Following the release of SDL Web 8.5 yesterday, we are very proud to announce the availability of SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 1.7. This latest release introduces several enhancements, including:

Support for retrofitting DXA on an existing CM Content Model which doesn't have unique Schema Root Element names. Using "retrofit mode", there is no problem that Schema Root Element names are not unique anymore. So while it is still recommended for new Content Model implementations to have Schema root element names that are unique, DXA 1.7 now can accommodate existing Content Models by ensuring that Schemas and Schema fields are mapped to unique identifiers on the DXA side.

Generic mapping for Keyword fields. Previously, Content Manager Keyword field values could only be mapped to the string, bool and Tag property types of the DXA View Model. These property types cannot always accommodate all of the fields of the Keyword, including custom Keyword metadata fields. As of DXA 1.7, a new subclass of ViewModelis now available called KeywordModel, to whose properties you can map all built-in Keyword fields. As for custom metadata fields, those can be accommodated by creating a subclass of KeywordModel.

The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 1.7 now uses the SDL Web 8.5 Content Interaction Library (CIL). This is compatible with the Content Interaction Services (CIS) from the Cumulative Update 1 for SDL Web 8, as well as the SDL Web Cloud. CIL 8.5 contains earlier CIL hotfixes and performance improvements including a distributed caching (that is, letting multiple instances of a Web application use a single, centralized cache), which DXA can now also utilize.

DXA 1.7 is available for SDL Web 8 Cumulative Update 1, SDL Web 8.5 and SDL Web Cloud, in both Java and .NET. More details about this release are available in the online documentation.

You can download the latest DXA release from our community site, in the Tridion Developers group under eXtensions, or directly from GitHub (.NET and Java), including Maven Central and NuGet. All the sources remain open and are available on SDL GitHub.