been available for a few minutes: Umbraco version 8. Five years have passed since the last major version of the Danish CMS was released; now v8 is here and not only does it give us many new useful features and gadgets, but also a simple and modern user experience. Find out everything you need to know about v8 here!

It was exactly 10 a.m. today, the morning of 26 February 26 2019, when Umbraco CTO Jacob Midtgaard-Olesen solemnly pressed the blue button in the YouTube livestream. It was the blue button that made the 8th major version of Umbraco accessible to its 250,000 community members and hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. The Umbraco world had been waiting for this major release for a long time – but it was worth the wait: Umbraco 8 is here and brings with it a much cleaner code, a number of smaller innovations and three large new functions that give editors and developers even more options to realise their made-to-measure projects.

A good 200 spectators were watching in the livestream when Umbraco Chief Unicorn Niels Hartvig discusses with various guests from the headquarters the creation and development of Umbraco 8 in the hour before the launch. In the Unicorner, Niels and his guests presented the latest Umbraco branding and colour scheme, which is now all over on umbraco.com, the community forum Our and other platforms. In addition to the documentation that already exists, further videos on Umbraco 8 will be uploaded to UmbracoTV and the official YouTube channel in the next few weeks.

Download Umbraco 8 now!

Our Umbraco guru and trainer, Sören Deger, has been taking a deep dive into v8 with his five-part blog series where he discusses all the new functions that v8 offers its users. Which are the most important?

For one, there is the smooth workflow which Umbraco 8 offers editors by the nice name of Infinite Editing. From now on, content can be edited without having to jump back and forth in Umbraco. A new comfort and a tremendous saving of time!

Using the next feature was previously only made possible with work-arounds and additional packages, but v8 provides out-of-the-box: It’s multilingualism. With Language Variants, multilingual pages can now be easily created and managed. Creating multiple nodes for different language versions of the same website is now a thing of the past. In addition, the new Umbraco allows editors to translate their texts directly in the CMS itself, thanks to the new split view.

The newly introduced Content Apps allow developers to make their editors’ and customers’ work easier with customised tools. A content app can be anything that has to do with creating content in Umbraco and is one thing above all: flexible and individual. Described by the Umbraco HQ as a “content companion”, it can be anything – from analytics integration to a practical tool that specifically supports workflows. 

In Umbraco 8, all sections have been moved from the left margin to an upper bar. On the one hand, this makes the work area tidier and on the other hand, it offers more space in the dashboard and the content tree. There is now also a search function with which the entire Umbraco instance can be searched (shortcut: Ctrl + Space). Building and testing packages in v8 is much smoother and more stable. Another novelty: Log Viewer and nuCache, the new in-memory cache that runs twice as fast as the previous XML-based cache. 

Even if Umbraco 8 is here: Active projects on v7 will of course continue. HQ support and security updates for Umbraco 7 will continue for five years. Until August 2019, v7 projects can still be created in the Umbraco cloud. By the way, the last minor release in v7 will be version 7.15 in March 2019. We therefore recommend that you consider migrating your current Umbraco projects to v8. Do you need help? Our Umbraco gurus are be happy to help!

Some might wonder what happens to the Umbraco certifications that they already have acquired. We have put together everything you need to know at a glance:

• Certifications based on Umbraco 6 expire on 31 December 2019. From 2020, all Umbraco 6 certifications and the corresponding titles will be invalid (Certified Professional, Expert and Master).

• Certifications based on Umbraco 7 do not expire. However, since they will lose their validity at one point, HQ advises that all relevant certifications be updated.

•  Want to refresh your Umbraco 7 certification? You can do that – with the new bridging courses! These trainings are available between late April and late December 2019 and are less extensive because they focus solely on the differences between v7 and v8. That also makes them a whole lot cheaper. Six out of eight training courses are available online as bridging courses. Read the official blogpost for more information.

You don’t have a (full) Umbraco certification yet? We offer all official master classes in German at regular intervals – from now on of course based on v8. The next one will take place in a few weeks. Be there and get Umbraco 8-certified!

"Simpler, not perfect" – that’s how Niels Hartvig describes the new Umbraco. The differences between v7 and v8 are huge and one thing is certain: Umbraco 8 will make our daily work easier for us and our customers!