We listened

We promised to fix the five biggest frustrations that slowed down your work with our “Fight the Frustrations” campaign. We fixed ten.

The technical fixes:

• Customize logging. The logging built-in to umbraco can be completely customized. Log only the types of data you want, to prevent unnecessary information or log entries that are handled by third-party software packages.
• Tab sorting on document types. With umbraco 4, you can sort the Tabs from the UI just as easily as you can the sort order of the properties.
• Direct editing of CSS files. Prior to umbraco 4, CSS files were stored in the database, and then published as files. That meant that any edits you made directly to the files eventually be lost. With umbraco 4, you can use your preferred text editor for modifying the CSS files directly (and add them to source control), as well as editing the stylesheets from within the built-in umbraco editor.
• Copy document types. Need a Document Type that’s almost identical to an existing one? Simply copy it with the click of a mouse and modify the pieces you need.
• Multi-lingual 404 errors. For sites running in multiple languages, it’s now possible to provide a friendly “page not found” error message (HTTP 404) based on culture. You can display different errors for each of the localized sites, optimized for the content and tone of the country.

UI Improvements:

• Enhanced search with auto suggest. A new ajax-based search field at the top of the umbraco UI lets you find any page quickly. Simply start typing and umbraco will show results that match. The field supports searching for document names, full text searching in all properties, or document id. This makes it fast and easy to find the documents you wish to edit, which is especially convenient for sites with deep hierarchies and large amounts of content.
• Full Firefox support. We’ve updated all parts of the UI to make sure that it works seamlessly with any modern browser. This includes FULL support for Firefox. Umbraco 4 supports any modern browser on any platform.
• Simplified rollbacks with visual difference tracking. The new and improved rollback dialog makes it easy to quickly see any differences between content versions by visually marking additions in green and removed content with a red strike through.
• Default user section. For users (editors) with limited access in to the various sections of the umbraco UI, version 4 improves the user experience, even removing the section list in the lower left corner if only one section is available to the user.
• Dictionary overview. Umbraco users with multi-lingual sites will enjoy a new and improved dictionary overview that shows a grid of all dictionary items and their various culture-specific settings. This makes it much easier to track and edit the translated values for each language.