umbraco
[Breaking change]: Removal of backoffice tours
Description
Umbraco 13 supported the feature of backoffice tours. You would see this on the first install of Umbraco, in the form of a guided selection of messages associated with different areas of the backoffice user interface.
It was also possible to create custom tours to demonstrate a particular package or project.
Whilst there has been an intention to re-implement this feature in Umbraco 14+ it's priority has always been low. As such, at this point, we feel it's better to be explicit and state that there is currently no intention to reinstate this in a similar form for the Umbraco 17+ backoffice.
Version
Umbraco 14
Previous behavior
Umbraco 13 presented a tour on first use of the backoffice introducing various CMS features and how to access them. Package or project developers could use this feature to develop their own tours.
New behavior
The tours feature and the default tour encountered on first access of the backoffice will no longer be available.
Type of breaking change
- [ ] Binary incompatible: Existing binaries may encounter a breaking change in behavior, such as failure to load/execute or different run-time behavior.
- [ ] Source incompatible: Source code may encounter a breaking change in behavior when targeting the new runtime/component/SDK, such as compile errors or different run-time behavior.
Reason for change
Tours provided a means of introducing someone completely new to the CMS to concepts such as document types, templates and content editing. They had some value there, but we feel efforts in this area would be better spent on improving existing documentation, providing video walkthroughs and considering the use of contextual help from within the backoffice.
Custom tours we don't believe have been widely adopted, and where they have, similar benefits could also be provided via documentation and video.
Sad to see backoffice Tours go :( They were a completely unique feature to Umbraco from any other CMS we've seen that really helped support the end users. Unfortunate that it was not more widely adopted for clients.
We utilized them for our client projects to support non-technical authors, or users who only had to update content once in a while, for typical processes that they would need to do specific for their project. It was really nice that they could get help in the CMS on any step of a tour at any time versus trying to hunt something down with a timestamp on a video that could be 30 minutes long, or reading through pages and pages of documentation that they may not 100% know what exactly they're looking for.
Sometimes it's as simple as they didn't know clicking on the arrow icon specifically, separate from the rest of the click area and a standard UI interface we're all very familiar with and know, will expand the content tree. Trying to catch that level of knowledge gap in a video [or document] is unlikely when those making the video probably didn't expect that as a step they would need to mention; but the Tours do.
The tours were a fantastic complimentary training and documentation material; especially for anyone following the Divio Documentation style. Tutorials are not a replacement for explanation or reference material found in Author Guides or demo videos, or vice versa, they compliment each other.
But it's understandable with the massive overhaul in 14+ that it was low priority ^^ Thank you for confirming the feature drop. Fingers crossed we'll see it return in some form ;D
