Categorized tenants, change the Script Task to use Monaco Editor, update logos to NuGet packages, and automated monkey testing in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core are the topics of this week. Interested in the details? Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Categorized tenants Now you can have a Category on the Tenants page and filter tenants by category. If you want to try this out, just set up your site and make sure you have the Tenants feature enabled. Now head to Configuration -> Tenants on the admin UI and add some tenants by clicking on the Add Tenant button. Here you can see we added three additional tenants and used Category A and Category B as the category for these tenants. You can filter the list by the available categories just by clicking on the Category dropdown near the State one. Change the Script Task to use Monaco Editor If you enabled the Workflows feature, you have the option to use Workflows. You can add a Script task to your workflow that executes a script and continues execution based on the returned outcome. And the Script Task now uses the Monaco Editor instead of the CodeMirror one. New branding icons for Orchard Core projects templates and new logo to NuGet packages Now the branding icons are updated for project templates. And now we use the new logo for the NuGet packages because the packages had the default logos. Demos Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core - Automated monkey testing When you are developing your software, you are always in the mindset that you actually know what your software is doing, how it works, what are the limitations. And with experience, you learn to anticipate different user behavior. Let's say that you are in the Orchard admin, and when you want to edit a content item, you know that you have to click on the Content option, and after a tiny delay, you will see a list that contains an element called Content Items. If you click on the Content Items, you will see a list of the content items. You know that you can edit a given content item by doing a single left click on the display text of the content item by default. Because it looks like a link, and you just have to click once. And if you want to save a content item, you still need to click once on the Publish button, for example. But a lot of people actually will do a double click on the Publish button. Long story short, there is a difference between what the developer can think of how users will use a piece of software and what users in the real world will actually end up doing. What you can see in this demo is about introducing monkey testing in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core. It was done mostly by Yevgeniy Shunevych, who is a developer working a lot on automation and automated testing, including his UI testing framework called Atata. What we have done is that we used gremlins.js for automated monkey testing. Monkey testing is about random interactions. The library unleashes random interactions onto the software, and it will try to break it. If it can, then we found a bug, we can fix it. Now it's time to check it out quickly! Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions is an Orchard Core CMS Visual Studio solution that contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries. Please keep in mind that only those extensions are included that use the latest released version of Orchard (i.e., the very cutting-edge ones depending on a nightly build are not yet here). This solution contains the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox as well, so we will use this one for the demo. Here we have an example for monkey tests as well, just find the MonkeyTests.cs file in the Lombiq.Tests.UI.Samples project. It's supposed to be very easy to use because the point is that you use this for features that you really want to break. The easiest way is to just test one particular page, that will do these random interactions on just that page. If it leaves the page, it will stop. And since it's random, every time it might be different, and to be able to produce deterministic repeatable results, it's also possible to provide a random seed which we have done here. But you can do the same just by using the MonkeyTestingOptions configuration class. You can find a method called TestCurrentPageAsMonkeyRecursivelyAsync. This means it won't stop if it leaves a certain page or if it leaves the page it starts with and will continue to test every page until it either finds a bug or if it runs out of time because you can also specify how much time it will spend on a single page. And if it leaves that page and comes back to the same page, it's still from that same time. Now let's see what will happen if you actually run a given test. You can easily run a monkey test by using the Test Explorer window of Visual Studio and finding a test under Lombiq.Tests.UI.Samples/Lombiq.Tests.UI.Samples.Tests/MonkeyTests. How it starts is like a standard UI test. First, it runs the setup, and if you have multiple tests just as before, it can reuse the same snapshot from the site that you have run the setup for. After, it will open the page and log in to the admin. And then you see it clicks everywhere, typing different kinds of keys and so on. This goes on until the time runs out. And that's not all of it! Do you want to know more about this new addition to the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core? Then check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 238 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

New custom path for the ChangePasswordConfirmation, Fluid 2.2.14 with several fixes and improvements, Orchard Core on the ASP.NET Community Standup are the topics of this week. Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Fix route ChangePasswordConfirmation The idea is that now there is a custom route for the ChangePasswordConfirmation instead of using the generic one. So, the action OrchardCore.Users.Controllers.ChangePasswordConfirmation() is now mapped to /ChangePasswordConfirmation, because that action was mapped to /OrchardCore.Users/ChangePasswordConfirmation. And the documentation of Orchard Core has been also updated with this new custom path. Fluid 2.2.14 Fluid 2.2.14 has been released with several fixes and improvements. Let's see some of the changes here! The first one is about displaying the source of an error message. Now, if there is a parser error, it will tell you the location of the error (line and column) but it will also show the line with the error. And this way it's easier to understand where the issue is. And if you have multiple templates, for instance, then you don't have to guess what template contains the error because you can see the error directly. Now FluidParserOptions can be configured by using Fluid.MvcViewEngine. This introduces a small set of further changes to support the recent work allowing for FunctionValues. Update to FluidViewParser constructor to pass FluidParserOptions argument. Update to sample projects to use the new constructor. The next improvement is to fix some keyword conflicts. Someone finds an issue in Orchard is that if you have a variable that is named emptyThing, the parser would find that you mean the empty keyword and will fail saying what is this Thing after the empty? And it's the same for blank, true and false. So, if you have variable names starting with empty, you can have them now, this is what this PR is fixing. And another one is to implement offset continue. Now you can assign a range directly to a variable with this version. Before you could not. The second thing is that you can do offset with the keyword continue. So, in this case, continue is a keyword and what happens is that it will do another loop starting from where the previous loop stopped. So here, if you say limit: 2, it will start from the 4th item. And you can also pass another limit if you want. So, here the idea is that we loop for three items in the array, and then we loop again for the rest and display all the items. News from the community ASP.NET Community Standup - PO (portable object) localization with Orchard Core There was an ASP.NET Community Standup about localizing the .NET website. The topics were how the .NET websites have been localized using the Orchard Core localization package with PO files. Sébastien Ros did a demo about the package, explained how the localizer works, how to inject it, how to use the module, how to create a PO file, how to use pluralization, etc. If you would like to know more about localization, check out the recording of that standup meeting here! DotNest Core is on Orchard Core 1.2.2 DotNest Core is a complete redevelopment of the DotNest platform, all on the latest version of Orchard Core. We've been running it with a couple of select few customers for a while now, and it's time to open it up a bit more. While you can't yet simply create an Orchard Core-based DotNest site, you can sign up for our limited beta here. You'll soon be able to get a fully functional, reliably hosted Orchard Core site on DotNest where you can build your personal website or something to showcase your Orchard skills with. And now the DotNest Core sites run on Orchard Core 1.2.2! Do you want to have a hassle-free Orchard site running in the cloud? Then sign up for the beta here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 239 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Fluid provides optional support for functions, optimizing SlugServie and MediaTokenService, and hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core are the topics of this week. Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Optimize SlugService The goal here was to increase the performance of the SlugService as much as we can. Marko Lahma went through the thing, and the problem was that the ZString haven't been used, it was leaking all the time thus bad perf. BenchmarkDotNet=v0.13.1, OS=Windows 10.0.22000AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 1 CPU, 32 logical and 16 physical cores.NET SDK=6.0.101 [Host] : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT DefaultJob : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT General easy rule (when implicit usings aren't being used): If there's using System.Linq; at the top of the performance-critical code, try to find a way to get rid of it. Reduce allocations in MediaTokenService and improve performance Since Orchard Core can use all .NET 6 goodness, Marko Lahma improved the performance of the MediaTokenService too. And what did he change? Don't ToString StringValues, keep them as-is as in dictionary once built. Parse commands and other commands with one pass using constructs that QueryHelpers uses. Allocate static command arrays to return from processors, some of them were always returning new ones. Change GetHash not to allocation anonymous closure each time by using Try/Set construct, using the same logic that extension method GetOrCreate uses. Change hash calculation to use stackalloc and spans for workloads < 1024 bytes (common case). Use the custom AddQueryString method that understands spans and concrete a dictionary type. Here you can see the numbers: Before: After: Fluid functions Now there is a new optional feature in Fluid called Functions. It's optional because the goal of Fluid is to be able to as close as possible to Liquid, but Liquid doesn't have Functions. If you open up the readme file of Fluid, you can see a new section there called Functions. There is a new option in the FluidParser that you can say AllowFunctions. By setting the AllowFunctions to true, you can call functions like this: {{ field('user') }}. The format of this one is {{ identifier('arguments')}} just like in JavaScript or in C#. Or you can say {{ field('pass', type='password') }} which is like {{ identifier('values', type='named value') }}. How it works is a field is an object, a FluidValue of type FunctionValue. In Fluid, anytime we access something like {% assign name = "Bill" %}, the name is a FluidValue, and in this case, the type is StringValue. When we find a field, the field is a value of type FunctionValue, and the FunctionValue implements the method name InvokeAsync. There is InvokeAsync, there is GetPropertyAsync, etc., everything that an object can do, and when this FunctionValue's Invoke is invoked it will execute something. And to invoke a FluidValue you use parenthesis. If we do parenthesis on something like name, which is a string, we can do name(), it will invoke the string, but it just returns NIL value. So you can invoke name if you want, it will not do anything. If it's a function, it will do something. To learn more about Functions, check out the documentation of Fluid! News from the community Hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core The Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core is a demo Orchard Core CMS module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. And the module has a new sample, which is a shape table provider that hides shapes. Check out the code of the new ShapeHidigingShapeTableProvider here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 240 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core 1.2.2 is now available that addresses some other security issues. Check out this post to know the content of this release of Orchard Core and to see the latest features of the framework! Orchard Core updates Media search indexing The idea here was to allow to search for content in files. Last summer, you could see a demo in this This week in Orchard post that shows a feature that provides a simple implementation to index media for search. More precisely, it indexes media files related to content items, so said content items will turn up in search when one of their media files matches the search query. And now this feature is merged to the main branch of Orchard Core! Check out the updated documentation to know more! Remove multiple compilation paths on MediaTokenService From the next minor version, Orchard Core will only build with .NET 6.0, so we can remove all the things from the code that do not target .NET 6.0 specifically. This time the ParseQuery method of the MediaTokenService got simpler because now we don't need to use the slower version, we can use the fast version with structs now. Add response to SmtpResult When you send an SMTP request, the response can be read, and now you can do whatever you want with the response. We already know if it failed or not from the SmtpResult, but now there is even more information in the Response. News from the community Orchard Core 1.2.2 release Orchard Core 1.2.1 has been released a few days after the 1.2.0 one, and here comes 1.2.2 to address some other security issues. If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Don't forget that 1.2.x is the latest minor version of Orchard Core that can be built by .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5. If you take the main branch, it will only build with .NET 6.0, and the upcoming versions will be only shipped with .NET 6.0. .NET 6.0 is an LTS and shipped for many months now with some security updates already. It will also make the local builds with Visual Studio faster, the CI is faster because it doesn't have to build everything three times and run the tests three times. Now let's see the fix that is in this release! If you have a Link Field, you can provide a URL to that field, and the URL is now sanitized. Before this change, you could pass some JavaScript in the URL. With that what we are doing is checking the link that we are generating is sanitized. This issue was also in the Menu Item Link Field and also in the HTML Menu Item Link Field, so everywhere where we pass a link. Another fix was in the AuditTrailContentController.cs to be consistent with the other fixes. Error messages can't contain HTML and the issue that the _notifier.WarningAsync is asking for a LocalizedHtmlString. Why is it asking for a LocalizedHtmlString? It's because WarningAsync expects a LocalizedString using H[""]. In this case, the goal was to render an error message as a notification. But the error message is a string. So the developer decided to wrap the error message into a LocalizedHtmlString and pass it. And by doing that we say this is a safe string, this is already encoded, so it can be used in a view. This is what the H[""] does. So, everything here is safe. So, it can be passed as a LocalizedHtmlString. We are lucky that the error message is safe because internally it's a static string. But we don't do that, because it could be like some other developers will copy this code without understanding that this is safe or not. So, let's assume that it's not safe, and you shouldn't pass it as a LocalizedHtmlString, because that will prevent the notifier from encoding the result. The fix here is to pass the error message as an argument and because it's passed as an argument it will be encoded. So, this is how we pass a LocalizedHtmlString to a notifier from an unknown string safely. We can just pass it as an argument. And if you would like to know more about the fixed security issues, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! Looking for some useful Orchard Core extensions that can help improve your Orchard Core 1.2.2 application faster and easier? Here's a bundle solution of all of Lombiq's open-source Orchard Core extensions (modules and themes). Clone and try them out now! This is an Orchard Core CMS Visual Studio solution that contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries. And we have also updated the solution to use Orchard Core 1.2.2! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 240 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core 1.2.1 is now available to fix some security issues. Check out this post to know the content of this release of Orchard Core and to see the latest features of the framework! Orchard Core updates Remove exists check for blobs Instead of querying the blob, if it exists any time, we just try to get it, and maybe the server will return with a BlobNotFound error. This way, if it's there, we prevent one external network communication to check if it's there before asking for it. So, we just ask for it, and then if it fails, it fails. It's a pretty common issue with Blob Storage because of its high latency you need to do as few communications as you can. Starting background tasks without waiting for initialized tenants You can have a scenario where you would like Orchard itself to starts its background tasks without the need of a request for each one of the tenants. Until now, you need to make a request to as parent tenant and to every child tenant to be sure background tasks of each tenant start to run. So, by default background tasks are waiting for their shell to be lazily built on a first matching request. From now, you have a ShellWarmup bool option in the appsettings.json that allows you to eagerly build shells just before executing their first background task. News from the community Orchard Core 1.2.1 release Orchard Core 1.2.0 has been released on the 6th of January. But after a few days, a vulnerability security issue has been filed. That's the reason why the community had to create a new Orchard Core 1.2.1 release, to fix that security issue. You can update to the new version as usual. If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! But let's see the fix that is in this release! It's not critical in the way that only users that are authenticated and have access to the dashboard can do things. Looking at the security issue and then how to not have them anymore. These are XSS issues, which means you can inject custom JavaScript in a page that could be triggered automatically, and then if you inject some fancy JavaScript you can force a user to submit queries and on this site, you could extract secrets or have them do things they don't want to do on the site. We encode everything we output. This means if the thing you output contains some JavaScript, it will be encoded, which means it will be rendered and not the JavaScript itself to be executed. In this case here, what was happening is that the translation was called on a variable, but we can't translate it. When we call T[], the IHtmlLocalizer will lookup for this text. If it finds this text in the translations, it will render the translation, otherwise, it will render the text as-is. That's why we always pass the English versions, such that if it doesn't find a localization, it will render this text in English. So, we don't have to create the translation for English, we just use that key that we passed. But the T[""] can contain HTML. And that's how we do to translate notifications, links, and stuff like this. And because it can contain HTML, the @ before that will just render it as is. So, whatever is passed there, it will be rendered as-is and not encoded. If we put some HTML or JavaScript inside that, this will be rendered as is and not encoded. What happened there is that when we do any string, like @T["Add widget"] is fine because we know this is a static string to generate. So, we know what we are rendering. But when we do it in a variable like @T[item.value], it can contain anything. And we don't know what it contains. And if it's user inputted, then there can be bad issues. So, we should never translate a user inputted value like this. This is an encoding issue over a bug. This is a list of SelectListItem, which itself contain a localized string instantiated value. There is no reason to use a localized string here. We use localized string as a type when we know that the property needs to be a localized string and should be a sign with a call to T for instance. This piece of code from the DashboardController is just to list the display name of the content type and the technical name of the content type. It's just a list of content types to allow you to create a new content item based on the type. The first solution is to don't translate variables. We have the design and started the PR for dynamic content translations, which is supposed to fix that, to provide a solution to be able to translate content types, permissions, and all the things that are user inputted and dynamic in the database (not static text). We should either not translate dynamic variables or use the new localization PR. The second option is to explicitly encode it for just this vulnerability. In this case, it's not breaking anyone, and it's secure because here, we explicitly translate the encoded value of the display name. So, it would break people who have spaces in their content type display name, because now they have to translate Foo&nbsp;content&nbps;type not Foo content type. .NET Foundation Most Active Community Projects 2021 Shaun Walker shared this image on Twitter that contains the most active community projects based on the number of pull requests, the number of commits, and the number of new contributors. As you can see, Orchard has 1507 pull requests in 2021, which is great. Orchard has 1291 commits, which is weird. Why do we have more pull requests than commits? Do we really close that many pull requests? We have some mini PRs created by Dependabot. And we haven't talked about which projects are using squash and merge and which projects aren't. But it's still a nice thing to be able to see Orchard in the top 10! :) Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 238 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 1.2 is now available! Check out this post to know the latest features of this release of Orchard Core and see a demo about an upcoming feature to have a jobs queue for scheduling! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Support data annotations PO localization This feature is about to be able to localize data annotations. Let's say you have a required field and you would like to save your form without providing any value for that field. In this case, you will get a validation error of course something like: The {fieldname} field is required. And from now you can easily translate the default error messages for data annotations attributes. If you open up the DataAnnotationsDefaultErrorMessages sealed class, you will find the default error messages that you can translate. But how can you translate these? In your PO file, you have to target the DataAnnotationsDefaultErrorMessages marker class, provide the value of the variable that you want to translate (msgid), and provide the translated text after the msgstr keyword, which is the Arabic version in this case. In the following GIF, Hisham Bin Ateya shows you the given scenario mentioned above by using the Arabic translation for a required field. Code cleanup For C# code files, Visual Studio 2022 has a Code Cleanup button at the bottom of the editor (keyboard: Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E) to apply code styles from an EditorConfig file or the Code Style options page. If a .editorconfig file exists for the project, those are the settings that take precedence. After you've configured code cleanup, you can either click on the broom icon or press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E to run code cleanup. You can also run code cleanup across your entire project or solution. Right-click on the project or solution name in Solution Explorer, select Analyze and Code Cleanup, and then select Run Code Cleanup. For more information about code style, check out this page. The codebase of Orchard Core got this cleanup, which means 312 file changes in this PR. And if you would like your code to be nicer, check out the Lombiq.NET Analyzers repository. Our Lombiq .NET Analyzers repository contains .NET code analyzers and code convention settings for Lombiq projects. We also had a demo about the analyzers in This week in Orchard post! Fix index cursors management When there are hundreds of thousands of rows the results returned by QueryIndex() may not be ordered by Id by default. In that case, services as AutorouteEntries using an index cursor on the Id column are not working properly, the _lastIndexId being not well managed. In this case when first publishing an item having an Autoroute, in place of only adding one Autoroute entry, it was trying to add thousands of them in an unordered way and was taking a very long time. Jean-Thierry Kéchichian also enhances the lookup of Autoroute entries to evict, the ones related to contained items of a given container. Demos Background Jobs Orchard Core has a background task infrastructure that runs tasks on a minute-by-minute schedule on a CRON job. But it doesn't actually allow us to have a queue where we can put jobs into a queue. This demo is about an upcoming feature to have a jobs queue for scheduling. In this demo (to show you this feature), Dean Marcussen used the Publish Later feature of Orchard Core to keep track of the background jobs, and by running a scheduler, you can run the Publish Later Job immediately without the need of waiting for the given time to be elapsed. Watch this recording on YouTube to know more about this upcoming feature! News from the community Orchard Core 1.2 release Orchard Core 1.2 is released! If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Upgrade your solution to 1.2 now! If you head to the repository of Orchard Core and head to releases, you will find the 1.2.0 release with the list of changes and the contributors. Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat or use the Discussions on GitHub and ask questions! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 236 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Topics for this week are the Fluid updates; better NRE handling for Widget and MenuItem stereotypes; allowing sending emails without "To" if "Cc" or "Bcc" is provided. Do you want to know more? Then check out our post now! Orchard Core updates Allow sending emails without "To" if "CC" or "BCC" is provided Let's say you have a system to send emails to many recipients at once and want the recipients to be in the BCC header instead of the To one. The email module of Orchard Core was required to have at least one recipient in the To header, so, the scenario described above cannot be implemented in Orchard Core. The solution for this is that now you can send an email without a recipient in the To header. The mail message should have at least one of these headers: To, CC or BCC. Here you can see the editor of the Send Email task where we provided an email address for the BCC header but kept the To and the CC headers empty. Fluid v2.2.8 In Liquid, you can have an identifier that starts with a number like: {% assign 1st = "first" %} {{ 1st }} It was not easy to parse, but now Fluid supports this one with version 2.2.8. And just a note here. If you navigate to the Liquid Sandbox of Jumpseller, you can find a sandbox that is using Liquid but in Ruby, which is the actual implementation of Liquid. You can use LiquidJs to test, but that is a custom implementation in JavaScript, so it might not be as true as the Ruby implementation. Better NRE handling for Widget and MenuItem stereotypes As you may guess, the NRE handling is about catching the null reference exceptions and showing proper error messages instead of displaying the "An error occurred while executing this request.". What were those errors? For example, follow these steps: Create a new content type with stereotype = MenuItem. Add a menu item of that type to a menu. Delete the content type created in step 1. Go back to the menu you created in step 2. Observe a Null Reference Exception. Here we created a new content type with the MenuItem stereotype called NewContentType. The site that we are using was set up by using the Blog recipe, so we have the Main Menu admin menu where we can easily add menu items by just clicking on the Add Menu Item button. And if we delete the NewContentType and navigate back to the Main Menu, we will see the following messages instead. News from the community Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions now updated to Orchard Core v1.1 Looking for some useful Orchard Core extensions? Here's a bundle solution of all of Lombiq's open-source Orchard Core extensions (modules and themes). Clone and try them out! This is an Orchard Core CMS Visual Studio solution that contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries. Please keep in mind that only those extensions are included which use the latest released version of Orchard (i.e. the very cutting-edge ones depending on a nightly build are not yet here). And this project, with all of our Orchard-related projects, is now updated to Orchard Core v1.1! Check it out here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 235 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Updating the Correlate Task, fixing CSS intermittent encoding issue and a demo about statically typed URL creation! Do you want to know more? Then check out our last post of this year! Orchard Core updates Fix Correlate Task If you have Workflows enabled in your solution, you have the option to add a Correlate Task to it. The hint is saying that it supports Liquid, but the truth is the parser here supports JavaScript, not Liquid. So, the solution here is to update the wording of the hint. And from now, if you would like to provide the value for your Correlate Task, you can use a Monaco editor here. Fix CSS intermittent encoding issue The cache on the browser was serving the CSS files using differently than UTF-8. When you disabled the cache on the browser it was fine. So, the cache is storing it as ASCII and not UTF-8. If you check out the picture below, you can see some weird characters on the screen. So, the problem here was a charset issue because browsers can handle different charsets if you put the information at the top of the file. But some of the stylesheets of Orchard Core were started with some comments and not with the line which is saying the given charset. And it looks like browsers only include the charset if it's in the first line of the stylesheet. So, the headers for the stylesheets are not injected anymore. Demos Statically typed URL creation The Lombiq Helpful Libraries for Orchard Core contains various libraries that can be handy when developing for Orchard Core CMS, to be used from your own Orchard modules. The Helpful Libraries now has a new class called TypedRoute which provides a strongly typed way to generate local URLs for Orchard Core MVC actions. It uses lambda expressions to select the action and provide arguments. Use TypedRoute.CreateFromExpression<TClass>(...).ToString() or the provided OrchardHelper.Action() and HttpContext.Action() extensions. Let's see this in action! In this demo, we will go with the quicker way and use our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution that contains that module with a nice sample. If you clone that repository and set up your site using any setup recipe, let's just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core, and under Configuration -> Features, enable the Lombiq Helpful Libraries for Orchard Core - Samples feature. Now, head to the /Lombiq.HelpfulLibraries.Samples/TypedRoute/Index URL to see the content of the following Razor file. As you can see, we constructed the first URL by using the anchor tag helper from ASP.NET Core. Here we needed to pass the area, the name of the controller, and the action and put the names of the accepted properties by the controller action by using the asp-route- prefix. If you use the extension, you can statically enter the controller name (TypedRouteController in this case) and using lambda you can select the TypedRouteSample action by passing the values you want. In this way, you can safely rename the controller or the action without breaking any functionality in your Razor file, because Visual Studio and Rider will also be able to find the references in your Razor files too. Do you want to know more and look under the hood of this feature? Well, you just need to check out this short presentation on YouTube! News from the community Christmas in Lombiq Sometimes we do stuff. Together. Not (just) in front of computer screens. These are some usual events in Lombiq that are all announced and arranged in advance. We periodically have an event called RnDay: this is a few hours long event where we share with each other what we recently worked on and what we plan to do. E.g. if we recently finished a project then the project's team members demo what they've done. This week we had our last RnDay for this year but this time (again), we have to make it online. We also named this event The 14th RnDay - Pandemic Edition 2! We also tried to do our best to make a nice group photo, you can see the result down below. :) We would like to thank you all for reading our posts and making the Orchard community stronger together with us! We hope that we could give you valuable news and demos about the happenings around Orchard and Orchard Core from time to time by reading our posts and of course the This week in Orchard newsletter. We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you next year! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 234 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

This time we will do a deep dive and will check out some important updates on Fluid. But before doing that, let's see some important changes of Orchard Core like preserving contained content items IDs or using async write/read of the Request.Body. Oh, and did we mention the brand new Orchard Core site, Antebellum? Orchard Core updates Preserve contained content items IDs Orchard Core has a feature to have content item IDs on Bag Parts be persistent (i.e., not change), which was implemented in this pull request. However, there was a bug. The "Bag Part Content Item ID" isn't persisted. And it was easy to reproduce. You just need to make a parent content type with a child content type like so: Then you just need to add in a Parent with a couple of children and publish it to get this result (it is outputting the child content item IDs): But every time you published the Parent Content Item, the child content item IDs changed: The fix was to use a dedicated Content Items array to hold the IDs. It prevents conflicts when removing (or moving to another container), and then adding an item, by computing indexes differently when adding an item, was based on the number of items + 1, now based on the existing max value + 1. And Jean-Thierry Kéchichian also fixes other little issues when dragging between containers more than one level up/down. Async write/read of the Request.Body is mandatory There was an issue in Orchard Core when you are using ReadToEnd() in the Request.Body. Using an async method is mandatory even if we use it synchronously by using GetAwaiter(). This is a behavior from ASP.NET which is toggleable, but we use the default in this case. Updates on Fluid Let's say you have an array and you would like to do a reverse. The following code is not a valid Liquid, that's just to present the given logic. Doing reverse in an array like: [1,2,3] | reverse => [3,2,1] will reverse the array. If you use reverse with a string like "1,2,3" you would expect to get "3,2,1". But what it was giving you is a string, but it should give you an array with ["3", "2", "1"]. So, the reverse has been fixed in two ways. First, fixing the behavior on strings and then also returning an array instead of a string. So, it's not obvious, not expected from that. If you want to suggest Liquid features, you can use LiquidJS.com, and then you can try something like that. The retuning value here 3,2,1 is an array actually (the site serializes it and displays it as a string). Another good tool is .NET Fiddle, where you can reference a NuGet package and can work with Liquid. It requires some more work, so using LiquidJS to try out Liquid is an easier way. Another improvement is there is a new render tag. Usually, you can use the input tag to load an external Liquid file. This input tag has been obsoleted by the Shopify team because it has security issues in a way that when you run a partial template from this input tag, it can access all the variables from the calling templates. The new render tag in Fluid now doesn't have this issue. It works exactly the same as input with the same parameters, but you can only access the properties, that have been set on the tag itself, or the variables that are defined in the global scope. There are actually some interesting ways to use that. You can write {% include 'foo' %}, and it will try to render the foo.liquid file. And when you do that, inside the foo.liquid, the foo property is the global scope. You can also do {% include 'foo' a:1, b:2 %} and than in this case foo.a, foo.b will have the values. You can also write {% include 'foo' as model %} and then the properties will be available under the modal property. Fluid v.2.2.4 is fixing first, last, and size. It means you can do the following that can be seen on the screen below. In Fluid, these properties were implemented specifically in all the values, but you can also use pipes to do the same thing. The issue is there were two different invertations ,but the standard says this should be the same thing. So, calling | first now is equivalent to do .first. This means any of your objects can implement these filters by just intercepting the property name. Fluid v2.2.5 contains the new liquid and echo tags. The echo tag can be used in this way: {% echo "foo" %}. The idea of the echo tag is that it's equivalent to the injection tag like this: {{ "foo" }}. The liquid tag is just to execute liquid. What you can do with that is you can run liquid like: {% liquid for x in 1..10 echo x endfor%} which is equivalent to {% for x in 1..10 %} {{ x }}{% endfor %} but as you can see, the first one is less verbose, you don't have to add all the curly braces and the percentage sign everywhere. It's just one block, and you can also nest them. Demos A new website using Orchard Core: Antebellum Antebellum provides a way for the everyday person to mine crypto, without the need of buying expensive hardware, consuming high electricity, high cost in cooling, maintenance of hardware, and sudden downtime. The site contains several custom pages, like the Sign Up page, which is actually using a workflow to do the user registration that also has an integration with Stripe.js. Stripe.js is a JavaScript library that you can wire into your checkout form to handle the credit card information. When a user signs up using the checkout form, it sends the credit card information directly from the user's browser to Stripe's servers. Just head to YouTube to see how the Sign Up page was built or how can you make a nice custom admin UI like that you can see in the video one in Orchard Core! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 234 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

The HTTP Response Task now supports the text/html content type, disables the File Content Definition feature by default, prevents confusing usage of IRunningShellTable.Match(HttpContext) and demo about the Orchard Core Features tests in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox. Do you want to know more? Then don't forget to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates HTTP Response Task supports "text/html" content type If you are using Workflows in your solution, you have the option to use the HTTP Response task, which writes an HTTP response (to use that task, you need to enable the HTTP Workflows Activities feature). If you are in the editor of your Workflow, you just need to click on the Add Task button and select the HTTP Response from the HTTP category. From now, you will see a new text/html content-type option of the response body, which allows workflow submissions to return web content directly. Don't enable the File Content Definition feature by default in the built-in themes From now the File Content Definition feature will not be enabled by default. This feature is replacing the default behavior to store content type definitions in the database with one that stores the content type definitions in a file in the App_Data folder. Most users prefer to store the content type definitions in the database by default. You can still enable this feature if you prefer your content definitions to be file-based, for instance, if you want them in your source control management. But by default, they will be in the database from now. If you have a distributed theme or site, then you might want it to be in the database by default. And the change is just to remove the feature from the recipes. The corresponding page on the Orchard Core documentation is also updated to inform everybody about the changes. Prevent confusing usage of IRunningShellTable.Match(HttpContext) You could use this extension method with an HttpContext, but it didn't actually work anywhere where you can do it from a module. So, from now this RunningShellTableExtensions is an internal class, because as you can see from the comment there: not public because it wouldn't match tenants with an URL prefix later in the request pipeline. Mostly to be used from ModularTenantContainerMiddleware. Demos Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - Orchard Core Features tests The Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox is a web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. UI Testing here is an automation that clicks through the web application in a browser. One of the most popular frameworks for that is Selenium, which does exactly that. You get an API to instruct a browser, and every major browser is supported. This UI Testing Toolbox provides a lot of features on top of Selenium for Orchard Core. Basically, allowing you to UI test an Orchard Core application in a safe and parallelized way providing a lot of helpers, a lot of higher-level APIs allowing you to test your application with SQLite, with SQL Server with local media storage, or with Azure Blob Storage. And you can have a test e-mail sending with a local SMTP server too. Everything just works. Check out the highlights of the Readme.md file of this repository to see all of the features and this older This week in Orchard post where you could see a demo about the Toolbox. This time we will focus on the Orchard Core Features tests. The idea here is that you have an Orchard Core application, and you want to do some basic smoke testing, like trial the application whether it works at its very basics. Now, for that, we have created a TestBasicOrchardFeatures extension method, which will run through a couple of tests that you can run individually. For example, testing whether the setup works, testing whether the registration works, testing whether the login works, and so on. All of these are features of Orchard Core itself, so not your custom application, but these are also all things that you can break from your custom code. So, we figured that it's useful to check whether these basic Orchard features work all the time. And for example, if you manage to break set up with your recipe or if you manage to break the login or the registration features from your code like even implementing an event handler that throws an exception, well then these tests should catch them. Do you want to see these tests in action? Well, in that case, you just have to click on the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 235 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 is 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! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!