Bloomreach Content V17.0 Release Notes

Overview

Bloomreach Content v17.0 introduces major platform upgrades, new developer tooling, expanded observability, and enhancements for both end users and developers. This release updates the Java and Spring Boot stack, adds OpenTelemetry tracing, modernizes key UI components, and introduces tools to streamline upgrades and performance validation.

All features described below are part of Bloomreach Content unless otherwise specified. For a summary of all releases, see the Release Notes Overview.

Major Updates and New Features

Java 21 and Spring Boot 4 Upgrade

Bloomreach Content v17.0 upgrades the runtime environment from Java 17 to Java 21 LTS (supported through 2030) and migrates to Spring Boot 4. This update ensures ongoing security maintenance, improved performance, and compatibility with current Java tooling.

This is a significant stack change. Spring Boot 4 introduces breaking API changes that may impact custom beans, configurations, and Spring AI connectors. Before upgrading, review and update your project code as required. Refer to the Upgrade Guide for a complete list of required changes.

Bloomreach Content Upgrade Tool

The Bloomreach Content Upgrade Tool is a standalone command-line utility that generates upgrade plans tailored to your project. Instead of following a generic changelog, the tool analyzes your codebase, identifies relevant changes, and guides you through each step, including integration with the Configuration Verifier.

The tool does not require AI. Optionally, you can enable AI-generated guidance (using Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) for manual code changes. The tool also supports MCP mode for use with AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or Cursor. No project data is sent to Bloomreach. The tool is distributed separately via npm (npx @bloomreach/brxm-upgrade) and is not included in the standard Bloomreach Content release artifact. For installation and usage, see the Upgrade Tool documentation.

OpenTelemetry Tracing

Bloomreach Content v17.0 adds native OpenTelemetry support. This integration enables distributed tracing for editorial and production operations, allowing teams to monitor and diagnose issues using existing observability platforms such as Honeycomb, Datadog, Grafana Tempo, Jaeger, New Relic, or any OTLP-compatible backend.

Bloomreach Content enriches traces with CMS-specific context, including the logged-in user, the editorial action, and, for slow requests, a detailed breakdown of internal CMS tasks. This allows direct correlation between backend performance and editorial workflows.

OpenTelemetry tracing is opt-in and requires only configuration changes. For setup instructions, see the OpenTelemetry integration documentation.

Note for Bloomreach Cloud: OpenTelemetry tracing is not currently available for Bloomreach Cloud environments. Support is planned by the end of Q2 2026. Cloud customers seeking tracing capabilities should contact Bloomreach Support.

Bloomreach Content Performance Test Suite

The Bloomreach Content Performance Test Suite is a standalone test kit for validating CMS performance. It measures UI latency (using Playwright) and API load (using Gatling), supports concurrent user scenarios, and compares results against defined baselines. The suite generates dashboards with performance metrics and regression verdicts.

The Performance Test Suite is distributed separately from the Bloomreach Content release artifact. For more details, see the Performance Test Suite documentation.

Workflow Comments

Editors and authors can now add comments when publishing or taking documents offline. This feature provides a lightweight audit trail, visible in the document ribbon, Document Information dialog, Revision History, and workflow request dialogs.

Workflow comments are disabled by default. Enable the feature via configuration. For setup instructions, see the Workflow Commenting feature documentation.

Modernized Channels Overview in Experience Manager

The Channel Overview in Experience Manager has been rebuilt using Angular, replacing the previous ExtJS-based implementation. This update resolves stability issues in channel creation, navigation, browser history, and error handling, resulting in a more reliable Experience Manager for editors.

Essentials Setup Wizard Rebuilt on Angular

The Essentials setup wizard has been rewritten using Angular 21, replacing the legacy AngularJS version. This change aligns the wizard with the rest of the Bloomreach Content frontend and improves maintainability for developers configuring new projects.

Additional Enhancements and Fixes

End User Improvements

Taxonomy

• Renaming taxonomy URL names is now disabled to prevent inconsistencies in taxonomy key references.
• Copy, move, and delete operations on taxonomy documents are now correctly restricted, preventing unintended changes to taxonomy structures and related documents.

Developer Improvements

AI Content Assistant

• Initial configuration bootstrapping for AI features has been improved to simplify new deployments.

Content REST API

• Breaking change: The fields hippostdpubwf:publishedBy and related internal workflow fields are no longer exposed via the Content REST API. This prevents user identity leakage. These fields will be absent from API responses. Delivery applications that rely on these fields will not receive an error, but the fields will be missing. See the Notices section for details.

Platform and Stability

• Publish workflow events now emit null instead of an empty string when appropriate, restoring expected behavior for custom workflow event listeners.
• An InvalidItemStateException that could occur after JCR node access via relative path has been resolved.
• The Chinese (Simplified) UI translation has been removed.
• Numerous third-party libraries have been updated as part of the Spring Boot 4 migration. For a complete list, see the 17.0.0 Detailed Release Notes.

Bloomreach Cloud Updates

OpenTelemetry Log Streaming

Bloomreach Cloud customers can now export application logs to their existing observability platforms using OTLP. Supported platforms include Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana Cloud, and any OTLP-compatible solution.

This feature is opt-in and enabled per stack. For setup instructions, see OpenTelemetry Log Streaming.

To enable this feature, contact Bloomreach Support.

Upgrade Support from Bloomreach Content Experts

Bloomreach Professional Services offers upgrade support for Bloomreach Content projects. The team provides upgrade execution services and an Upgrade Assessment, which delivers a detailed evaluation of your current systems and upgrade requirements within three days.

The Upgrade Assessment report includes:

• Executive summary
• Overview of major changes
• Recommended upgrade procedure
• Comprehensive list of findings

The evaluation fee is fully refundable if you proceed with Professional Services for the upgrade. To request upgrade assistance, contact your account manager.

Notices

Content REST API: Workflow Fields Removed

The following internal workflow fields are no longer returned by the Content REST API in v17.0:

• hippostdpubwf:publishedBy
• hippostdpubwf:depublishedBy
• hippostdpubwf:publicationReason
• hippostdpubwf:depublicationReason

These fields were not part of the public API contract but were previously visible in responses. Their removal prevents user identity leakage.

Impact: Delivery applications that reference these fields will receive no value after upgrading. No error or warning is generated. Review and update your delivery-layer code to remove any dependencies on these fields before upgrading.

Removed Modules

Targeting Demo Support Modules

The hippo-addon-targeting-demo-support module and its submodules (data-loader, data-generator) have been removed. These modules were intended for demo and test data generation only.

Action required: Remove any references to the following artifacts from your project's pom.xml before upgrading:

• com.onehippo.cms7:hippo-addon-targeting-demo-support-data-loader
• com.onehippo.cms7:hippo-addon-targeting-demo-support-data-generator

Projects referencing these artifacts will fail to build with Bloomreach Content 17.0.0.

Chinese (Simplified) UI Translation

The Chinese (Simplified) translation files (_zh variants) have been removed. The CMS UI will default to English for any labels previously translated into Chinese. Custom translations are not affected.

Custom Essentials Plugin Frontend Components

The Essentials setup wizard now uses Angular 21. Custom Essentials plugins that include frontend components built with AngularJS (controllers registered to the hippo.essentials module and HTML fragments under META-INF/resources) are no longer compatible.

Action required: If your project includes custom Essentials plugins with frontend components, rewrite them for Angular 21 before upgrading.

Major Release Information

v17.0.0 is a major release. It introduces breaking changes to the Java runtime, Spring framework versions, and CMS module structure. Review the Upgrade to Bloomreach Content 17 guide thoroughly and plan for additional testing compared to a minor release. For minor version upgrade instructions, see the upgrade overview.

Supported Technologies

For complete system requirements and a maintained compatibility matrix, see the system requirements documentation.

Maintenance and Support Policy

Terminology

• Supported version: Customers receive helpdesk support as described in their SLA. Bug fixes for supported but non-maintained versions are only provided in maintained versions.
• Maintained version: Product code is updated with security and bug fixes. System requirements for third-party libraries are kept current. Support is limited to certified system requirement providers.
• End-of-life version: Versions that are neither maintained nor supported. These may be available in archives but can be removed without notice.

Support Status Table

Version	Planned end date of Standard Support	Planned end date of Premium Plus Support	Original major version release date
Latest 14.x	December 2024	December 2025	Dec 2019
Latest 15.x	December 2025	December 2026	April 2022
Latest 16.x	December 2026	December 2027	June 2024
Latest 17.x	December 2027	December 2028	May 2026

Supported versions may vary based on contractual agreements. Versions not listed are end-of-life.

Security Notes

This release updates third-party dependencies with known vulnerabilities. Keep your systems current with announced product releases to maintain security.

Availability

Bloomreach Content v17.0.0 is available as of May 4, 2026. The open source release will be published approximately two years later, in accordance with the release policy.