Improving search filters to the contents list - This week in Orchard (22/06/2021)
We can write about several nice improvements this week! Adding missing deployment steps, new lines about Shortcodes in the documentation, updating the content type editor, and a demo about the search filters improvements to the contents list!
Orchard Core updates
Deployment steps
We have several cases where we have the recipe steps but not the deployment steps. For example, now you can export the Facebook login settings but without secrets (like passwords) because we don't handle that in the recipes right now. The newly added import/export deployment steps are:
- FacebookLogin
- GoogleAnalytics
- Microsoft Azure AD
- OpenIdValidationSettings
Technical name of Content Type and Display Name of Content Parts in Edit Content Type page
This feature is about to show a read-only input with the technical name of the content type when you would like to edit the content type definition. With this feature, you can easily see the difference between the display name and the technical name. Of course, you can guess the display name by the technical name, but not everyone knows that.
You can check it out easily. Let's just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and go to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types. Edit one of the content types, and you will see the technical name and the display name of the content type.
Shortcodes docs and rename Razor helper
We have the HtmlToShortcodesAsync Razor helper that you can use to render Shortcodes. This one is now renamed to ShortcodesToHtmlAsync, and the old one is marked as obsolete.
And you can also find some new lines in the documentation about how to render Shortcodes via a Liquid filter or Razor helper.
Check allowed file extensions when importing media
You can have a list in Orchard Core that contains the file extensions that can be uploaded to the media library. If you would like to upload a PDF file to the media library and the PDF extension is not allowed, you won't be able to upload that. However, if you want to import a PDF file via recipes, you could do that because the file extension checking was missing from there. It could be a security issue but if you have rights to execute recipes, that means you have already logged in as a user who has Security Critical permissions.
And one more note here: if you do _logger.LogWarning, don't forget to check is the LogLeveL.Debug enabled _logger.IsEnabled(LogLevel.Debug), otherwise, don't write a warning to the log files.
Remove deprecated SHA256CryptoServiceProvider usage
While running a benchmark, it started failing, the SDK throwing some warning that the CryptographyAlgorithms.CreateSHA256() is deprecated and cannot be used in .NET 6. The documentation says that now we can do SHA256.Create(), and it works for all the versions that we are targeting. Someone else from Microsoft related to benchmarking and performance mentioned this issue because they are using Orchard Core as a source for the PGO. PGO means Performance Guided Optimizations which is a way to analyze what's happening in an app to optimize the IL generated by the JIT.
Demos
Improving search filters to the contents list
A few weeks ago, you could see a demo regarding search filters and parsers for the contents list. This demo is just about showing you the final version of the search filters that you can also try out right now if you are using the preview packages of Orchard Core!
Let's see how you can use this feature that makes browsing your content items much easier! We have a site set up with the Blog recipe. The blog recipe creates an Article content type and one Article content item by default. If you want to list all of the article content items, you just need to navigate to Content -> Content Items and select Article from the filter by content type dropdown menu. As you can see, this means that the Search textbox will be populated with the type:Article expression. It means if you write, type: and the name of the content type, you can list all of the content items from the given type. If you also want to sort the items by the created date (select Recently created from the Sort dropdown menu), the sort:Created text will also appear in the Search textbox.
If you click on the funnel icon before the search box and select the Filter Syntax one, you will see a modal window that shows you the available filters. This modal describes all the registered filters that you can use with the given properties. It also shows you the current values of the given filters and a little bit of information about the syntax. And then down the bottom, you just get the current filter and the normalized version of it which describes how it's being constructed.
And the same applies to the Users list too (Security -> Users). Here we filtered for the Enabled users where the name contains admin, and where the Administrator role applies. Finally, we sort them by their email address.
If you would like to know more about this feature don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube!
News from the community
Lombiq Utility Scripts: create a trusted certificate
Our Utility Scripts project is open source from last year! Many scripts for Orchard Core, Orchard CMS, Azure, SqlServer development. E.g., quick Orchard Core solution init, reset/reinstall. In the following lines, we would like to show you a nice and useful script that could be a very handful one during your Orchard Core development.
The CreateTrustedCertificate script creates all necessary files and imports them into the local Certificate Store so that it can be used to access localhost sites via HTTPS. If you open up that file in GitHub, you will find several comments in the script that help you to see what are the steps that are script is actually doing!
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