Convert Themes views to shapes, Orchard Core Commerce 2.0 - This week in Orchard (26/04/2024)
Convert Themes views to shapes, improving notification filter performance, and announcing the 2.0 release of the Orchard Core Commerce project are the topics for this week! Without further ado, let's get started!
Orchard Core updates
Convert Themes views to shapes
Before this change, there was no flexible way to contribute to the output of the Themes views. For example, there was no way to inject a "Customize" button next to the Enable/Disable button to allow customizing the appearance.
The goal of this change is to convert the concrete view of the Themes view to shapes so we can inject shapes into the output. As you can see, the outcome is the same. The only difference is that people can inject shapes into variance zones now.
Improve notification filter performance
After the move to System.Text.Json some metrics went up. This fixed the lock contentions and large object heaps. Plus, some other GC stats are also better. The creation of JsonSerializerOptions uses a weak reference and locks internally so they shouldn't be created too often. The NotifyFilter was created then eagerly while not necessary. Now it's only on demand with some extra caching.
The NotifyFilter class is a filter, meaning it will be invoked in every request. Orchard Core will invoke its OnHandlerExecuting method. And on every request, it was creating a new filter instance and it was then creating a new JsonSerializerOptions. It's creating a new one because it needs to set a dynamic converter, a converter that needs something that the DI resolves. And creating a JsonSerializerOptions object is expensive.
Now you can just resolve the IOptions<NotifyJsonSerializerOptions> which class contains the JsonSerializerOptions to improve the performance.
News from the community
Orchard Core Commerce 2.0
Orchard Core Commerce is an Orchard Core port and partial rewrite of the open-source Nwazet Commerce module that was built for Orchard CMS 1.x. Nwazet Commerce was initially built in 2012 by Bertrand Le Roy, loosely based on a commerce sample by Sipke Shoorstra. The initial goal of Nwazet Commerce was to power the website of the hardware startup Nwazet. While Nwazet is no longer operating, the Nwazet Commerce project went on and was further developed by a group of passionate contributors who are using the platform for their own, and their customer's websites.
Like Orchard, Nwazet Commerce was built with extensibility in mind, and as such, it has its own extensions (typical examples include local tax and shipping modules). It's also a pure, idiomatic Orchard.
Orchard Core represents a major evolution of the Orchard design principles and is sufficiently different that running Nwazet Commerce on it will necessitate significant work. As such, the community decided that starting from a blank slate was the best way to go, so they will port Nwazet Commerce piece by piece, being careful to accurately apply Orchard Core's new design principles. The community also decided to adopt a new name that gets rid of the now obsolete origins and establishes our ambition for the module to become the go-to commerce module for Orchard Core.
Back in 2022, we published a demo where you could see the current state of the module. A few months later, we reached another milestone when we finished with the basic implementation of Stripe Payment integration (without taxation, shipping, etc.). Stripe is a payment service provider that business owners can use to accept dozens of payment methods, from credit cards to buy now, pay later services. Stripe Payments handles the steps between a customer providing their card information and learning that their payment has been accepted.
As you may know, Lombiq provides stewardship for the Orchard Core Commerce module. That means that we do code reviews and work on features and fixes. At the beginning of 2023, we released the 1.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! You can read some of the key features of the release in this post. You can easily try it out by cloning this repo and building and running the OrchardCore.Commerce.Web project. Thanks to Auto Setup, the site will be set up with the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe. After you can go to the dashboard, using the credentials admin and Password1!, and go to Content -> Content Items to create your first Product.
And one month ago, we released the 2.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! This is a major version increment because there are some breaking changes, so watch out! We have upgraded to the latest Orchard Core 1.8 packages too. One of the breaking changes is that the built-in Stripe payment provider support has been separated into a standalone package. For now, it's still the only payment processor we support out-of-the-box but we plan to expand that in the near future. You can also implement your custom payment providers.
We've also added product listing with filter, search and paging support, the ability to resume payment from the order page, more documentation including a guide, and many other improvements, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements. Check out the full list of changes here.
Orchard Dojo Newsletter
Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 470 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course.
Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!
Hisham Abdullah Bin Ateya said
It's great to see docs for OrchardCore.Commerce, will be a good start for anyone wants to try the project
Thanks for sharing Gabor