Orchard Harvest goes Online, Content Lock feature prevents editing conflicts - This week in Orchard (21/08/2026)

Orchard Core updates

Replace ImageSharp.Web with NetVips for on-demand image processing

ImageSharp v4.0.0 is out, and the breaking changes are minimal for us. But this version enforces a license check, as noted on the Six Labors blog, requiring a license file to be present, see details here. The license itself didn't change: Orchard Core, as an open-source project, can keep using it, and the license doesn't affect transitive dependents, i.e. users of Orchard Core. But there are multiple issues:

• There's no single license for Orchard Core, but there needs to be one for CI builds, and individual ones for everyone who wants to build Orchard Core from source, whether to contribute or just explore the codebase. This breaks the F5 experience, and raises the barrier for contribution.
• These licenses are only valid for a year. When they expire, the build fails, requiring periodic license updates for the CI builds and for every contributor.
• People who build Orchard Core from source become subject to the license too, and thus required to apply for or buy one. It will come as a surprise to people working with the full source in their own solutions, or who publish Orchard Core to an internal NuGet feed, that they now have to pay.

Because of that, we needed to decide: bite the bullet and update ImageSharp despite the inconvenience, or find an alternative.

We decided to replace ImageSharp with NetVips as the default engine. NetVips is a managed binding over the native libvips library, which brings significantly faster resizing through shrink-on-load decoding. If you want to keep ImageSharp-based processing, a new opt-in feature, Media ImageSharp Image Processing, provides an IImageProcessingEngine backed by SixLabors.ImageSharp 3.1.x. Enabling this feature replaces the default NetVips engine.

Check out the release notes of Orchard v3 for the feature, configuration, and type renames, the IResizedImageCache API change, and everything else you need to know about this replacement.

Thanks to everyone who worked to make this change happen, especially Jasmin Savard, Sébastien Ros, and Zoltán Lehóczky.

Update YesSql to 6.0

Sébastien Ros released YesSql v6.0.0. This major version brought a few breaking changes, already adapted to be compatible with the nightly build of Orchard Core, including:

• IQuery<T>.ListAsync() now returns Task<IReadOnlyList<T>> instead of Task<IEnumerable<T>>. Because Task<T> is invariant, methods that returned the query result directly no longer compile. They're updated to await and return (or to type the local as IEnumerable<T>), so public signatures are preserved.
• The YesSql.Filters.Abstractions.* namespaces were flattened to YesSql.Filters.*. Updated the affected using directives (package IDs are unchanged).
• ISession.SaveAsync inserted a bool checkConcurrency parameter before collection. The one positional call site now uses a named collection: argument.
• Removed parameterless IQuery<T> overloads (ListAsync(), FirstOrDefaultAsync(), etc.), and updated the FakeQuery<T> test mock accordingly.

Demos

Content Lock feature prevents editing conflicts

The OrchardCoreContrib.Modules repository is a community-maintained set of modules for Orchard Core. It will soon contain a Content Lock feature, which prevents editors from editing content already locked by another user.

Head to Configuration -> Features and enable Content Lock to prevent simultaneous editing by multiple users. Open the editor for any content item, then log in as another user in a separate window: you'll see a red Locked icon next to that content item.

Hitting Edit shows a notification that the content is locked and can't be edited until the lock is released; the Publish and Save Draft buttons are disabled too. Once the first user leaves the editor, or the lock times out, editing becomes available again. The timeout is configurable via appsettings.json.

See this feature in action in the demo on YouTube by Hisham Bin Ateya.

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 goes Online

Important update about Orchard Harvest! Due to various factors, we had to make the difficult decision to move the event online.

Orchard Harvest 2026 will be hosted through Microsoft Teams, and anyone can join for free! You'll find the latest information on the conference website and grab your complimentary tickets here.

With Orchard Harvest moving online, we once again accept speaker applications: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCICDdeeZFbXdAlSWTkdgpZAtUQzA3UzVNUERJTk4zVlEwRUtXNkM2SlI4Sy4u

The number of available presentation slots are TBD, also depends on the already planned speakers' (for the in-person version) schedule.

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If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!