This latest release of the Digital Experience Accelerator introduces several enhancements, including:

On-demand, Taxonomy-based navigation that, in addition to the existing Structure Group-based navigation, offers a new navigation based on a Taxonomy (i.e. based on Category and Keyword hierarchies). This navigation can be used "on demand", where the nodes in the navigation hierarchy are loaded when requested on an as-needed basis, utilizing the existing navigation APIs and your Views.

A new Audience Manager module, integrating with the SDL Web Audience Manager feature. This adds a Current User Widget to the Header, allowing the visitors to log in with credentials from the Audience Manager database, including a log-out capability.

Support for HTML forms, adding API support for HTTP requests of type POST, and prevention of CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks. Example implementations for this are available in both .NET and Java.

The Digital Experience Accelerator Framework is now clearly separated from optional Views and View Models that are used in its example implementation, by moving these Views and their View Models into a Core Module, which is now equivalent to any other module.

The SDL Digital Experience Accelerator 1.6 now uses the SDL Web 8 Content Interaction Library (CIL) 8.3 from the SDL Web Cloud. 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 8.3 contains earlier CIL hotfixes and performance improvements.

DXA 1.6 is available for SDL Tridion 2013 SP1, SDL Web 8 CU1 and SDL Web Cloud, in both Java and .NET. DXA 1.6 will be the last version supporting SDL Tridion 2013 SP1, support for 2013 SP1 will be dropped in the next release. 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. All the sources remain open and are available on SDL GitHub.