Orchard Core Rebranding, new filters on the Users page - This week in Orchard (25/04/2021)
It's time to rebrand Orchard Core for the upcoming 1.0 release! Share your ideas in a visual survey, then check out the newest features of Orchard Core, like the new filters on the Users page or the upcoming sticky toolbar! Check out our post for more!
Orchard Core updates
Update branding
There was a discussion last month about updating the branding of Orchard Core and we also wrote about that in this post.
So why do we want to start rebranding Orchard? Branding is super important to make Orchard a widely known, competitive product, to truly make it an industry sensation. And now you can fill out a visual survey to help the community choosing the logo you would like to see! If you haven't voted, please choose the logo, the color, and the type of font that you are like the most. Thanks for voting, it means a lot to the community!
And don't forget to follow this issue on GitHub where you can freely add your opinion about the new logo to make Orchard Core even better!
Expose BackgroundTask Events
Currently, if you want to know from code when a background task is executed and how long it takes there's no easy way to do it, you can't easily tap into background task execution. It's probably a problem unique to application performance monitoring (and otherwise necessary if you want to collect telemetry on background tasks).
ModularBackgroundService could raise events when the execution of a background task starts and when it ends (perhaps separately when it completes successfully and with an error). Basically, raise events when there's logging currently.
Now you have the availability to see when a given background task starts for example to be able to create diagnostics. The only thing you have to do is to implement the IBackgroundTaskEventHandler. The ExecutingAsync method will be invoked before executing the background task and the ExecutedAsync gets called just after the execution of a background task.
The Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights Orchard Core module enables easy integration of Azure Application Insights telemetry into Orchard. Just install the module, configure the instrumentation key from a configuration source (like the appsettings.json file) as normally for AI, and collected data will start appearing in the Azure Portal. The module will utilize these events there to make background task telemetry collection better. If you haven't heard about that module yet, take a look at this post!
Support for SQL window functions
Now Orchard Core has support for SQL window functions!
Window functions are not part of SQL92 syntax, but they are quite useful and available in all modern database engines. They are part of SQL:2003 standard.
lampersky extended SQL Parser and SQL Grammar to support OVER clause with PARTITION BY and ORDER BY so now you should be able to perform queries like:
SELECTCOUNT(1) OVER () as col1,COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type) as col2,COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type ORDER BY Type) as col3,COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type, Id ORDER BY Type, Id DESC) as col4FROM Document;
Now you are able to use other window functions (argumentless) like:
- ROW_NUMBER()
- RANK()
- DENSE_RANK()
- and more...
Demos
New filters on the Users page
Head to the admin UI of Orchard Core then navigate to Security -> Users. If you check out that page closely you will see some new additions here. We already have a search feature here and now we have new filters too! You can sort users by user name and email address. You can say that you want to display only enabled/disabled users or all of them. But the most useful feature we think is the option that you can filter users by role. This is very useful if you have a lot of front-end users and you just want to see the authenticated ones.
Head to YouTube now to see the new filters in action!
Sticky action buttons
Let's say you are on the admin UI of Orchard Core and you editing your content item. And that content item contains several parts/fields, which makes the editor page more complex and you need to scroll to be able to see every editor because it's now not fit on your screen. If you have just added a FlowPart or a BagPart to your content type, these will definitely make your editor longer. This makes publishing, saving, or previewing your content item a little harder. That would be great to have a sticky toolbar that stays in place if you scroll the page and you can see them all the time. This means a toolbar with the title of the current page on the left, and with the action buttons on the right.
You can meet with the sticky toolbar on the create/edit content and on the Design -> Templates page because these are the longest ones where you may need this feature the most.
This feature is still under development and might change in the future. If you are interested in a recording of this demo, head to YouTube now!
News from the community
Decoupled CMS Orchard Core tutorial for the Dojo Course
After a long wait, last December we released the new Orchard Core version of our legendary Dojo Course tutorial series, the Dojo Course 3!
Are you a newcomer and want to learn Orchard Core from the ground up, both from a user's and a developer's perspective? Are you somewhat familiar with Orchard Core but would like to get up to speed and become an Orchard pro? Look no further, check out Dojo Course 3! Dojo Course 3 guides you from the very basics of Orchard Core all up to be able to write your own themes and modules, utilizing various APIs of Orchard. Here you can check out the Dojo Course 3 YouTube playlist. All the video tutorials are here, in the recommended viewing order. Note that the video descriptions contain links if any were mentioned in the video.
And now we are thinking about making a decoupled CMS Orchard Core tutorial for the Dojo Course to extend it a little bit. Orchard for the admin and content store, Razor Pages for the frontend. What do you think about this one? Are you interested? If yes, please tell us your opinion under this Tweet to be able to create that kind of tutorial in the future that you would love to see!
Orchard Dojo Newsletter
Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 196 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course.
Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!