We have released a new version of Digital Experience Accelerator for .NET. It introduces key features that enable you to better manage and present a mix of content from both SDL Tridion Sites and SDL Tridion Docs on your website.

Content Mashup

Back when DXA 1.8 was released, it introduced structured content delivery based on DITA standards. Now, we have gone even further and introduced a way to blend different types of content. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which a company wants to show product details together with marketing content, meaning there is a need to display technical documentation on the page as well. In the past, the typical solution was to host different websites and to deliver these different types of content with a link to redirect the user to the documentation portal. Even then, the user would have to search again for his specific requirement in a particular product and end up with a 100-page product PDF to search in. Have you had a similar experience in the past?  Did this frustrate you, and did it feel like a bad experience?

This is what DXA 2.1 addresses: from now on, you can create websites that blend traditional marketing content and structured content, thus providing a continuous customer experience. Your one webpage can both describe the product and reveal some details from documentation. You can either pull the entire topic from your documentation on the webpage or you can extract specific sections of it using semantic mapping, which supports structured content from now on.

Dynamic Documentation

Blending content means having two sources of data, one published from SDL Tridion Docs and the other from SDL Tridion Sites. Sometimes, having to create a documentation portal creates a lot of overhead. Dynamic Documentation is a set of modules that can be used together to build websites where your documentation will be hosted. It has a rich React JavaScript UI, which is hosted using only DXA. You can customize it to your needs by changing the layout, styles, logos and much more. It has important features like content presentation, grouping documentation around your products, and documentation search, and it even allows your users to submit comments about the content.

Native regions support

Our SDL Tridion Sites 9 release introduces Native Regions. A region is an area of the web page that contains a set of related content items. Predefined Regions provide page creators with guidance about what content is expected on the page. We have made changes to support this key feature in DXA as well.

Public Content API client

The newest release of the Content Delivery functionality exposes a new API called Public Content API, which is based on GraphQL technology. It is an important change in how systems can interact with the Content Delivery back end. It was based earlier on OData, which is now replaced with GraphQL which significantly improves productivity and data retrieval. The biggest advantage working with the Public Content API is the ability to work with a blend of structured and traditional content. DXA 2.1 ships with a new Public Content API client to leverage these capabilities.

NOTES

• DXA 2.1 works with SDL Tridion Sites 9 only. We are working on an SDL Web 8.5 compatibility pack, which will be available as part of the DXA 2.2 release. 
• The DXA 2.1 release is for .NET Web Applications only. Feature parity for Java Web Applications will be achieved in scope of the DXA 2.2 release.

You can download the DXA.NET 2.1 release from the SDL AppStore. All the sources remain open and are available on SDL GitHub.