Xperience Community: Sustainability

Description

A community-driven open-source package that brings sustainability insights and audits to Xperience by Kentico, inspired by the brilliant work of the Umbraco Community Sustainability Team, and the Umbraco.Community.Sustainability package. 🌿

For more details about this package, check out Bringing Sustainability Insights to Xperience by Kentico which provides more background information around the package and its origin.

Library Version Matrix

Xperience Version	Library Version
>= 30.12.0	3.x
>= 30.4.2	1.x - 2.x

Dependencies

• ASP.NET Core 8.0
• Xperience by Kentico

Package Installation

Add the package to your application using the .NET CLI

dotnet add package XperienceCommunity.Sustainability

Quick Start

1. Install NuGet package above.

2. Register the Sustainability services using builder.Services.AddXperienceCommunitySustainability():

   // Program.cs
   
   var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
   
   builder.Services.AddKentico();
   
   // ...
   
   builder.Services.AddXperienceCommunitySustainability(builder.Configuration);

3. The Sustainability tab will automatically appear on content pages in the Xperience admin interface.

Note: Playwright browsers (Chromium) are automatically installed on first application startup. The installation path defaults to App_Data/playwright unless you're hosting on a UNC path.

Features

Carbon Emissions Calculation

The package uses the Sustainable Web Design Model v4 (SWDM v4) from The Green Web Foundation to calculate carbon emissions. Carbon ratings (A+ through F) follow the official Digital Carbon Ratings methodology.

Green Hosting Detection

The package automatically checks if your website is hosted on a green energy provider using The Green Web Foundation's database. This affects the carbon calculation:

• Green hosting: Uses renewable energy intensity values (lower emissions)
• Standard hosting: Uses global grid intensity values
• Unknown: When verification fails, conservative estimates are used

The hosting status is displayed in the Sustainability report with three possible states:

• ● Green hosting - Site uses renewable/green energy
• ● Standard hosting - Site uses standard grid energy
• ● Unknown hosting - Unable to verify hosting provider

Sustainability Report

Once installed, a new tab appears for each page in your web channels. The Sustainability tab allows content editors and marketers to see and benchmark page weight and carbon emissions, which is then converted to a carbon rating for individual pages.

Each report includes:

• Carbon Rating: Letter grade (A+ through F) based on grams CO₂ per page view
• CO₂ Emissions: Total carbon emissions with hosting status indicator
• Page Weight: Total size of all resources loaded
• Resource Breakdown: Categorized by type (Images, Scripts, CSS, etc.) with individual file sizes
• Optimization Tips: Xperience-specific recommendations for reducing page weight
• PDF Export: Download complete sustainability reports as PDF for sharing and documentation

Historical Tracking

Track sustainability improvements over time with comprehensive historical reporting:

• Trend Analysis: Two side-by-side charts showing CO₂ emissions and page weight trends over time
• Report History: View all previous sustainability reports for a page with collapsible cards showing key metrics
• Pagination: Load historical reports in batches to efficiently browse through your sustainability history
• Before/After Comparison: Compare current and historical reports to measure the impact of optimizations

Configuration

The package can be configured using the Sustainability section in your appsettings.json file.

{
  "Sustainability": {
    "TimeoutMilliseconds": 60000,
    "PlaywrightBrowserPath": "/custom/path/to/playwright/browsers",
    "EnableBrowserConsoleLogging": false
  }
}

Configuration Options

Option	Description	Default
TimeoutMilliseconds	Timeout in milliseconds for waiting for sustainability data to be collected from the page.	60000 (60 seconds)
PlaywrightBrowserPath	Custom path where Playwright browsers should be installed. Only required when hosting on UNC paths (network shares starting with \\). For standard hosting, browsers are automatically installed in App_Data/playwright.	null
EnableBrowserConsoleLogging	Enable browser console logging to Kentico Event Log for debugging purposes. When enabled, all console messages from the headless browser are logged to help troubleshoot issues.	false

Note on UNC Hosting: When hosting on UNC paths (network shares), you must configure PlaywrightBrowserPath or the application will throw an error during startup. This setting is ignored for standard hosting scenarios.

Contributing

Feel free to submit issues or pull requests to the repository, this is a community package and everyone is welcome to support.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.md for more information.

⭐ Support

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