Umbraco briefing - January 2016
After a fantastic year for Umbraco developers and site owners, 2016 picks up the pace with some exciting releases.
The brilliant V7.4 is already in beta and plans for V8 are coming slowly into focus. To this extraordinary array of news, we’ve added our little bit, with the imminent release of Pipeline CRM.
1. Umbraco 7.4 in beta
What happened?
As we mentioned in June’s briefing, Umbraco 7.3 was released in September, introducing a number of much-needed technical and UI improvements. Since then, there have been 3 minor versions, fixing some 90 bugs and making 7.3.4 one of the most stable releases yet. But that’s not all. Version 7.4 is out in beta, featuring a major overhaul of the back-office user experience. There are improvements for developers, but the Grid editor, Media area and general editor UX has been given a good polish.
How am I affected?
We are so impressed with 7.4 (both improvements and quality), that if you are starting a project now, we will get going on that version. Trust us, your content editors will love this CMS as much as we do!
2. Umbraco 8 roadmap
What happened?
In this year’s Umbraco UK Festival, Shannon presented the roadmap for Umbraco 8, which features a major code clean-up to make our sites run faster through improved caching and searching. Features-wise, watch out for Segments and Variants both features that make personalisation a doddle, the former by customising our templates based on the user’s profile (e.g. small viewport), the latter by letting editors create content variations for different audiences (e.g. 1-to-1 translation).
How am I affected?
If you are on v6 or below, the time to start an upgrade project is NOW so drop us a line. V8 is likely to be production-ready sometime around Q2 2017. As the community can divide its attention to two major versions max, we will be the first to label pre-V7 installations as legacy.
3. Launch of Pipeline CRM
What happened?
We’ve published a blog post, a uHangout interview and an article on 24days. You really have no excuse not to be aware that we have been working on a CRM for Umbraco since this summer. We are on track to release V1.0 within a few days, closely followed by a roadmap and code samples to integrate with your website, supporting use cases from customer support to e-commerce.
How am I affected?
Pipeline CRM will be free to use, although you will need a license to store more than 100 Contacts or Opportunities. Even better, we will be giving out generous early-bird discounts. If you think Pipeline CRM will be useful to you, get in touch now and we will reserve you a discounted license or three!
This article first appeared in the GrowCreate blog.
