Adding SupportedCultures and DefaultCulture to the Culture filter; new AddDisplayDriver Service Collection Extension, and a demo about the upcoming MateAdmin admin theme are the topics for this week. Let's check them out in detail!

This week's topics include auto-attaching the DashboardPart to content types with the DashboardWidget stereotype and supporting randomly ordering results in SQL queries. Don't forget to check out our newest Orchard Nuggets post about adding import/export to an ASP.NET Core app! Let's see the details!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 2.1 is now available! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core. In the upcoming weeks, we will check out the newest features and additions of Orchard Core 2.1. Let's just get right into the news!

When working with an ASP.NET Core application, it’s often necessary to move various content or configurations between different environments or back up critical information. Whether you’re setting up a new site, migrating content, or synchronizing data across multiple instances, the Orchard Core Deployment feature can simplify the process. This feature provides an easy solution for importing and exporting data.Are you new to Orchard Core? It's a great open-source framework and CMS built on ASP.NET Core. Check out the official getting started docs.Let’s say you manage multiple sites for clients. You might have a standard set of content (like sample blog posts, landing pages, or settings) to help clients get started. With Orchard Core Deployment, you can create these once, export them, and import them into each new Orchard Core instance to streamline the onboarding process. A similar example would be to move content or configuration between a staging and production app.To get started, go to Configuration → Features and search for “Deployment”. Some features will also enable others explicitly. We will go through each feature and explain what they do. Deployment: Offers a framework for importing and exporting recipes, JSON files containing configuration and content. This feature is the foundation of deployment (how we call export-import) in Orchard Core, allowing for the structured export and import of content, technical configuration, and user-editable settings for entire sites or specific components.Remote Deployment: Extends the deployment feature by allowing content export and import to and from a remote server. This feature is useful when managing Orchard Core installations across multiple environments, enabling direct deployment to remote instances, without downloading and uploading JSON files.Add Content To Deployment Plan: This feature adds an action in the content item action list to include specific content items in a deployment plan. This is useful when you want to select specific items to deploy without including the entire site’s content.Export Content To Deployment Target: Adds an option to the content item action list that allows you to directly export content items to a specified deployment target (including downloading the recipe, thus basically the content item inside a JSON file locally).View Or Download Content As JSON: Provides an action in the content item action list to view or download content as JSON files. This feature is helpful for reviewing content item details or troubleshooting.Here is an example of all the content item list actions that are added by these features:These actions focus on single content items and they are really simple. “View as JSON” and “Download as JSON” options are self-explanatory. If you select “Add to Deployment Plan” you will get a list of your current deployment plans and a default one will be created (“Export content to deployment plan target”):“Export to Deployment Target” will list the deployment targets. The default one is “File Download”:But what is a deployment plan? It’s a collection of steps that together produce a recipe JSON file. You can have multiple deployment plans. Let’s create one! Go to Configuration → Import/Export → Deployment Plans. Here you can see your deployment plans, rename them (with “Edit”), delete them, and modify them (“Manage Steps”).image alt="Deployment plans inside menu"]BlogPost/orchard-nuggets/2024/how-to-add-import-export-to-an-asp-net-core-app/deployment-plans-inside-menu.png[/image]Click on the “Add Deployment Plan” button. Here you can name your new deployment plan.After that, you can create the plan, and then you will see it in the list. Now click on the “Manage Steps” button for your deployment plan. You will see this screen, but it’s empty since you need to click on the “Add Step” button to add steps:Here you will see all the available steps:They have descriptions, but just to name a few important ones:All Content: Exports all the content items of the system.Content: Exports all content items for specified content types.Content Item: Exports a specified content item.All Features: Exports the state of all features, ensuring the same features are enabled or disabled across sites.We have two Page content items in our case, so let’s export those with the “My second deployment plan”.Add the “Content” step. Then select the Page content type. Additionally, you can check the “Export As Setup Recipe” option if the data should be exported as a Setup recipe. A setup recipe in Orchard Core is a JSON file that contains instructions for setting up content, configuration, and features on a new or existing Orchard Core instance, structured to automate the setup of a site. It’s almost the same as a recipe that you can export with the Deployment feature, just it needs to contain everything to set up a site, not just e.g. a couple of pages.After that, you can add the step by clicking on “Create” and execute the plan with “Execute”:When executing you can again select the target. The default option here is the previously mentioned “File Download” to download the deployment plan locally. This will download a ZIP file that has the “Recipe.json” file inside. This will contain in our case all the page content items.Okay, but how do you import? Go to Configuration → Import/Export. You will have multiple options:JSON Import: Here you can directly insert your Recipe.json file. You can copy the file's content, or you can also just drag the file there. The content will be visible as JSON and you can edit it before importing. In this example, we used the recipe which was inside the ZIP that we downloaded from “My second deployment plan”.Package Import: Imports a complete package (ZIP file) containing multiple JSON files, media files (yes you can export media files, by adding the Media step), and other resources. So this is best for large-scale site migrations or complete environment setups. You just need to select the ZIP file, then click on “Import”:In our case, this will throw an error but this is because we already have the two pages (thus the two permalinks of the pages are already in use), but if you import this package in another application that has the Page content type, it will work. But if it doesn’t have the Page content type, you can just add the “Replace Content Definitions” step in your plan, which will also export the content type after you choose it.But what if you want to import to a remote instance? If you have the Orchard Core Deployment Remote enabled you will see two more options under Import/Export: “Remote Clients” and “Remote Instances”.Under “Remote Clients” you can add your remote clients:You will need to set a “Client Name” and an “Api Key”. This will come from the client app. So for example, if you want to import from staging to production, you will need to go to production and create the client.After that, you can enter your staging site, and under “Remote Instances” you can add the instance.You will need to set a name (it’s just for display and can be anything) and a URL (which can be copied from under “Remote Clients” for example in your production app if you are importing to production).Then you will need to set the client name and the API key. These are the ones that you set first in “Remote Clients” in the other app.After that, the instance will be available as a target when exporting something (so it would be imported right into the target).Returning to the example at the beginning:Let’s say you manage multiple sites for clients. You might have a standard set of content (like sample blog posts, landing pages, or settings) to help clients get started.With Orchard Core Deployment, you can create the “template” of these sites, with the necessary items and settings, then export them into a recipe. After that, you can send that to your clients. Or Orchard Core Remote Deployment you can even export the recipe right to your clients' app.Orchard Core’s Deployment features make it easy to move content and configuration across environments or different sites. Whether you're migrating data or synchronizing settings, these tools simplify the process. Want to see these features in action? Check out our tutorial video to learn how to set up and use Orchard Core Deployment features!Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

New NamedRecipeStepHandler base class and users with permission can disable Two-Factor Authentication are the topics for this week. Don't forget to check out our newest Orchard Nuggets post about how to add an audit trail to an ASP.NET Core app! Let's see the details!

Don't configure JsonOptions by default, and introducing DeploymentSourceBase to simplify DeploymentSource are the topics for this week. All of the recordings of Orchard Harvest 2024 are up on YouTube! Check out our post for the details!

Add deployment for Microsoft Account, deprecate Site Owner permission, and retain Administrator Role as a System Role, and our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution is updated to Orchard Core 2.0! Check out our post for the details!

Adding content item and widget alternates based on the alias and slug, retiring AssignRoles and AssignRole_{RoleName} permissions, and a demo about the URL Rewriting Module are the topics for this week. Let's check them out in detail!

When you have an ASP.NET Core application, that publishes content often and has different users, it’s a good idea to keep track of what is happening in the app: What changes? What content gets deleted or published by who? Who logged in, and when, did somebody fail to log in repeatedly using a wrong password? Who changed the settings?For example: Imagine you're managing a news portal where multiple articles are being written and published daily. One day, an article titled "Breaking News: Major Policy Change Announced" was accidentally deleted. It was a high-traffic piece, and its sudden disappearance created confusion among readers and the team. As an administrator or perhaps an owner, you want to restore the article, then find out what happened and who made this change. The answer is: Orchard Core and its Audit Trail module.Are you new to Orchard Core? It's a great open-source framework and CMS built on ASP.NET Core. Check out the official getting started docs.The Audit Trail module logs key changes and events in the system, such as content creation, deletion, and login failures. It also allows tracking changes to content, restoring previous versions, and recovering deleted items. It’s all extensible too, so you can add more features with some coding. Let’s see how to use it!First, go to Configuration → Features and make sure the Audit Trail feature is enabled. Optionally, if you also want to track user events (like somebody logging in etc.) you can enable the Users Audit Trail feature too. Please note that enabling the Users Audit Trail feature will automatically enable the base Audit Trail feature, as it is a dependency of the Users Audit Trail. After this, you can access the audit trail settings under Configuration → Settings → Audit Trail. You can see three tabs on the top: Events, Trimming, and Content. Let’s start with Events. Here you can see the events that will trigger an audit trail record, and by default, all of them are enabled. The first set of events is tied to content, so content item creation, removal, etc. You can disable any of those if you want. The second set of events is for the user. This set of events only appears if you enable the Users Audit Trail feature too. These are for user activities, so login, failed login, etc. You can also select to record the client's IP address. We recommend erring on side of caution, and starting with everything enabled, and only disable certain events if it turns out that they’re just noise for your site.Now take a look at the other tab, Trimming. If a site has a lot of activity, perhaps it’s good to delete audit trail logs after a year or so, since the records can eat up a lot of space in the database (it won’t really get slower, but depending on your hosting provider, you may need to pay more). The trimming setting allows you to do that. The default trimming option is 90 days. So any audit trail event that is logged and older than 90 days will be deleted from the database. To avoid trimming you can select the Disable trimming task option. In the Last run field, you can see the most recent time the trimming task was executed.Now, check the content tab. Here you can see the types of content for which events are logged. You can freely disable or enable any of them. In our example, some are enabled, but some are disabled. This is because we configured the audit trail settings in the startup recipe. For example, see this startup recipe in our open-source Lombiq Walkthroughs module. Of course, if you have different content types than our example site, you will see them on this screen. But remember, if a content type is disabled here, its events won’t be recorded (like deletion). Not all content types may be important for you to track. For example, if you're not actively using a particular content type, you might want to disable the logging of it to reduce unnecessary noise. Only track what’s necessary to balance performance and insight. For instance, in the image, just to name one, the tracking of the Layout Injection content type is disabled. This is because it’s a widget that is only used in one place, and it won’t be updated ever likely.Additionally turning on the Audit Trail feature will add a content part called Audit Trail part. This part as the description says: “Allows editors to enter a comment to be saved into the Audit Trail event when saving a content item.” If you add this part to the content type, you will see a new field for a comment, what you can use to add some explanation about the current content change. Staying with the news portal example, each time an editor revises, they can leave a comment in the audit trail explaining what was changed and why. For example, "I reworked the intro paragraph for clarity." This is all good, but how one can see the actual logs? Well, it’s pretty simple, now there is a new tab in the admin menu called Audit Trail. In this example, we had a page content type and audit trail turned on from the beginning. When I set up the site I created an admin user and I logged in. After that, I created a page content item, published it, and deleted it. You can restore deleted content items from the audit trail, so that’s what I did next. Then I renamed the title of the page. You can see all that from the logs: Returning to the example at the beginning:One day, an article titled "Breaking News: Major Policy Change Announced" was accidentally deleted.If the audit trail was turned on for that content type, now there is a solution! Go to the audit trail logs, you will see who deleted it and you can also restore it, correcting all the mistakes.For more audit trail features check out our open-source Orchard Core extension for the Audit Trail module: Lombiq Audit Trail Extensions. Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

The new AddShapeTableProvider extension method and the new External Authentication Feature are the topics for this week. Don't forget to check out our newest Orchard Nuggets post about how to add workflows to an ASP.NET Core app! Let's see the details!