For those of you not on twitter or our.umbraco.org - here's a Chrome Extension for Umbraco Developers. This extension will let you switch between different debug modes and the Umbraco UI. It also sports two search boxes for directly searching the Umbraco custom Google search and our.umbraco.org.

If you have ideas for improvements, please let me know! 

I’ve just updated the Image Cropper datatype with some adjustments, bugfixes and new features:

• Ability to configure what quality you want the crops in
• Default positioning of crops (Left/Center/Right and Top/Middle/Bottom)
• Fixed an interpolation issue when resizing that would produce a soft border around the crop
• Fixed an issue when saving/publishing after a postback

I’ve changed the location where crops are stored from an underlying /crops folder to the original image location as well as changed the name of the generated crops to /media/(propertyid)/filename_(cropname).jpg. I did this because it will let you override the default image thumbnail in the Media section by naming at least one of the crop presets ‘thumb’.

PS! Insert image dialog in RTE will still show a rectangular vertically centered view of the thumb, so you are warned ;-). I’ll add a configuration option for this in the next version.

Thanks to all for your feedback on the first release. Lots of great ideas that I’ll try to implement at some point such as max viewsize (Thanks Thomas) and more.

Download Image Cropper v0.9 for Umbraco

Umbraco v4 is on track and here are some dates from twitter.com/umbraco:

• RC2: Jan 16th
• RC3: Jan 23rd
• Release: 30th

I highly recommend subscribing to the Umbraco RSS feed at Codeplex to get an insight of what gets implemented / fixed:

• All Project Updates (recommended)
• Issue Tracker
• Releases
• Source Control
• Wiki

The core team usually add a comment describing the work that is checked in. As an example, here are some updates made yesterday:

• 45581: New section icons, UI tweaks, translations, sort dialog bug fixes. Reverts the "page shouldn't save if validation fails" feature..
  
  
  Here’s a screenshot of the new icons =)
• 45549: Improves en.xml ui translation, improved sorting, content picker overflow,fixed: regex form, fixed: tree padding/margins, fixed: content editor validators doesn't stop it from saving. Deletes old V2 ui graphic files.
  
  
  Click name to sort all nodes.
• 44976: Fixes 20223, Adds full Safari support for tinymce

Now, go subscribe and get involved by testing and report issues you encounter!

I've just booked my seat for Codegarden 2008 and look forward meeting fellow Umbracians. This year Codegarden will be in lovely Copenhagen, Denmark. Seems like we'll be around 100 people this year, over twice as many as last year. Respect!

More participants are needed to make Codegarden 2007 a reality. Sign up TODAY!