/home is not server-side rendered (content loaded only via CSR)

[saschaszott]

Describe the bug

Despite Server-Side Rendering (SSR) being enabled, the homepage (/home) does not appear to be rendered on the server.

When inspecting the HTML source of /home, the dynamic content displayed on the homepage (e.g. item metadata) is not present in the initial HTML response. Instead, the content is only loaded later via Client-Side Rendering (CSR) in the user’s browser.

As a result, the homepage content is not visible without JavaScript enabled, even though SSR is configured and active. This could negatively impact web crawling, SEO and accessibility.

Steps to Reproduce

1. (if SSR is not enabled; default in production mode) Enable SSR in config.yml
2. Access the homepage at /home
3. View the page source (not the DOM inspector)
4. Observe that the dynamic homepage content (item metadata) is missing
5. (optionally) Disable JavaScript in the browser and reload /home
6. Observe that the homepage content is not displayed

Expected Behavior

If SSR is enabled, the homepage (/home) should also be rendered server-side, including its dynamic content.

[tdonohue]

@saschaszott : I just tried this out today and I'm not able to reproduce this on demo.dspace.org or sandbox.dspace.org:

1. Visit https://demo.dspace.org/home or https://sandbox.dspace.org/home
2. Turn off Javascript in browser
3. Reload page --> SSR works and I still see the content.

The default SSR configs also don't exclude /home from SSR. See https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/main/src/environments/environment.production.ts#L13-L34

Is this maybe a bug we've already fixed??