24 June 2014
First ever Umbraco Melbourne Meetup!
So here it is: The first ever Melbourne Umbraco Meetup; date locked in for the first Wednesday of July, and hosted by the good folks at Roadhouse Digital.
Umbraco v8 is out... but can we upgrade?
There's been a lot of excitement about the new release of Umbraco version 8, and at the recent Umbraco Down Under Festival held this week, there was a lot of focus on what you can and can't do.
How to upgrade packages, what's changed, exploration of new features, and guidance from Umbraco HQ staff including both the Chief Unicorn Niels Hartvig and Director of Moon Based Operations Shannon, Deminick around upgrading and extending Umbraco with packages.
Shannon gave an excellent talk on migrating packages across using his Articulate blogging package as an example. He's ported it across in a very short amount of time and the source code is an excellent reference point if you intend to do the same.
One key takeaway was that it's currently not possible to upgrade directly from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 8 via the usual path - many packages have not yet been ported to the new code base, and there are major configuration changes as well to consider.
Even if you have a basic site that doesn't involve third party packages, then you can migrate your site by copying content and updating templates etc. in relatively quick time, but for anything more complex, the recommendation is to wait a few months until migration is supported by Umbraco HQ (there's indications that they are building a tool to assist with this - more information is available on their v8 FAQ page).
However, if you find yourself upgrading Umbraco 7 via nuGet, be very careful that you don't just choose the latest 8.x release - you need to double check that you stay within the Umbraco 7 version or you will run into problems.
And some Umbraco Plugins may not have a separate nuGet package - a case in point is the excellent uSync package by Kevin Jump - the nuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/uSync/) currently has a version specifically for Umbraco version 8 in beta and will happily install for you, which can then cause all sorts of problems.
The key takeaway here, of course, is that if you're developing a plugin package for Umbraco and distributing it via nuGet, make sure you create a separate package for Umbraco version 8.
Looking forward to the future, it's worth noting that Niels indicated in his presentation at uDuf that Umbraco 7.15.x will likely be the last version released in that major release stream. He also made the comment that Umbraco 7 is a very stable, functional and highly usable CMS to work with for Editors, and there is very little need in the majority of cases to actually upgrade to Umbraco 8 at all.
So here it is: The first ever Melbourne Umbraco Meetup; date locked in for the first Wednesday of July, and hosted by the good folks at Roadhouse Digital.
Umbraco have just released a patch for an issue affecting a library used by the CMS that could lead to exposure of private information and recommends applying the patch to affected sites as soon as possible. We look into how to determine if your site is likely to be affected, and what to do about it.
The Umbraco CMS is a very flexible and open platform for building an expressive and intuitive Content Editors interface, but sometimes that comes at a price when it comes to indexing the produced content for Lucene/Examine based searching. A bit like looking for the needle in the haystack. In this article, Rob takes a look at ways to clean that content up while indexing to surface keywords and presentation without any messy artifacts.
The MemberListView for Umbraco 7 provides a management dashboard view for Members allowing for mass Unlock, Suspension or Activation of members. This is one area in member management that's currently missing from the Umbraco Core, and this package seeks to address that. The majority of the functionality was hacked together in time for the Codegarden 14 Package Competition and refined to iron out a few of the bugs and complete the missing functionality.
Umbraco provides the ApplicationEventHandler class to derive from when connecting to events in modules, but it's not immediately obvious.