We had an awesome time this month hosting the Second Dorset Umbraco Meetup, we welcomed Callum from Cogworks to catch us up on what happened at the Umbraco UK Festival as well as a great opportunity to get some networking done! Here’s how the night rolled out.
Everything was running smoothly, the 25 pizzas arrived on time, we had plenty of drinks and guests were turning up at a steady rate allowing the team to greet everybody. We set up a warm environment to make all our guests feel comfortable and relaxed to enjoy networking. After an hour or so of getting to know each other and playing snake with bananas (we have a makey-makey kit that allows you to hook wires up to bananas and use them as arrow keys and play games like Snake and Pacman), we welcomed Callum to talk us through the Umbraco UK Fest. Callum is a Certified Umbraco Master and Senior Developer, who also organized the Umbraco UK Festival and the Umbraco BQQ.
This year UK Umbraco Festival was 80’s themed, and the photos are simply amazing! The atmosphere of the Fest was great “everyone greeted me with a high five instead of a handshake.” A lot was also revealed on what can be expected from Umbraco version 8.
Fortunately, we hosted our second meetup at an exciting time for the Umbraco community. Shortly before Umbraco version 7.8 was released. This included many new features, such as making Umbraco easier to learn. Upon starting Umbraco for the first time now, you’re greeted by a tour which interactively guides you through the back office. There’s also a selection of interactive lessons that go through the back office to show you around.
Another feature added to 7.8 is the help section in back office. This will be super useful because at any given moment there’s the opportunity available to you as a user to click the question mark that’s in the bottom left of the back office and there’s plenty of help on what you’re working on!
A couple of fixes have been made that greatly benefit the Load Balancing, this helps to avoid annoying error messages. Alongside this is the security improvements of 7.8. Now better cookie session tracking has been put in place and there is also a stronger password format by default now.
Umbraco HQ has said that the expected final release of 7.8 will take a little longer than normal, and they’re planning for a final release of 7.8 during January 2018!