Umbraco CMS 7.2 - awesome new features are on the way
A new release of Umbraco is on its way, it’s packing some powerful new features and they are chock full of awesome.
Preview mode device views
First off, we have a new preview mode tool. It’s a slide out bar that allows you to switch between different device views of your, hopefully responsive, website.
It’s great for editors and publishers to have a quick and easy view of how their content will span over the crazy amount of devices out there. It’s configurable as well, so adding new device resolutions should be a snap.
The Grid - a datatype on steroids
The new Grid datatype was in development originally by an agency from Spain called LECOATÍ. It was seen by the Umbraco HQ team and they decided it was too powerful to simply be missed out on, and approached the agency about bringing it into the core. Very smart move on both sides.
The Grid is going to change the way we build content pages. Built for grid layouts, think Bootstrap and Foundation frameworks, with this editor you’ll be able to truly build and control your content for the page. Your “standard content page” will have nothing standard about it.
You can add row after row of structured and rich content. Headlines, multiple columns, each with rich media and text editor support. You are now able to build rich content pages, without the archaic single WYSYWIG editor property for a whole page.
Similar editors are part of other CMS’s out there, but I’ve never seen it done quite so well. It’s simple to use, clean, fast, and feature rich. This is quite likely the belle of the ball of the new features set.
Compositions - Document types are evolving
The way we’re able to compose our page types is changing in a powerful way.
Previously, we had a parent child inheritance model. What this meant is that all of the content properties of a parent document type, would also be contained in its child types.
A good example of this is say you have a type of page called content page. It has content properties on it like a headline, a content body, a multiple media picker for an image gallery. It in turn has a parent document type called webpage, which has content properties for a page title, meta keywords, and a meta description. NOW, say you want to create a child of the content page called a blog article page, and it has some fields for the author’s name and details. Well, that blog article page also has all of the properties of its ancestors, like the meta fields, headline, content body, image gallery, etc… If you wanted to exclude one or more of those fields you had to either restructure those ancestors and possibly all of their child types to fit the needs of the one new document type you were creating, or possibly create a one off document type on its own, which kind of defeats the purpose of the inheritance feature in the first place.
With compositions being released, we have much better control of what is in our document types. We can, for example, have SEO, gallery and content document types. And in the blog article type we create, we simply pick and choose which of these we compose it with, while still adding content fields to the document type specific to the blog article page.
This will be huge for ongoing development with medium to large scale sites. It’s like where once you would have painted yourself into a corner, now the walls have been removed.
There are heaps more features as well as performance improvements and bug fixes on the way as well. Umbraco CMS 7.2 is still in the alpha stages, but these guys work fast, I don’t imagine we’ll be waiting long before an official release.
