Live from Orchard Harvest 2024 Las Vegas - Day 2

Building the Orchard Core Community

Over the last year or so, we've seen numerous improvements in how we function as a community. In this talk by Zoltán Lehóczky, we went through what has happened, what effects certain changes had on our community life, and a vision for what we'll see next. He talked about the new Discord server for Orchard Core, and the improvements related to GitHub, for example now we have automation, we auto-close unresponsive new issues, and we have AI code reviews with Code Rabbit, and merge conflict notifications. We have no untriaged issues because the new ones get triaged within a week. Finally, he talked about the next steps like having a Community manager or bringing back the Steering committee.

Understanding the Performance Characteristics of Orchard Core

Sebastien Ros started his talk by describing the performance characteristics, like startup time, size on disk, and build time. After he talked about how we can improve the performance with continuous benchmarking, validating changes before they shipped, and with proactive modifications. He continued his presentation by mentioning some tools, like Bombardier, K6 (which could be used for Load generation), PerfView, or Visual Studio .NET (which could be used for tracing). After that, we checked out how important is to have caching on a site, like how disabling the menu caching affects the performance.

Smithsonian Folkways Collection Management and Orchard Core Demonstration

With a mission to increase and diffuse knowledge, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings digitizes and distributes a large catalog of historic sound recordings. In the middle of their enterprise is an Orchard Core implementation that has been customized to support the needs of their collection and website. Toby Dodds started his talk with some words about the Smithsonian Folkways company and the size of the collection which contains 4,500 releases and 70,000 tracks from 30 record label catalogs after we could see a demo of the website and the architecture of the website. We could see how to manage tracks, and records, importing/exporting Excel files. Finally, he talked about the collection management toolkit, which includes the Orchard Core dashboard, spreadsheets, MS SQL, FileMaker, and the Boomi cloud integration.

Unlocking Hyperproductivity with Orchard, Elsa, and Intelligent Agents

Sipke Schoorstra started his talk by introducing Elsa workflows, which is an open-source workflow framework originally derived from Orchard Core, and evolved into an independent project. Elsa has a modular architecture and one of the modules is the Agent module which defines and deploys intelligent agents to automate tasks. Agents are predefined prompts to give them a specific role or a "persona". They can be orchestrated within workflows, ensuring deterministic and consistent execution of tasks. In his demo, he showed us several examples of how we can utilize Elsa. One of the presentations is about how to make a connection between Orchard Core and Elsa to proofread a blog post published in Orchard Core. The updated blog post will be sent back to Orchard Core via HTTP calls.

Security Scanning an Orchard Core Application

In his other talk, Zoltán Lehóczky introduced us to ZAP, the world's most widely used web app scanner. He also showed the desktop app of ZAP and how to run an automated scan with it. After we are checking the possibilities to continuously check our Orchard Core application for security issues. You can do that by using the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox and that was the next part of the demo: we checked how you can use ZAP from code. If you are interested in the Orchard Core solution, check out the source code on GitHub.

Speeding Up: Custom Development

The last talk of the conference was by Michal Kužela where the focus was on speeding up custom development via modules that bring new possibilities to Orchard Core. The was started by an introduction into portal development(B2B partner solutions, internal management systems) and into a new workflow with custom modules. This means there are three custom modules; OliveTableBuilder, which is a relational table management module; OliveGrid, which is a data management module, and OliveImporter, which is a data import module. After the introduction, we could see a demo about a solution where we could see these modules in action.

Hackathon

We closed this year's Harvest conference with a Hackathon where the attendees could collaborate and innovate with each other. The organizers listed some Orchard Core issues and the attendees were able to work on these with fellow community members, for all skill levels.

Thank you for attending this year's Harvest Conference and I hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did! If you could share your experience on social platforms, that would help us to organize the next events. You can use the #OrchardHarvest hashtag if you would like to mention our event.