Admin Layers, move admin branding to a distinct shape - This week in Orchard (31/05/2021)
A new demo about Admin Layers, several performance improvements, and a new AdminBranding shape is waiting for you in our upcoming post! Oh, and have we mentioned that Lombiq is now more than 8 years old? :)
Orchard Core updates
Move admin branding to a distinct shape
Now you will find a brand new AdminBranding shape in the default admin theme of Orchard Core that is about containing the favicon, and the default, clickable Orchard Core logo that redirects the user to the home page of the admin UI (the admin dashboard). And now, because this whole stuff is a new shape, you can easily customize this one too! Check out the updated documentation to read some words about it!
Fix drop widget to empty zone
Someone reported an issue that it's not possible to drag and drop widgets to an empty zone. Now, this has been fixed.
Remove some async-await
It's not a recommendation anymore to remove async/await when it can be removed. In this case here the Task from _session.Query can be returned directly, it doesn't have to be awaited. There is a benefit in terms of allocations but at the same time if there is an exception you lose where it's coming from. And the impact in terms of perf is minimal. So, it's not a recommendation to do it every time.
Adding spatial features to content (Lucene indexed)
You could see a demo a few weeks ago about adding spatial features to content. This module provides a GeoPointField, which can be used to give a geographic position to content. And this has been merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core with nice detailed documentation also! Don't forget to check out the docs to read about Terms specifications, Geo Bounding Box, Geo Distance, and many more!
Reduce string allocations in MediaTokenService and use pooled StringBuilder instances with StringWriter
Now the code is using StringBuilder from the StringBuilderPool instead of using String.Concat(), which is about allocating one buffer. There are other improvements with the queryStringTokenKey, which is not recreating a new string every time, just using the existing one.
StringWriter will create a StringBuilder by using the StringBuilderPool and passing that to the StringWriter. It's not creating a new one, it's just reusing the existing one.
Demos
Admin Layers
People want to change shapes or styles for various things on the admin UI without having a custom admin theme. For example, currently, it is not possible to change the admin panel's logo and icon without a custom theme (set the base theme to Admin). The new Admin Layers feature is very similar to the Admin Templates one. This new one is about working with the layers of the admin theme, which means you can put different kinds of widgets to the zones of the admin theme using different kinds of layers rules. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that's the goal of this one!
Let's say you set up your site using the Blog recipe. After go to the Configuration -> Settings -> Features and find the Admin Layers one which enables admin users to render widgets across pages of the admin based on conditions.
Now, the first thing to do is to set up the available zones for widgets as you would do that in the case of the front-end widgets as well. You can do that under Design -> Settings -> Admin Zones. Let's say we would like to work with the HeadMeta, Footer, Header, and NavbarTop zones for now.
And let's add some layers too! If you navigate to Design -> Admin Widgets, you could see a very-very familiar UI to manage zones and layers. Here we have just added a simple layer called Always that has one boolean condition rule, which is True. Meaning the widgets on this layer will always be rendered.
Now, let's do some testing! Let's say we add a simple Raw Html widget to the NavbarTop zone that is just about containing some bold text. After we will create a new Liquid Widget and render it in the HeadMeta zone. The Liquid Widget is just about containing some styling for the theme:
{% styleblock at:"Head"%}body {background-color: gray !important;}{% endstyleblock %}
Now we have created two widgets that we have displayed on the Always layer of the admin theme. Let's see how our theme looks like!
First, notice the Some text in the NavbarTop zone near the moon icon. This is the Raw HTML widget in the NavbarTop zone. And the new background color is coming from our Liquid Widget.
If you would like to know more about this feature, don't forget to check out the following recording on YouTube!
News from the community
Lombiq is 8 years old!
May 21, 2021, is the 8th anniversary of founding Lombiq! On this special occasion, we have gathered 8 important factors of our company's life. We are glad that we took these steps at that time otherwise we might not be able to celebrate with our strong community here today. Check out our post to see which important factors we gathered together!
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