New Orchard Core theme, Make Content recipe step idempotent - This week in Orchard (16/05/2020)
Are you tired of the existing built-in themes in Orchard Core? Do you want to try new ones? Well, let us show you a brand new theme called The Medium Theme! The scheduled publish feature now can be used with the nightly build packages! And if you want to expand your knowledge you can read about the security-critical permissions, the new methods in the IContentHandler interface, and many more!
Orchard Core updates
Make FormPart generic
Now you can customize a FormPart attached to any content type and define the enctype to use when submitting the form using POST method or you can enable the Antiforgery Token if you want. You can also customize the wrapper around your form. Just enable the Forms module and attach the FormPart to your type. Then you will find the following screen when editing your content type.
Render BagPart items with Summary display type
If you have widgets inside a BagPart, they would be displayed with the Detail display type and shows unnecessary stuffs. But the whole thing is quite weird. Why would you add a widget to a BagPart? For widgets, you can use the FlowPart and add widgets there. BagPart is for content items not for widgets. If they are in BagPart it will break your themes if you have provided custom templates for widgets using the Detail display type instead of the Summary one. You can still change the display type for the items in the BagPart to another display type if you want to customize the rendering.
Here you could see a widget Summary template (Widget.Summary.cshtml) that would be used in case if you render a widget inside a BagPart because it will use the Summary display type. So, in a nutshell: BagPart will render content items as Summary display type. If any content type template was customized for Detail (Content-Foo.cshtml) in BagParts, it will need to be changed to the Summary display type (Content-Foo.Summary.cshtml).
Make content recipe step idempotent
If you check the IContentHandler interface you will find some new endpoints:
ImportingAsyncImportedAsyncValidatingAsyncValidatedAsync
The goal of these new methods is that any import or API call to query content have to be idempotent, meaning that the same action will be executed multiple times and that will result in the same effect, like if you say create a content item with the ID = 1, the first time it will create it, the second time it will tell you it's nothing to do because it's already done. Or if you call delete something 10 times, it will do it for the first time and don't do anything for the next one, don't break anything, just tell you that the call is already done. But if you say create new items 10 times, it will create them 10 times, depends on the parameters you pass.
Let's see an example in the AliasPartHandler. If you try to import a content item with an alias that already exists, the result will be a fail with an error Your alias is already in use.
Update configuration docs
There is a section in the documentation that now shows you how to create a tenant just from the configuration.
Add Scheduled Publish functionality
Some weeks ago we showed you an upcoming feature to Orchard Core that is about to publish a content item in a given time in the future. Now, this feature is merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core, so if you are using the nightly builds of Orchard Core, update to the latest and try out this feature now! If you haven't heard about this module yet, check out the demo about how to use it on YouTube!
Make Import Data a security-critical permission
As a reminder, security-critical permission is a permission that could enable you to elevate your permissions and abuse a feature to become a super admin. There are some critical features in Orchard Core like running a recipe. If you run a recipe you can enable any feature, a feature that might give you access to anything or change some content that might give you access to anything. The Import Data Permission should be listed as security-critical because with it you can import any data to the site, including changes to roles, which could elevate permissions. The way how you can create security permissions can be seen for example in the Permissions class of the Deployment module.
Demos
New Orchard Core theme: The Medium Theme
The Medium Theme is a free, open-source theme that you can find in the following repository. Sipke Schoorstra decided to create an Orchard Core theme based on The Medium Theme and make it open-source. This repository not just containing the theme itself, but you can find there some useful features too. Later, the theme will get its own repository. The comments are not supported yet, but that's on the roadmap that you can also find in the Readme.md file of the repository. The blog posts are associated with owners, for that the User extended with a couple of settings. Blog posts can have tags and you have many other features to use in your theme. If you are interested in everything about the new theme, don't forget to check the following recording on YouTube!
News from the community
Stability updates for our Orchard Visual Studio Extension
Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension is a Visual Studio extension with many features and templates frequently used by Lombiq developers. It contains Orchard-related (including Orchard Core) as well as generic goodies.
This extension has an Orchard Log Watcher feature, that alerts you when you have any new entry in the log file. When you install this extension, you will see a new button on the Orchard Log Watcher toolbar. The button of this toolbar will be enabled when you have unread entries in the error log files. If you click on this button, the log file will be opened with the editor assigned to open .log files. And that's not all of the features of this extension!
This week we released a new version that contains stability updates that fixing some potential embarrassing UI freezes. If you have it installed, the update will arrive automatically, otherwise check out here the open-source extension. In GitHub, you can find the extension's Readme with release notes too. Also, if you encountered bugs or have a feature request please add it on the GitHub page as well.
Lombiq and open-source
Open-source software is something we live and breathe. Check out how we contribute to the very foundation of the IT world by reading the Lombiq and open-source post on our website!
Orchard Core workshops
The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events.
Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module.
Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage!
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