Release 1.6.0 - Sagarmatha

Summary

Version 1.6.0 focuses on performance, templating enhancements, and richer recommendation capabilities, while tightening payloads and improving documentation. The update introduces Redis-backed caching for catalogs and recommendations, a modern templating approach with Jinja2, expanded recommendation catalogs with liked/loved signals, and several small but meaningful improvements to payloads and docs.

Features

• Integrate Jinja2 templating engine and restructure HTML components to enable cleaner templates and easier customization of the UI.
• Add Redis-backed caching for catalog retrieval to speed up responses and reduce backend load.
• Extend Redis caching to cover the recommendation services, improving latency and scalability for catalog-driven recommendations.
• Introduce liked and loved catalogs in the recommendation system, enabling richer user sentiment signals across all recommendations.
• Documentation improvements: README now includes status badges for quick visibility.

Improvements

• Refined caching logic and updated response headers for catalog retrieval to ensure correct caching behavior and better client-side caching semantics.
• Remove unnecessary last updated date from manifest requests to reduce payload size and bandwidth.
• Overall performance improvements driven by Redis caching and smarter data access patterns.

Bug Fixes

• Addon updates: fix ensures that the description field is replaced rather than appended when updating an addon, preserving accurate metadata.

Documentation

• Add issue templates for bug reports and feature requests to streamline contributor workflows.
• Update README with badges and clearer contribution guidelines.