Since releasing version 3.0 in coordination with the .NET 6 launch event at .NET Conf, Oqtane has continued to attract industry attention and increase adoption. The 3.0.1 release contains a variety of useful enhancements for both software developers and administrators.
Public facing websites need to be optimized for search engine indexing. This release builds upon the earlier Blazor pre-rendering improvements by ensuring that elements such as the page title, which are critical to SEO, are set properly in the page output. In addition, dynamic page elements which are applicable to an entire site have been migrated to the server rendering process, resulting in a performance benefit for client-site interactions.
Due to the fact that the content and structure of a website changes over time, it is common that a user (or bot) may try to visit a Url which is no longer valid. These are sometimes referred to as broken links and they can be a major source of frustration for both users and administrators. A Url Mapping feature has been added in this release which allows you to automatically identify broken links so that they can be mapped to a valid location. In addition to managing broken links, it is also possible to use the Url Mapping feature for vanity urls and custom workflows as well as providing a seamless user experience when migrating the content of existing websites to Oqtane.
A generally accepted industry metric is that 97% of the traffic in public facing websites are related to anonymous visitors. These include both first-time visitors as well as returning visitors. This release includes the ability to uniquely identify anonymous visitors for your site. The feature provides an administrator with a management user interface to gain real-time insights about their visitors and users. Developers can utilize the API to create personalized experiences for each visitor and leverage the data to create more advanced visualizations.
The Oqtane community continues to offer unique and valuable contributions to the framework. Leigh Pointer submitted some user experience productivity improvements to both the Page and Module management areas, and Pavel Veselý integrated some of the powerful new Blazor capabilities from .NET 6 for error boundaries and dynamic components. Other community members contributed a wide variety of bug fixes and the Discussions areas has provided valuable insights into the innovative ways the community is leveraging the framework. The Github repo reached 1000 stars this past week - a significant milestone in the evolution of an open source project.
This release includes 30 pull requests by 6 different contributors, pushing the total number of project commits all-time to over 2500. The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers. The 3.0.1 release is available for download on Github.