The 6.1.2 release is a maintenance release which includes usability, security and performance improvements.
Deploy To Azure
Microsoft Azure is a popular option for hosting software applications. Azure supports ARM templates which allow you to declaratively create and deploy infrastructure. Oqtane has included an ARM template for a number of years, however it had not been maintained regularly and was no longer compatible with the latest Azure APIs. In Oqtane 6.1.2 the Azure ARM template was updated to streamline the installation process:
This also includes the addition of an Azure SQL database provider to simplify the configuration of the database settings:
Robots.txt
A robots.txt file provides guidance to search engine crawlers (or bots) about which pages or sections of a website they should or should not crawl and index. This conceot has become even more important with the emergence of AI bots which scrape content from websites for the purposes of populating their large language models (LLMs). In Oqtane 6.1.2 it is now possible to customize the robots.txt instructions for each site in your installation.
External Login For Host Users
Oqtane has included support for remote login integration using OIDC/OAuth2 for many years. However due to the fact that Oqtane is a multi-tenant solution, users with host privileges were restricted due to the fact that they have elevated access to all of the sites within an installation. But for environments which have many affiliated sites that all share the same external identity service, there was a need to support host users. So Oqtane 6.1.2 now includes a new external login option to allow host roles.
Security
This release has been upgraded to the latest .NET SDK version 9.0.4 which includes security patches for any issues identified in prior .NET 9 SDK releases from Microsoft.
Open Source
To date, the open source project has recorded over 2900 pull requests from 58 contributors and has published 54 official releases, which ranks it among the most active open source projects within the .NET Foundation. The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of the .NET community. The 6.1.2 release is available for download on Github and is running in production at https://www.oqtane.org, https://www.blazorcms.net, and https://www.blazorkit.net.
