Preamble
This series is about the migration of my Umbraco package, Contentment, to the new Umbraco backoffice, codenamed Bellissima.
If you want to see Contentment in action, I did a 30 minute presentation at CodeGarden 2023, Finding Contentment, exploring each of the editor components. Bellissima is the project codename of the new backoffice for Umbraco CMS, (circa v14). Bellissima web tech... e.g. Web Components, TypeScript, Lit, Vite, see @mattbrailsford's series of articles Back to the Front-end: Exploring the Future of the Umbraco UI.If you don't know what any of that means, expand this section for background reading and lexicon for this series.
Disclaimer: I am part of the Umbraco Backoffice Community Team - my opinions in these articles are my own and do not reflect the opinions of the community team nor Umbraco HQ.
The detail in these articles tries to be as accurate as possible (at the time of writing), if reading this a year or two from now, I'd expect there to be many changes with how Umbraco extension development is approached.
Where to begin?
At CodeGarden (June 2023), a preview of v14 was released, but wasn't quite ready for package development. By August 2023, 14.0.0--preview002 was released, including the Extension API, so package developers could register their extension points, e.g. dashboards, property-editors, etc. Meaning it was ready to explore.
My initial dilemma was should I attempt to make the existing Contentment codebase work with Bellissima, or start from scratch?
Note: I had a similar dilemma with the Umbraco v9 / .NET Core migration work. Ultimately, I started off from scratch, then did a complete U-turn and ended up with the .NET multi-targeting solution, supporting multiple versions of Umbraco in a single package. (Which has turned out quite well for Contentment.)
My gut feeling was to keep the existing codebase as-is, making sure that the .NET assembly library has binary compatibility (e.g. the C# server-side bits), before thinking about the backoffice-frontend/web-component bits.
Umbraco v13 and v14 would be compiled against .NET 8.0, so I got the latest .NET 8 preview installed and configured Contentment's .csproj file to target net8.0 and reference Umbraco's 14.0.0--preview002 NuGet packages. As expected, this gave me a bunch of compiler errors from breaking-changes in v13/v14 codebase.
Fixing up the breaking-changes was straight forward, nothing complicated, given my .NET multi-targeting approach, I could make use pre-processor directives for specific fixes, e.g. #if NET8_0_OR_GREATER. All time consuming, but no headaches.
Versioning dilemmas
Once the compiler errors were resolved, I was able to run Contentment against an Umbraco instance of 14.0.0--preview002. Of course, I wasn't able to do anything with it, there were no property-editors registered, but the initial hurdle was overcome.
Before I got going with the backoffice-frontend/web-components prototyping, I wondered about whether Contentment should take the RCL (Razor Class Library) approach. Meaning that the App_Plugins folder would be served from the NuGet package itself, rather than copied over at build-time. (It's what all the cool kids are doing these days!)
This presented another dilemma, RCL is a .NET Core technology, so this wouldn't work for legacy .NET Framework, meaning that I'd need to drop support for Umbraco v8. And whilst I was considering dropping support for old versions, I could drop Umbraco v9 too. I gave it all some thought and updated Contentment's ROADMAP.
In terms of Contentment's version numbers, and expecting to add support for Umbraco v13/.NET 8, I could do a Contentment v5 to drop support for v8/v9, add v13 (LTS) and do the RCL. This would be paving the way for a Contentment v6 to add support for Bellissima, (although because of the .NET multi-targeting, it'd need to be the next .NET major, so .NET 9, which would be Umbraco v15). (There's probably a lot to unpack in this paragraph, it'll make sense in a future article).
I still haven't fully decided whether to continue with the .NET multi-targeting approach after Bellissima, I may change my mind, but I do like the idea of having a single NuGet package (and codebase) that could support multiple versions of Umbraco. It'd be interesting to explore.
Next time...
Next time, I'll show my starting steps for the backoffice-frontend/web-components, installing TypeScript/Vite/Lit, et al.
In the meantime, if you want to skip ahead and see the code, here are links to areas of interest on Contentment's GitHub repository:
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