[Breaking change]: Removal of backoffice tours

[AndyButland]

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.