2026 Release 4 (July 2026)

We pushed our pre-summer release back by a week to account for a high severity security patch for Umbraco Forms, which landed in the week commencing 27 July. With the new LOOP infrastructure we were able to deploy this twice as quickly, keeping sites updated and running smoothly going into the summer holidays.

Security patches

• Umbraco Forms patch: upgraded to version 13.9.8 for a high severity vulnerability
• Umbraco Core patch: upgraded to version 13.15.1 for a high severity vulnerability

New features

• Password protection can now be applied to specific pages or areas of the site, managed entirely within the CMS
• llms.txt files can now be created in the CMS and added in Site Settings, much like a robots.txt file. llms.txt works like a sitemap for AI search tools, which is part of AEO (answer engine optimisation) (client request)
• FAQ schema is now generated automatically and added to the source code for your FAQs. Schema is code that helps search engines and AI tools understand a page (client request)
• New "Feature list" block (example)
• New "Signpost panel grid section" block (example)

Minor updates

Mega menu

• New CMS setting to add a link to sub-menu item headings in the dropdowns
• New "Link text override" setting for the dropdown top-level text, avoiding repetition of the top-level navigation (client request)
• Option to have the menu appear in front of the header background (default is behind)
• More font-styling variables for mega menu elements
• Feature section items now handle not having a link set

Events listing

• New CMS setting for how many events appear on a single page (client request)
• New block editor in the CMS so content can be added underneath the event listing
• Section IDs added to the event listing and featured event section for anchoring

Opening times calendar

• Today/tomorrow opening times panels can now be enabled or disabled in the CMS (client request)
• Added an option to style weekend days with different background colours (client request)

Media and uploads

• Media upload limits increased in the CMS: images up to 10,000px max width/height, other files up to 20MB

Content blocks

• Text section block: new setting to make the text section wider on desktop (client request)
• Decoy panel section block: now supports 2 call-to-action buttons (client request)

Visual effects and styling

• Screen effects can now be set to show behind page content
• Hero area: new toggle for a parallax effect on hero images and video
• Buttons and social icons: added support for "corner-shape" (progressive enhancement)
• Added an option for view transitions between page loads (progressive enhancement)
• Signpost panels: "Overlay" variant now inherits panel border radius by default
• Carousels: added wrapping support for a large number of nav indicators
• Signposts block: styling improvements when following a hero area with a bottom-edge mask
• Image scaling on hover: more settings for transform CSS
• Buttons: added "scale on hover" effect option
• Panels: added a newer masking technique as an option
• Listing panels: added "scale on hover" effect option
• Responsive nav bar: more styling and masking options for prev/next nav buttons
• Interactive map: label text wrapping improvements
• Footer social icons: added masking shape options to match button options

PageSpeed optimisations

• Split out more page elements as modules, to reduce initial asset load sizes
• Added layout optimisations with newer CSS rules
• Changed front-end compilation to "baseline widely available" (reduces the extra code shipped for old browsers)
• Various JavaScript updates for code performance
• Disabled effects for blocks already in the viewport on load
• Umbraco Forms: made CSS loading non-blocking
• WebP images: improvements to the way images are served

Bug fixes

• Daily show section block: fixed Title and Text CMS fields not pulling through on the front end (client request)
• Transport timetable: fixed event titles not being pulled through correctly
• Fixed header links pointing to an unpublished or deleted page
• Fixed a page error caused when a listing image had been deleted from the media section
• Hero area: fixed a spacing bug for full-height hero plus page-title-area
• Fixed incorrectly calculated image sizes property (Media gallery, Image & Text Carousel)
• Hero video (YouTube): fixed an incorrectly added iframe class
• Smoke effect: fixed the CMS "travel" setting not being applied (it stayed on the default value)
• Heading effect: fixed extra line spacing when titles wrap onto multiple lines
• Reviews: star rating no longer renders in the source code if left as 0 in the CMS (client request)
• Capped image requests to 30 seconds to mitigate an issue causing some sites to go down
• Events listing: "Featured events" now disappear automatically once the event date has passed (client request)

Created by Neil Lewin, Modified on Wed, 7 Oct at 12:49 PM by Neil Lewin