Packages in Umbraco 8

On December 09, 2020, Luminary hosted the Virtual Australian Umbraco Meetup. This meetup was focused on the package eco-system for Umbraco 8. 

This meetup and the recordings are a sneak peek into the OSS (Open Source Software) movement in action. Umbraco is OSS and the packages built by the community are what makes it lean and extensible.

We had a few Umbraco Superstars – Nathan Woulfe, Søren Kottal, Robert Foster, Kevin Jump and Poornima Nayar – talk about packages they have developed or are in the process of developing. The format of the meeting was a 10-minute lightning demo/talk and five minutes of Q&A.

Here's the full rundown along with the recordings.

Plumber 2 – the workflow solution for Umbraco 8 by Nathan Woulfe

Nathan (@nathanwoulfe) describes Plumber as a package which adds a heap of useful bits and pieces to Umbraco, to allow multi-staged workflow approval for publish/unpublish actions. More details could be found at https://github.com/nathanwoulfe/Plumber-2. See a quick demo here. 

Full Text Search - Søren Kottal 

This package by Søren (@skttl) is a fast, powerful and easy to set up search solution for Umbraco sites.

• Searches the whole page content (also generated content)
• Simple and easy setup for multiple search types (quoted, fuzzy matching, wildcards etc.)
• Extends the default ExternalIndex

The package is available at https://our.umbraco.com/packages/website-utilities/full-text-search-8/ 

Open or Closed / Configuration Editor / MemberListView - Robert Foster

Robert (@robertjf72) was able to demo not one but three packages he's built for Umbraco.

Open or Closed - Yet another Business Hours package!

Inspired by the Dexmoor BusinessHours package, this one uses the built-in date and time picker and targets Umbraco 8.6+

https://our.umbraco.com/packages/backoffice-extensions/open-or-closed/

Umbraco 8 Configuration Editor

Adds a Configuration Editor to the Settings section for Umbraco 8 with the capability to edit all files in the /config directory plus the root Web.config file. The root Web.config file will be backed up with a date-stamped extension on save.

https://our.umbraco.com/packages/backoffice-extensions/umbraco-8-configuration-editor/

MemberListView

Adds a MemberListView dashboard to the Members area in Umbraco 7.7+ and 8.6+ to allow easier management of members including approval and unlocking capabilities.

The MemberListView provides a management dashboard view for members with convenient filtering and sorting and allows for mass Unlock, Suspension or Activation of members.

https://our.umbraco.com/packages/backoffice-extensions/memberlistview/

uSync - Kevin Jump 

Keep your Umbraco settings in sync - uSync in an Umbraco package that takes the bits of Umbraco that are stored in a database and moves them to disk, so you can source control, copy and move your Umbraco site between computers and servers. Kevin (@KevinJump) gave us a demo where he used uSync with Azure DevOps to deploy changes across environments.

Package details - https://our.umbraco.com/packages/developer-tools/usync/

Package idea - Property Hider - Poornima Nayar 

In this session, Poornima (@PoornimaNayar) spoke about an idea for an Umbraco plugin. This session progressed with other members from the community giving input for this package idea and similar packages in previous versions of Umbraco. The best part of this quick chat is a continuous discussion happening on the Umbraco Slack channels. 

Thank you!

We would love to thank all the speakers at this event for prepping and participating. We were honoured to have you and hope to see you again. Also a note of thanks to the participants for making time and attending this meetup.

If you are interested in joining the next Umbraco meetup hosted by Luminary, sign up here. For more news and interesting Umbraco tidbits follow @UmbracoMel and me @dAmazingNut on Twitter.