Niels Hartvig recently posted that Umbraco 7.4 has been released. With much focus on improving the user experience, this new version of Umbraco is being subtitled as the "Content type editor update".
Features and improvements highlighted in this update includes:
- New content type editor
- Some UX polish + documentation
- Media library improvements
- Grid polish
- Password for user panel (no dashboard)
- Models Builder
Later in the post, Niels discusses how Umbraco 7.4 development was initiated within the Umbraco community.
The background was one evening where someone told me that it was complex to create simple sites with Umbraco compared to other products on the market. Nonsense I thought, so I started up a screen recorder to record a quick video that proved them wrong. With the mindset of someone new to Umbraco, I opened our beautiful back office, went to the settings section and did what many of us has done many times - clicked “Create New Document Type”.
The danger of doing the same thing many times is that you accept flaws. Know your way around them. That evening, seeing this dialog with fresh eyes I could almost cry. This feature was no longer outstanding - it was only on par with the rest. We’ve poured so much energy in improving most of Umbraco throughout the last couple of years, but always postponed this one. That evening I had enough.
So as many evenings before, I pinged Per and while it’s mostly related to the CodeGarden bingos when we disturb each other late at night, he forgave me and we agreed that it was time. Quickly we also agreed that this was the opportunity to involve the community from the very start and one thing - and month - quickly took another. It turned out we opened a can of worms and what should have been a little evening video recording project resulted in spending several man years on a single feature (involving everyone in the HQ and even added new hires to the HQ).
It is recommended that any new project you start with this content management system, you start it with Umbraco 7.4. Umbraco is available as a download as well as a service.
A version of this article was originally published on socPub.com.