I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at this year’s Umbraco Down Under Festival which was fantastic! Thanks to everyone at KØBEN digital for putting on such a nice event as well to all of the sponsors Zero Seven, Tea Commerce and Luminary in helping make it all happen. And what great timing to have an Umbraco festival just after Umbraco v8 is launched! Big thanks to Niels Hartvig for coming all the way from Denmark, it certainly means a lot to us Australians (yes, I am one too even with this Canadian accent!).

Hackathon

We had quite a few people at the Hackathon this year (18!) and we were able to close 3 issues and merge 6 Pull Requests along with finding and submitting 4 other issues, all for Umbraco v8, great work! Looking forward to seeing the Australian community submit even more PRs for v8 and hope to see you all at the Australian Umbraco meetups :)

Slide Deck

My talk this year was on Umbraco Packages in v8 though much of it was really about transitioning to v8 in general.

Here is the rendered PDF version of my slides, of course it doesn’t come with all of the nice transitions but it’s better than nothing. My slides were done with the brilliant GitPitch service which I absolutely love. Not only does it make presenting code so much nicer/easier, it just makes sense to me as a developer since I can just write my slides in Mardown and style them with css. Plus having your slide deck in Git means making new slides out of old slides quite nice since all your history is there!

I tried to break down the talk into 3 sections: Migrating, Building and Packaging.

Migrating

“Migrating” was a bit of a walk through between some fundamental things that have changed between v7 and v8 that not only package developers will need to be aware of but anyone making the transition from v7 to v8.

Building

“Building” showcased some new features for packages and v8, though I didn’t talk about one of the major v8 features: Content Apps, because Robert Foster was already doing a talk all about them in the morning. Instead I focused on how Dashboards work in v8 and a couple currently undisclosed v8 features: Full Screen Sections (sans c#) and Package Options.

Packaging

“Packaging” may have been a bit rushed but I thought I was going to go overtime :P I talked about the new packager UI in v8 and that it is certainly possible to build packages for CI/CD integration with PowerShell scripts to build an Umbraco package from a command line. I’d like to make this far more straight forward than it is now which is something I’ll work on this year. You can find this PowerShell script here and a newer example in Articulate here. Lastly I mentioned that there is a disconnect between the Umbraco package format and the Nuget package format with regards to installing Umbraco data and that it would be nice to make both of these work seamlessly as one thing… and this is certainly possible. I created a PR a very long time ago to address this called Package Migrations (even though it says Morten made it … he actually just submitted the PR ;) ). I need to write a blog post about what this is and how it is intended to work so we can hopefully get some traction on this this year. The very brief overview is that package updates would work very similarly to Umbraco updates, if an update is detected that requires a migration, the installer will execute to guide the user through the process and to provide UI feedback if anything fails along the way. This way package developers can properly leverage the Migrations system built into Umbraco and Umbraco data will happily be installed on startup even if you install a package from Nuget.

The main barrier currently is that Umbraco Cloud will need to natively support it otherwise people will get the installer screen on every environment when they push a package update upstream which is not great, Umbraco Cloud should instead run the migration on the upstream environment in the background just like it does with Umbraco updates.

Lastly I talked about how Articulate currently manages this situation between the Umbraco package format and the Nuget package format.

UDUF 2020

Looks like UDUF is moving to Sydney next year, so we’ll so you all there!