U4-9930 - Can't edit WebForms templates in Umbraco v7.6.1

This appears to be a problem with MVC vs WebForms. If I switch the defaultRenderingEngine in umbracoSettings.config to MVC then I get a blank editor, which makes some sense as the templates were created in WebForms, not MVC. If I put it back to WebForms, then I get YSOD. All my templates were previously created in WebForms, is there a way to get this to work in Umbraco v7.6.1?

Hi Ben, unfortunately we missed this on in the upgrade notes/breaking changes list. From 7.6 onwards we will no long support editing WebForms templates from within the backoffice. We really want to encourage people to only use MVC templates from now on. I wrote a blog post a few years ago detailing how you could actually pretty easily move your templates to MVC: https://umbraco.com/blog/moving-from-webforms-to-mvc/

Hopefully you'll understand we don't want to invest time in the new template editor to make it support a technology we don't think people should use any more.

If you already have them and want to create more of them, set the defaultRenderinEngine to WebForms and everything EXCEPT the template editor will still work. So you can still update them in Visual Studio (or other text editors) but no longer in the backoffice.

Apologies for not listing this as a breaking change.

FYI: I'm setting this to "Fixed" so that it will show up in the list of breaking changes.

Thanks Sebastiaan! I was wanting to move our sites over to MVC anyway. We have a lot of custom user controls that were written for WebForms, but I will use this as a good excuse to start moving that way :)

In fact, I think they will still work as long as there's no actual form submissions then UserControl macros work in MVC templates (I know that sounds a bit horrible but it makes moving to MVC a little easier).

For people who absolutely cannot live without the MasterPages editor, I threw together a quick and dirty editor that will show up in the Settings section, named "MasterPages". It will not do the nesting of masterpages in the tree (of course it will still use masterpage inheriting if you define a MasterPageFile) and there's no nice helper buttons to insert fields and macros etc. But you can do some quick edits and save them from within the backoffice.

Just unzip the attached zip file into your site, if you don't want it any more, delete ~/App_Plugins/MasterEditor and bin/AceUmbraco.dll

After dropping the files in your site, you might have to increase the version in ClientDependency.config by 1.

I've added a screenshot to the issue to to show what it looks like.

@sebastiaan Thank you so much. I don't have the time to learn MVC right now.

Would I still need to create a Template of the same name every time that I upload a MasterPage file. I would think so, or else I can't set permissions on the Document Types. True?

Hi Sebastiaan, Thanks for your prompt reply. I have not done any code change after upgrading from 6.1.6 to 7.6.0. The problem is discussed here http://issues.umbraco.org/issue/U4-9930. If I understand the issue, webforms master pages are no more supported from 7.6.0. Is this true? Does this mean only way for us is to upgrade to MVC? What if my business has no plans to upgrade to MVC in the near future? will I get license support if we are continuing with webforms? I will write the same on the issue 9930.