Community Blogs

Browsing Umbraco Logs in Kudu

A new userscript that brings a proper Serilog log viewer into the Kudu interface: file picker, expression search, saved queries, and a momentum graph, all with no build step required.

Smarter redirects when editors trash content in Umbraco

A new Umbraco package that replaces the default trash action. It captures the URLs of doomed content first, then suggests redirect targets using Umbraco.AI.Search, with a non-AI fallback for bulk trashes.

Releasing Image Hotspot 17.0.0

What's new in version 17.0.0 of the Image Hotspot property editor: Umbraco 17 support, block editor fixes, localization in 29 languages, and a new versioning scheme.

Share the Love - Bringing #H5YR to jcdc.dev

I've added the new #H5YR widget to my sites. Send a virtual High Five!

The Umbicosaurus De-Extinction: The Community Effort that Brought a Better Icon Picker to Umbraco 17.4

In 2021, I dreamed of improving the icon picker in the Umbraco backoffice and today, in Umbraco 17.4, the package I started is making a splash as part of Core! This is the story of Umbicosaurus.

Advanced Permissions for Umbraco: Advanced User Group Control for Complex Scenarios

Quick note: I write these blogs myself, AI only redacts them. I'm excited to announce that I just released my very first open source Umbraco community package: Advanced Permissions for Umbraco! In this post, I'll explain why I created this package, what it adds to Umbraco's permission system, and when you'd want to use it. Why This Package Exists I've been working with Umbraco since version 4, mostly in an agency context where projects often involve multiple editors, multiple user groups, and more complex content structures. That experience shaped what I value: features that give teams enough control without making day-to-day editing harder. I wrote about these scenarios in a GitHub discussion a while back. The current permission system works fine for many use cases, but I do think it becomes too limited once projects grow in complexity. In my opinion, this is an area where Umbraco could — and should — offer more flexibility. For now, this package is my attempt to solve that problem in a practical way. Advanced Permissions for Umbraco is designed for situations where the built-in permission model does not give you enough control. The Current Permission System (In a Nutshell) To really understand the benefits of Advanced Permissions, you first need to understand the default Umbraco permission system. Here's how it works: You assign default permissions to a User Group by toggling a list of verbs: Create, Delete, Cultures and Hostnames, Publish, and so on. Users with that group inherit those permissions. You can also override these permissions on specific nodes, and those overrides apply to that node and all its descendants. It's straightforward and handles most workflows well. Where It Reaches Its Limits Grant Types and Inheritance In Umbraco, you set default permissions on a User Group, and then you can override those on specific nodes. But here's the catch—when you override permissions on a node, those node-specific permissions completely replace the defaults. There's no inheritance. So if you want to change just one permission on a node (say, disallow Delete), you have to specify every single permission at that node level. You can't say "inherit everything from the default and only change this one thing." You end up copying all the default permissions to the node level just to tweak one, which is error-prone and a maintenance nightmare. And because permissions are just toggles—allow (checked) or deny (unchecked)—there's really only "allow" and a sort of implicit "not-allow." There's no way to explicitly deny something. This matters when you have multiple User Groups on a single user: all their permissions just stack up. You can only gain permissions, never restrict them. Scope Node permissions always apply to a node and its descendants. You can't set permissions on just the node itself, or just on descendants. Take an employee directory: an overview page with employee pages underneath. Ideally, you'd want editors to leave the overview page alone but be able to delete individual employee pages as they leave. The current system doesn't support that directly. Multiple User Groups When a user has multiple groups, their effective permissions are the combined list of everything allowed across those groups. There's no way to say "this group can do X, but that specific group cannot delete content." You get the union of all their permissions. What Advanced Permissions Adds The package introduces three capabilities for when you need more control: Three Grant Types (Allow, Deny, Inherit) Instead of just allow/deny, you get: Allow: explicitly permit something Deny: explicitly forbid something Inherit: use whatever the ancestor nodes specifies This means you only need to set the permissions you want to change and let everything else inherit from above. No more duplicating every permission just to tweak one. Flexible Scopes Choose where permissions apply: Node + Descendants (the standard Umbraco behavior) Node Only (children inherit from ancestors above) Descendants Only (the node itself isn't affected) You can combine node-only and descendants-only permissions on the same node to set different rules for a parent and its children. Smart Permission Resolution Advanced Permissions includes a resolver that calculates your actual permissions based on priority: Explicit deny (takes precedence) Explicit allow Implicit deny Implicit allow It handles multiple User Groups intelligently across all of them. Apply Permissions to Everyone There's a virtual "All Users" group for permissions that should apply to everyone. Useful for nodes that should never be deleted, for example. It works like any other group from the resolver's perspective. The Access Viewer To understand your actual permissions when things get complex, there's an Access Viewer that shows your effective permissions for any user or group. Click on any permission and see the resolver chain that determined it. When You'd Use This You'd reach for Advanced Permissions when the built-in permission model starts to feel too restrictive—multiple teams with overlapping responsibilities, permissions that need to vary significantly across your content tree, or content structures that don't fit neatly into the standard model. For simple scenarios, Umbraco's built-in permissions may be enough. But when you need more control over how permissions are inherited, combined, allowed, or denied, Advanced Permissions gives you a more flexible model to work with. You can find the package on the Umbraco marketplace today!

A weekend without internet access

Two Umbraco Cloud CLI spinoffs: fetch DB and media into your local dev

Two wizard CLIs that pull a fresh database and media folder from Umbraco Cloud straight into your local dev project - spinoffs from the archiver, useful on their own.

Umbraco Member thrown out after changing password

I'm working with a migration of the website for my Umbraco-package Newsletter Studio, from Umbraco 8 to Umbraco 17. I use Umbraco Members to allow customers to login and manage their licenses, update information and download receipts. New password = Member logged out When I was working on a feature to allow customers to change password, I noticed that I kept getting thrown out from the logged in area of the website after changing the password. The Member was throw out both: When they change password them selfs When the password was changed in from the backoffice I searched around for this, and it turns out that this is security feature. Umbraco has introduce settings around concurrent logins both for Users and Members, in appsettings.json one can configure these "Umbraco": { "CMS": { "Security": { "AllowConcurrentLogins": false "MemberAllowConcurrentLogins": false } } } According to the documentation, MemberAllowConcurrentLogins will fallback to the value of AllowConcurrentLogins, which is set to false by default. What happened? When the user changed the password, it looked like a new login, since this was not allowed the user was thrown out. There is two ways around this, one could refresh the users login cookie by calling _memberSignInManager.SignInAsync() after the password change. var currentMember = await _memberManager.GetCurrentMemberAsync(); var currentPasswordIsValid = await _memberManager.ValidateCredentialsAsync(currentMember.UserName!, model.CurrentPassword!); if (!currentPasswordIsValid) { return Error(); } var changePasswordResult = await _memberManager.ChangePasswordAsync( currentMember, model.CurrentPassword!, model.NewPassword!); if (!changePasswordResult.Succeeded) { return Error(); } // Refresh member authentication cookie await _memberSignInManager.SignInAsync(currentMember, true, "");  Or, one could set AllowConcurrentLogins to true.

The Silent Developer

I built a CLI to archive Umbraco Cloud projects

When a client upgrade meant retiring an old Umbraco Cloud project, I wanted a complete local archive before pulling the plug. So I built a wizard CLI to do it.

Fixing the "maxViewItems" Limit in Umbraco Cloud Kudu

Hitting the "maxViewItems is set to 299" message in Umbraco Cloud's Kudu console? Here's the one-line fix in DevTools which I always forget!