Oqtane has been focusing on its runtime capabilities in recent releases, optimizing framework performance and expanding its features in external-facing web scenarios. The 3.0.3 release continues with this theme and includes refinements which are a direct result of production dogfooding experiences with Oqtane.Org, Built On Blazor, and .NET Foundation Project Trends.
Url fragments are internal page references, sometimes called anchors. They usually appear at the end of a URL and begin with a hash (#) character followed by an identifier. They refer to a section within a web page and when they are provided in a Url, the browser looks for an anchor tag in the page with a name attribute matching the fragment specified. Unfortunately, this fundamental web behavior is not natively supported in Blazor applications due to that way that rendering is handled by the various hosting models. As a result, a custom solution was required in Oqtane in order to enable this behavior in a consistent manner. Luckily, JS Interop could be used to provide a seamless anchor navigation experience. This feature can be seen in action when visiting the Oqtane.Org site ie. https://www.oqtane.org/#about.
Meta tags are metadata related to the content of a page. Meta tags are not visible on the page itself, but are included in the page head and are essential in providing additional information to search engines and social platforms about the purpose and meaning of a page. This Open Graph article provides a variety of useful information about meta tags. Oqtane has been enhanced in this release to include support for the specification of meta tags for each page. The meta tags can be managed through the page management feature in the framework and are automatically injected into the page when it is requested.
Oqtane is not a CMS however it does contain a default module which enables administrators to include blocks of text or HTML content on their pages. The Html/Text module has been enhanced in this release to support versioning ie. the ability to preserve each iteration of module content so that it is possible to understand the evolution of content over time and even restore an older version if necessary.
This release includes 20 pull requests by 5 different contributors, pushing the total number of project commits all-time to 2635. The Oqtane framework continues to evolve at a rapid pace to meet the needs of .NET developers. The 3.0.3 release is available for download on GitHub. It is already running in production at https://www.oqtane.org.