Following on from their last release in November, the Umbraco community came together for a record-breaking Hacktoberfest where they contributed towards the new 8.4 release. 489 pull requests were submitted from hackathons at various Umbraco Festivals this year - that’s up 153 on the previous year!

What is Hacktoberfest you ask? Well, it’s a bit like Octoberfest but with code and open-source development instead of beer.

What’s new?

As you’d expect with a record number of pull requests, there are many new features included in the 8.4 release:

Data Types

Umbraco have introduced a new Info app, similar to the already existing one for content and media items. Here you can find information on the property type and alias as well as an overview of where it’s used for each Data Type. This allows for quick and easy adjustments to your setup.

The second new feature added to Data Type will notify you if and where the Data Type is being used before you hit confirm on whether to delete or not delete.

Property Actions

Allowing editors to work faster, this new feature will help you replicate similar blocks of content by copying the whole item and pasting it onto another item before editing it.

Better back office search

It’s now possible to search entities such as content, media, members, templates, content types, media types and data types by their Global Unique Identifier. Additionally, you can search for Media Items based on its filename.

Media library optimisation

Previously, all items and their thumbnails would have been dropped into a single folder, making it impossible to open and causing the browser to crash through overloading. Media Libraries have now been optimised to handle a larger number of items by only requesting thumbnails of items in the viewport, improving site performance and stability.

For more information on Umbraco 8.4, please read the review notes or get in touch.