For a large intranet project I am currently in doubt as to what basis I will choose, Umbraco 7 or Umbraco 8. Together with a number of colleagues (non-technical users) I have involved, we think the Umbraco 7 interface works better and looks nicer. The disadvantage is that Umbraco 7 will be discontinued i guess and that the entire project will someday have to be upgraded to Umbraco 8.
Is it perhaps therefore more convenient to opt for Umbraco 8 now and hope that the interface of the upcomming versions will be as good as that of Umbraco 7 again?
For my curiosity, what do you use for new projects? Umbraco 7 or 8?
Umbraco 8.
Many fixes from u7 was transfered to u8 and ofcourse many tweaks which many users used in u7 now exist in u8 as default functions.
In addition can say that it will be hard to upgrade from u7 to u8 (for now it's impossible for now). Umbraco team are now more focused on u8 and most fixes will be released on u8.
What else? Depends more from what you wanted to have? Stable and checked by years or something new and modern which is establishing only now?
I think it depends on the type of application you want to use Umbraco for. For important websites I personally think you should not use Umbraco 8 already without a clear view about the lacks, but for simple websites you can do.
V8 adds built in language variants support and contains the new (fast) NuCache. Publishing content by using Content services should be much faster
I have involved, we think the Umbraco 7 interface works better and
looks nicer.
Umbraco 8 comes with nice UI improvements like infinite editing which is a improvement over v7. I'm not sure about the missing tabs in v8, but maybe something will change there in future, according to this forum post: https://our.umbraco.com/forum/umbraco-8/93641-discussion-about-tabs
I've used v8 on four website now, and not hit any problems. I'm just using the vanilla core Property Types, and no 3rd party plugins. Nothing overly glitchy, and you get used to it after a short while
If you go down the route of v7, in 6 months time you'll be screaming to yourself to why you didn't start the project on the v8 branch.
I know it's a little outdated but I found this post whilst researching for an article I'm writing. Just figured I'd drop my two cents on the matter.
If you're intending to do a lot of work with custom controllers, custom workflows, models, API integration etc, then it may be worth holding off as the documentation is still a little sparse and the community support isn't as good as U7 due to an overall lack of experience with it being much newer.
But the previous mentions are correct U8 is much quicker, has a ton of bug fixes and general quality of life fixes. It is much better, but the lack of documentation makes it a bit more difficult for some developers. So take that's something you should take into consideration when it comes to estimating timeframes.
It was more surrounding Umbraco Forms or when setting values on built in property types programmatically.
An example is it took me 3 hours to figure out how to set value on a checkbox list. I had to go through the source code to realize it was expecting a JArray so I had to serialize a list of strings.
It's not that it was missed it's more that it's just incomplete as it's a growing process. Realistically documentation should've been more filled out before releasing V8.
It's not something I'm annoyed about as I know it's open-source and we rely a lot on the community. This is more of a heads up for people who want to adopt V8 that they should add additional timeframes when it comes to figuring out how some functions work as documentation may not exist to answer your question and it may not have already been asked on our Umbraco.
In times like this I rely on the Umbracians slack, but not many people in there seemed able to answer the questions. Again this is just something for users to bare in mind.
Also just to add not having access to PublishedContent within form workflows made things more difficult than it should have been. There should be a way to get the latest published content of an IContent item.
I tend to look at V8 as "almost ready" for production use. I'm hoping by 8.2 it will be good enough. Some of the issues preventing it from being ready in my opinion are:
Too many bugs; even in 8.1. I personally found a bug where simply saving a content item clears out tags. Luckily that was fixed for the upcoming 8.1.1 update. But sometimes when you edit a doc type or data type, the content cache gets hosed and you have to rebuild it.
Missing features from V7, like changing the doc type of a content item.
No scripts to cleanup the database and keep it lean; these will undoubtedly come in time.
The new editing experience removed tabs which makes it much harder to navigate content. There are packages like U8 Collapse which help, but it needs to be re-thought by the U8 team. Also, infinite editing panels are missing some options, like "Actions".
Inconsistent implementation means refactoring too soon; for example, events now rely on dependency injection but objects like ContentService aren't provided by DI.
Documentation is too sparse; this makes supportability much more difficult, especially for things like Umbraco Forms which has always had horrible documentation. I've had to use the Umbraco 8 source code to figure stuff out. It's that bad. If they were willing to spend years rewriting Umbraco to the point that it's behind V7 from a feature standpoint, they should also be willing to spend time writing proper documentation.
I agree with what Michael said.
It could depend on how much customization you intend to have sitting on top of core umbraco 8 (and 3rd party packages etc that might need umb8 compatible versions to be released yet). Give yourself some lead time into building on umb8 if you can and play around with it before starting production builds.
TBH Going from 6 to 7 felt more of a necessity than 7 to 8 at this point. Thing is, it works. I will wait until all the good packages are well into v 8 before doing anything but test-sites.
We have build Uintra (https://our.umbraco.com/packages/collaboration/uintra/) on version 7 and that can might be a good starting point for you if you are looking into Intranet structure. We are currently upgrading Uintra to Umbraco 8 (+ doing migration functionality), but we can see that it will take some time since it’s a major change.
Upgrade from 7 to 8 is not possible as i know, that will be or there is migration tool. In general for new projects it’s good to use latest software version because its more future proof, but for using packages and standard functionality version 7 might be easier to start with.
What do you choose? Umbraco 7 or 8
Hi everybody,
For a large intranet project I am currently in doubt as to what basis I will choose, Umbraco 7 or Umbraco 8. Together with a number of colleagues (non-technical users) I have involved, we think the Umbraco 7 interface works better and looks nicer. The disadvantage is that Umbraco 7 will be discontinued i guess and that the entire project will someday have to be upgraded to Umbraco 8. Is it perhaps therefore more convenient to opt for Umbraco 8 now and hope that the interface of the upcomming versions will be as good as that of Umbraco 7 again?
For my curiosity, what do you use for new projects? Umbraco 7 or 8?
Umbraco 8.
Many fixes from u7 was transfered to u8 and ofcourse many tweaks which many users used in u7 now exist in u8 as default functions. In addition can say that it will be hard to upgrade from u7 to u8 (for now it's impossible for now). Umbraco team are now more focused on u8 and most fixes will be released on u8.
What else? Depends more from what you wanted to have? Stable and checked by years or something new and modern which is establishing only now?
I think it depends on the type of application you want to use Umbraco for. For important websites I personally think you should not use Umbraco 8 already without a clear view about the lacks, but for simple websites you can do.
V8 adds built in language variants support and contains the new (fast) NuCache. Publishing content by using Content services should be much faster
Umbraco 8 comes with nice UI improvements like infinite editing which is a improvement over v7. I'm not sure about the missing tabs in v8, but maybe something will change there in future, according to this forum post: https://our.umbraco.com/forum/umbraco-8/93641-discussion-about-tabs
I've used v8 on four website now, and not hit any problems. I'm just using the vanilla core Property Types, and no 3rd party plugins. Nothing overly glitchy, and you get used to it after a short while
If you go down the route of v7, in 6 months time you'll be screaming to yourself to why you didn't start the project on the v8 branch.
In short - It's a no brainer :-)
I know it's a little outdated but I found this post whilst researching for an article I'm writing. Just figured I'd drop my two cents on the matter.
If you're intending to do a lot of work with custom controllers, custom workflows, models, API integration etc, then it may be worth holding off as the documentation is still a little sparse and the community support isn't as good as U7 due to an overall lack of experience with it being much newer.
But the previous mentions are correct U8 is much quicker, has a ton of bug fixes and general quality of life fixes. It is much better, but the lack of documentation makes it a bit more difficult for some developers. So take that's something you should take into consideration when it comes to estimating timeframes.
Hi,
I'm wondering what documentation is really missing for v8?
I don't see it as something missing rather than "we havent tried".
If you are depending on a lot of packages, yes, they don't exist for v8, but the ones that are needed will be (by my prediction) done within the year.
We really hope so, specially the Courier/new deployment system. That is the main reason why we, at our company, haven't tried to move to v8 so far.
We have a "complex" environments system in our clients, and it is impossible to manage the DB without the Courier or a new deployment system.
It was more surrounding Umbraco Forms or when setting values on built in property types programmatically.
An example is it took me 3 hours to figure out how to set value on a checkbox list. I had to go through the source code to realize it was expecting a JArray so I had to serialize a list of strings.
It's not that it was missed it's more that it's just incomplete as it's a growing process. Realistically documentation should've been more filled out before releasing V8.
It's not something I'm annoyed about as I know it's open-source and we rely a lot on the community. This is more of a heads up for people who want to adopt V8 that they should add additional timeframes when it comes to figuring out how some functions work as documentation may not exist to answer your question and it may not have already been asked on our Umbraco.
In times like this I rely on the Umbracians slack, but not many people in there seemed able to answer the questions. Again this is just something for users to bare in mind.
Also just to add not having access to PublishedContent within form workflows made things more difficult than it should have been. There should be a way to get the latest published content of an IContent item.
I tend to look at V8 as "almost ready" for production use. I'm hoping by 8.2 it will be good enough. Some of the issues preventing it from being ready in my opinion are:
I agree with what Michael said. It could depend on how much customization you intend to have sitting on top of core umbraco 8 (and 3rd party packages etc that might need umb8 compatible versions to be released yet). Give yourself some lead time into building on umb8 if you can and play around with it before starting production builds.
TBH Going from 6 to 7 felt more of a necessity than 7 to 8 at this point. Thing is, it works. I will wait until all the good packages are well into v 8 before doing anything but test-sites.
Hi iNETZO
We have build Uintra (https://our.umbraco.com/packages/collaboration/uintra/) on version 7 and that can might be a good starting point for you if you are looking into Intranet structure. We are currently upgrading Uintra to Umbraco 8 (+ doing migration functionality), but we can see that it will take some time since it’s a major change.
Upgrade from 7 to 8 is not possible as i know, that will be or there is migration tool. In general for new projects it’s good to use latest software version because its more future proof, but for using packages and standard functionality version 7 might be easier to start with.
is working on a reply...