Optimizely Release Notes — September-December 2022

Blend reviews Optimizely’s release notes every few months to better understand how changes will affect existing and future projects. With the holidays and the end-of-year bustle, we let the last few months get away from us — so, here are the major new releases over the last quarter of 2022.

For the full list of releases, visit Optimizely’s Release Notes. And for more information on how these changes might affect your project, or to reach out to Blend Interactive’s Gold-level development team, contact us today!

CMS 12 Additions.

Now that CMS 12 has had a year and a half to stabilize, a few features of CMS 11 have been reintroduced the newer version.

• Reports Center — The Reports tab has been re-introduced, which includes reports such as Not Published Pages, Published Pages, Changed Pages, Expired Pages, Simple Addresses and Link Status. (CMS-17340) — Product: EPiServer CMS UI v 12.12.0
• Plug-in Manager — The plug-in manager lets admins view which plugins have been implemented, as well as which versions of plugins are installed. (CMS-24209) — Product: EPiServer CMS UI v 12.13.0

Speed and performance upgrades.

Two speed and performance upgrades were implemented in Q4:

Improve build speed with incremental builds.

From Optimizely’s release notes:

Improved the build speed in projects by copying shell module files when they change or are missing.

Formerly, these files were copied and overwritten on every build with the CopyZipFiles.target being executed. In projects where zip modules files are included in the repository (such as modules/_protected/CMS.zip or Shell.zip), those files are no longer overwritten on each build.

Optimizely projects on .NET core should exclude all modules from the source repository because those files are automatically recreated when missing during the dotnet build.

(CMS-20793) — Product: Episerver CMS UI v 12.11.0

Improve performance in Visitor Groups.

From Optimizely’s release notes:

When working with Visitor Groups, criteria were loaded in one operation from the back end. Performance can be affected by many criteria or the performance of a specific implementation. Loading Visitor Groups was split into two steps to improve performance:

• load the criteria group
• load the specific criteria within that group once it is selected

(CMS-24681) — Product: Episerver CMS UI v 12.14.0

Support for list properties.

Optimizely has added support for list properties — including for blocks — allowing developers to define list properties in certain areas. This includes:

• ContentDefinitions (HAPI-2416) — Product: EPiServer Content Delivery API v 3.6.0
• ContentDelivery API (HAPI-2422) — Product: EPiServer Content Delivery API v 3.6.0
• ContentManagement API (HAPI-2421) — Product: EPiServer Content Delivery API v 3.6.0

.NET 6 upgrades.

Additionally, Optimizely is continuing to make upgrades to bring the CMS and its tools up to .NET 6. Over the past few months, the following have received their .NET 6 upgrade:

• Optimizely Content Manager — Added support for .NET 6 to Optimizely Content Manager package of Optimizely Content Cloud (CMS). (CMS-24975) — Product: EPiServer Labs Content Manager v 1.1.0
• Google Analytics — Google Analytics is supported on .NET 6 (GA-102) — Product: EPiServer Google Analytics v 3.0.0
• Connect for Campaign — Connect for Campaign is now supported for ASP.NET Core (.NET 6) (CAMP-163) — Product: EPiServer Connect For Campaign v 4.0.0

Additional features and bug fixes.

There are always bug fixes and minor functionality changes. Rather than list the rest, feel free to visit the release notes page and filter by date.