Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting:

• Running Orchard on two nodes: this is a tricky thing but in this discussion there some good tips
• Community features in Orchard: a lot of built-in and third-party modules bring "social" functionality to Orchard. You won't be able to just install Contrib.Facebook but there are some decent fundamentals.
• A tale of database table locking, transactions and low-level data access in Orchard: sometimes you just have to bury deeper.

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Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting:

• "Record persisting advices": checklist if you want to store something in a low-level (non-content part) record
• "Adding empty part to type fails": always create a driver for your part
• "Records only in Models namespace: good?": remember to put your records under the Models namespace
• "Indices with SchemaBuilder": you can add database indices from migrations, but only from AlterTable

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Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting:

• "Passing my own data types to a view": using form field html helpers with dynamic models and in alternates defined with the shape attribute
• "Dynamically built html with Clay": capturing the generated html coming from a shape
• "How to access fields of a content item again?": ways of accessing a content field's value by using dynamic or statically typed extension methods

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It's not obvious that themes can have dependencies in the same way modules do - here's a blog post about this.

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Dependency injection through constructor injection is a technique used throughout Orchard: you can't really write an Orchard module without injecting some services. Dependency inection and the special kind of dependencies, event handlers are explained in the Orchard Docs.

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The Orchard Cheatsheet is a nice little API reference for some lesser known objects, made by Orchard's lead developer, Sebastien Ros. The cheatsheet's list only contains elements of the API that are accessible from (sometimes very specific) shape templates (well, ExtensionDescriptor seems to be an exception), but e.g. WorkContext is something you definitely encounter elsewhere too.

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Bertrand Le Roy's not-so-recent article "Orchard Extensibility" in MSDN Magazine explains the various aspects of - surprise - extending Orchard. The article mainly covers Orchard's content model, its concepts and flexibility: something we all love in Orchard. Bertrand also lists some other important parts of the Orchard API, all worth knowing.

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"Writing an Orchard Webshop Module from scratch" is an excellent, 11-part (planned for 15) tutorial on Orchard module development by Sipke Schoorstra. Everyone who has ever written at least a short tutorial will feel what amount of work such a series contains: not surprisingly it's well worth reading, even for ones already somewhat familiar with Orchard module development.

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These modules are really useful if you want to squeeze out the performance of your Orchard website:

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Some useful links in the topic:

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A nice checklist about what not to forget when creating a content part at Orchard Hungary.

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A very useful video by Bertrand Le Roy. Migrating an SQL CE database, the simple-to-use self-contained database format used by Orchard, to a standard SQL Server database is a necessary step when your site grows. SQL CE is great for development and for small sites, but the full SQL Server DBs are much better performing.

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