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We are pleased to announce a new release of cloudscribe at version 8.1. This minor version release addresses a number of issues, bugs and feature enhancements (see the release notes below).

We've released a new version of the cloudscribe Visual Studio template. Reviews are always appreciated!

We recommend that the VSIX template should be installed into Visual Studio 2022 (version 17.8 onwards).

Older versions of the VSIX template remain available here: https://github.com/cloudscribe/cloudscribe.templates/tree/master/Archive.

As always, feedback is welcome in the forums or on GitHub.

Release Notes

version 8.1 - 6 May 2025

@cloudscribe/cloudscribe.Web.Navigation

• #135: Fixed an issue causing incorrect child page sub-menus when the URL ends with a trailing slash. This ensures consistent navigation tree behavior across routes with or without trailing slashes.

@cloudscribe/cloudscribe

• #1073: Introduced a reserved word list for tenant site names to prevent conflicts. For example, "development" is now restricted to avoid issues with accessing developer sections.
• #1063: Added a feature to export user data from the User Manager, including basic attributes such as First Name, Surname, Display Name, Email Address, and Created Date.
• #798: Enhanced the file manager with the ability to move files between folders, eliminating the need to delete and re-upload files.
• #762: Updated the main heading on /privacy and other cloudscribe core pages to use <h1> tags or allow configurability, replacing the previous <h2> implementation.
• #942: Extended reCAPTCHA protection to the "Forgot Your Password?" page to mitigate risks associated with automated email spam and enhance security.
• #935: Resolved an issue where the returnurl parameter was ignored on the login page if the user was already logged in. Now, the intended return behavior is consistently applied.
• #929: Improved the user experience for sites with social sign-in by hiding password management options (/manage/setpassword and /manage/changepassword) when database authentication is disabled.
• #924: Fixed a UI issue in the Page Manager tree where togglers were inheriting an underline style and made them larger and easier to click.
• #959: Fixed a crash when saving user details with a date of birth in PostgreSQL. Ensured compatibility with timestamp with time zone by enforcing UTC for DateTime values.
• #1056: Corrected the behavior of the "Clear Image" button to ensure it functions as expected after dragging and dropping an image.
• #1034: Added a "View Activity" link on the Manage User page to improve navigation to the User Activity page.

@cloudscribe/cloudscribe.SimpleContent

• #487: Added options in CMS settings to display created and last edited information (author and timestamps) below content. These settings include configurable defaults.
• #549: Updated the LinksRenderPartial to align with Bootstrap 5 standards. Replaced <h2> and float-based styling with semantic markup and modern flex layouts.

Upgrading an existing cloudscribe site

We recommend manually editing the .csproj file of your solution (or each of them, if you have multiple projects). to upgrade the package references:

<PackageReference Include="cloudscribe.Core.SimpleContent" Version="8.1.*" />
<PackageReference Include="cloudscribe.SimpleContent.Web" Version="8.1.*" />
<PackageReference Include="cloudscribe.Core.SimpleContent.CompiledViews.Bootstrap5" Version="8.1.*" />

(and so on for all cloudscribe packages)

There should be no breaking changes from our previous v8.0 release.

Wow, it has been 11 months since my last blog post. Time flies, and a lot has been accomplished in that time. I really should have been blogging about various things along the way, but today I will try to provide a summary of news and progress for cloudscribe.

Open Source Improvements

Dynamic Authorization Policies is a new open source project from cloudscribe that started life as an add on product but was recently made open source on github. It allows you to manage ASP.NET Core authorization policy requirements from the UI. cloudscribe Core always provided management of user role membership and custom claims, but typically authorization policies are coded up in startup code which means that in order to change them you have to change the code, build, and redeploy your application. So you could create new roles from the cloudscribe core UI but you could not use the new role in a policy without going through build and deploy steps. Dynamic Authorization Policies lets you manage policies from the UI and therefore provides the final piece of the puzzle for managing access to your site content and features.

cloudscribe Core has some new improvements, including support for LDAP authentication, this work was sponsored by Exegesis Spatial Data Management. We also added an option to force only one web browser session per user, and an option to require 2 factor authentication.

PwaKit is a new open source project that facilitates building progressive web apps that work offline and support push notification. This work was sponsored by our friends at Exegesis Spatial Data Management.

A whole new way of doing localized content has been implemented in SimpleContent but needs documentation and a sample project. There is a github issue about it here and it was sponsored by Domain Integrators.

Commercial Products

In addition to our open source progress, we've also shipped several commercial add on features.

cloudscribe Forms and Surveys Solution provides a super user friendly drag and drop form designer, and provides a content template for SimpleContent that allows you to put a form/survey on content pages. This youtube video gives a tour of the product.

cloudscribe "TalkAbout" Comment System provides a self hosted GDPR friendly alternative to 3rd party comment systems such as Disqus. If you use a free service chances are that you and your web visitors are the product. Such services add numerous 3rd party tracking cookies and collect data about you and your users for their own purposes. All these extra tracking cookies complicate your ability to meet GDPR requirements. By using a self hosted comment system instead you can avoid all those 3rd party tracking cookies and more easily achieve GDPR compliance.

cloudscribe "TalkAbout" Forums provides a self hosted, GDPR friendly question and answer style forum to help you build a community. We just launched our Community Support Forum recently using this.

cloudscribe Membership Paywall provides the tools you need to monetize your premium content. You protect your premium content with roles, and users who purchase membership get automatically granted the needed roles to access your content and automatically removed from the roles if their membership expires. It provides automatic membership renewal using stripe for payment processing.

All of our add on products are free to try, and are included in our latest project template for Visual Studio, so you can easily create web apps with the nuget packages for these features all wired up for you. They do have some nag alerts that are shown every few web requests, by purchasing a license file you can remove the nag alerts.