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: ImportingAsync ImportedAsync ValidatingAsync ValidatedAsync 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 145 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! 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! 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!

Have you ever developed a great feature for Orchard Core that you wanted to add to the source code, but you were not sure about how to contribute the code and submit a pull request? And do you want to know the team behind all that we do at Lombiq Technologies? Here are all the faces, the whole Lombiq team. This is Lombiq! Don't hesitate and check our current post for more! Orchard Core updates Make Login, Logout and ChangePassword paths configurable Now you can change the endpoints for the login URLs. These can't be changed by using code, that's why they had to be in the appsettings.json. You can find the correct way about setting these values in the documentation. How to contribute? Since now there weren't any pages where you can find details about how you can contribute your source code back to Orchard Core. Now if you checkout to the dev branch of Orchard Core you will find a CONTRIBUTING.md file in the root of the repository which tells you everything about how to contribute code and content, submit pull requests and so on. Allow registering named style and script resources with inline content You have Liquid and Razor tags for custom styling/custom scripts and the ability to say where you want your style/script to be rendered. And if you inject a custom script/styling you can set the dependency of your custom script/style. Let's see some Razor example for these additions! Imagine that you would like to add a custom script for your page and use the ID selector from jQuery to select a single element with the given ID attribute. For that, you will need to include jQuery for your page. To do that you have 2 options:Register your script using the IResourceManifestProvider, set the dependencies of your script (for example jQuery), and just simply use the script Tag Helper to inject that to your Razor page. <script name="myVeryCustomScript" asp-src="~/areallycustomscript.js" at="Foot"></script> But you can also set the dependency here by using the depends-on attribute. The second way is to add a custom script and say that you are using jQuery functions, so you will need jQuery to be able to run your script. <script at="Foot" depends-on="jQuery"> $('#myDiv').css('border', '3px solid red');</script> In both cases, you inject your script in the wanted location (foot or head) and set the dependencies of the page. That's great, but imagine that this script is in the template of a widget. And of course, a page can contain several instances of your widget. In that case, your script will be injected multiple times. In some cases, that's what you want, but if not, it's unnecessary to have that script on the page multiple times. You have several workarounds to check if the script/styling is already injected to the page or not, but now you have an easier solution for that. Let's see the following code: <script name="MyScript" at="Foot" depends-on="jQuery"> $('#myDiv').css('border', '3px solid red');</script> The only difference here is the name attribute and this makes this block a named script. Named scripts will only be injected once and can optionally specify dependencies. You can use the style Tag Helper in the same ways: <style name="my-style" depends-on="the-theme"> .my-class { /* some style */ }</style> Adding option to enable MiniProfiler on the admin too The MiniProfiler module can only display its little widget on the frontend currently. Now you have an option to enable it for the admin too. To see it in action set the option, which can be done in OrchardCore.Cms.Web's Startup class with this snippet: public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){ services.AddOrchardCms(builder => builder.ConfigureServices(services => services.PostConfigure<MiniProfilerOptions>(options => { options.AllowOnAdmin = true; })));} Or you can use the AllowMiniProfilerOnAdmin() extension method in the same method: public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){ services.AddOrchardCms(builder => builder.AllowMiniProfilerOnAdmin());} For more information about the Mini Profiler head to the documentation, where you can also find a link to the updated Configuration page. Fix RSS items description The issue in the screen below was that if the bodyAspect was not null, we are reused the bodyAspect. The bodyAspect was cached during a request, but if you are rendering many different content items, then we would reuse the same bodyAspect for all of them. In an RSS feed when we build the body of the content items, all the RSS items would have the same body. Now we are also caching the content item ID. If we don't match the exact content item ID we don't restore the cached version of the body. Check the diff in the HtmlBodyPartHandler! Here you could see the related code changes where we also cache the content item ID. Demos Kast Group Finder: an Orchard Core site Kast is an Australian company and one of their primary goals is to implement the Kast platform with the Kast Group Finder component. We worked together with Seth Cleaver (Co-founder and Director of Kast) on this tool to be able to create an intuitive self-service process that enables people within a church to easily find a suitable group to attend, simplify the administrative processes required for getting people into groups, and provide information to the group co-ordinators that might assist in planning and measuring effectiveness. Check out this YouTube video about what can you achieve by using Orchard Core and how you can use the Group Finder and let us know if you have any questions! News from the community RC2 branch If you navigate to the GitHub page of Orchard Core and check the issues, you will find one with the name RC2 Validation. There is a list that contains all the things that are needed to be done to ship RC2. Here you can find a branch that contains the list of to-dos to work on. In this checklist, you can find the items that needed to do when publishing a release. You can check this issue from time to time to monitor the current state of the RC2 release. New Orchard Nuggets posts A breadcrumb menu is a simple but effective navigation aid that shows the user where they are in the site's content structure and which path they can take back. It's also part of the web accessibility guidelines. However, there's no feature built into Orchard Core for this. Nevertheless, how to create a breadcrumb menu? It's actually really easy, just copy a piece of code from this brand new Orchard Nuggets post! Let's suppose you're building your shiny new Orchard Core website. In there you're also building a shiny new page, with Flow Part obviously. You throw together a lot of widgets to get all the bells and whistles on the page, then you save it and BAM! Internal Server Error: "InvalidDataException: Form value count limit 1024 exceeded." What's this, did I break Orchard? Is Orchard trying to break me? Let's find out how to fix this in the second Orchard Nuggets post of the week! This is Lombiq! Do you want to know the team behind all that we do at Lombiq Technologies? Here are all the faces, the whole Lombiq team. All the Orchard developers, leaders, office managers, hardware and software engineers, accountants, advisors! This is Lombiq. The two projects of ours mentioned in the video are DotNest, the Orchard SaaS (https://dotnest.com/), and Hastlayer, the .NET hardware accelerator (https://hastlayer.com/). Note that while we published this video during the coronavirus pandemic it was actually recorded during our 2019 RnDay event, in December 2019. Everyone was safe :). 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 142 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! 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! 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!

Let's suppose you're building your shiny new Orchard Core website. In there you're also building a shiny new page, with Flow Part obviously. You throw together a lot of widgets to get all the bells and whistles on the page, then you save it and BAM! Internal Server Error: "InvalidDataException: Form value count limit 1024 exceeded." What's this, did I break Orchard? Is Orchard trying to break me? Let's fix this! The exception happens because the structure you've built with Flow Part is simply too large for the default ASP.NET Core limits. This is not something that would be too extreme to achieve, actually: If you have more complex widgets (with a lot of fields each) and you put several of them into a complex nested structure you can quite possibly build something by hand that would fail like this. Ask how I know! You can increase the limits restricting posted form value sizes, and in this particular case you'd need to change the ValueCountLimit value of FormOptions. Put this into the Startup class of your Orchard-based web app project (it won't work in a module or theme!): services.Configure This increased the limit to 4096, plenty more than the default. However, keep in mind that these limits have their uses: Malicious users could try to post large pieces of data to your server, trying to overwhelm it for example. So only increase this as much you only need! Note BTW that we're using the ASP.NET Core configuration API here, something which is also demonstrated in detail in our Training Demo Module, so follow up learning there! Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

A breadcrumb menu is a simple but effective navigation aid that shows the user where they are in the site's content structure and which path they can take back. It's also part of the web accessibility guidelines. However, there's no feature built into Orchard Core for this. Nevertheless, how to create a breadcrumb menu? It's actually really easy, you just have to copy a piece of code from Orchard Dojo! Oh wait, we're Orchard Dojo. So here you go: @inject OrchardCore.ContentManagement.IContentAliasManager ContentAliasManager; @inject OrchardCore.ContentManagement.IContentManager ContentManager; @inject Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.IHttpContextAccessor HttpContextAccessor; @using OrchardCore.ContentManagement; @using OrchardCore.Menu.Models; @{ // Retrieving the menu we want to build the breadcrum menu for, in this case the one with the alias "main-menu". var menu = await ContentManager.GetAsync(await ContentAliasManager.GetContentItemIdAsync("alias:main-menu")); // We'll need the current URL to be able to check which menu item corresponds to the page. var currentRelativeUrl = HttpContextAccessor.HttpContext.Request.Path; var breadcrumbItems = new Stack<ContentItem>(); // Building the path in the menu tree to the current item. bool SearchActiveItem(IEnumerable<ContentItem> menuItems) { if (menuItems == null) return false; // Note that for the sake of simplicity this will work only with Link Menu Items, not with Conten Menu Items. foreach (var menuItem in menuItems.Select(item => item.As<LinkMenuItemPart>()).Where(item => item != null)) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(menuItem.Url)) { var url = menuItem.Url; if (url.StartsWith("~")) url = url.Substring(1); if (url.Equals(currentRelativeUrl, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { breadcrumbItems.Push(menuItem.ContentItem); return true; } else { if (SearchActiveItem(menuItem.ContentItem.As<MenuItemsListPart>()?.MenuItems)) { breadcrumbItems.Push(menuItem.ContentItem); return true; } } } } return false; } SearchActiveItem(menu.As<MenuItemsListPart>().MenuItems); } @* Using the Bootstrap breadcrumb classes. *@ <ul class="breadcrumb"> <li class="breadcrumb-item"> <a href="@Url.Content("~/")">@T["Home"]</a> </li> @while (breadcrumbItems.TryPop(out var menuItem)) { var linkItem = menuItem.As<LinkMenuItemPart>(); <li class="breadcrumb-item"> <a href="@Url.Content(linkItem.Url)">@linkItem.Name</a> </li> } </ul> Wait, wait, slow a bit down. What is this? This is the code that would render a simple breadcrumb menu for the menu with the alias "main-menu". If you've set up your Orchard site with any of the built-in recipes you already should have such a menu. But do take a look at the code in detail, we have a lot of helpful comments in there! Once you're clear on what this piece of code does you can copy it somewhere in your theme to display it. For example, you can just put it into the Layout shape template. A cleaner approach would be to put it into its own separate template, like BreadcrumbMenu.cshtml, and display it in one of the many ways possible. Pretty much that's it! Now let's suppose you built e.g. a menu like this: With the above snippet you can have a breadcrumb menu like this when you open the Module Development page: This just uses the default Bootstrap breadcrumbs styling. And that's it, we're done with our breadcrumbs, enjoy! To be fair, this could use some work to make it bulletproof. We could e.g. optimize away the whole lookup when we're on the homepage. Then, it only supports only a single menu item for a given page. Nevertheless, it should get you going. If you'd like to see a generic and more advanced breadcrumb menu feature in Orchard check out this issue. Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

Soon you will able to show content items in your menu easily! How? Check our newest This week in Orchard post and read about an amazing demo to see the new Content Picker Menu Item in action! We published a brand new case study this week on our website about the latest Orchard Core site we developed. By reading that study you can see the possibilities that you can easily achieve by using Orchard Core as your CMS! Don't forget to read our whole post for the most interesting news around the community! Orchard Core updates Added ability to restrict widgets within a flow part You can use the FlowPartSettings to give content managers the capability to restrict which widgets are available within the flow editor. If no widgets have been selected then all widgets will be available, as per the current implementation. Let's see it quickly! Set up a site with the Blog recipe and then edit the content type definition of the Page content type. To do that navigate to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and choose the Page. Then find the attached parts and hit Edit near the Flow one. Here you can select which content types this flow can contain. Just for the sake of demonstration, we say that the Flow editor of this page can only accept Liquid widgets. Let's see what will happen when we create a new Page! Hit New -> Page and try to add something to the Flow editor. You will see that only the Liquid one will be on the list because in the previous step we only allowed Liquid widgets. So, when you attach a FlowPart now you can decide what content types you want to be able to use in a FlowPart. It can be useful if you create a form page type with a FlowPart for it. You could then decide just to allow for form widgets. Remember: if you don't select anything you will be able to use any type of content type with the Widget stereotype in your editor. Added support for IN (SELECT) SQL statements You can use a custom SQL statement, that is about to parse for the queries module, the one that uses the generic SQL language and that will be translated to any dialect that the CMS supports (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server). If you use this language now you can use the select expression inside an in statement. It's also supporting the not in correctly and the like and not like was not working well, so these are also fixed. Check the new InlineData attributes added to the ShouldParseExpression test method to see some examples with the new expression. Fix shape table providers There was an issue with the way you would be able to override a template from your module, override a template for a dependent module. This change will look for shape templates in a module for any first-level dependencies and it's also improving performance because there would be fewer shape templates loaded in the memory. And if you have a feature depending on another feature then it won't be able to override the second level feature, you have to depend on that. It makes sense because you are creating a template for the second level feature, so you can depend on that because you expected that it would be there. Deployment plans search Let's navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export and create one or more deployment plans. Here you can filter the deployment plans and also do bulk actions. To do bulk actions select two or more deployment plans and after that, you will see the Delete option in the Actions dropdown. Content culture picker shape documentation If you navigate to the Content Localization section in the Orchard Core documentation, you may have noticed that there were no Razor example codes. From now the documentation has been improved with Razor examples! Demos Content Picker Menu Item Let's set up a site with the Blog recipe, create a new Page, and call it My brand new page. Then choose the Main Menu option in the admin UI and hit the Add Menu Item button. Here you could see the Available Menu Items modal window with two options: Link Menu Item and Content Picker Menu Item. Let's choose the second one! The Content Picker Menu Item is about having the ability to choose from the content items available in the CMS with a content picker. There is the Selected ContentItem dropdown, that can be used to select the content item that you would like to show on the menu. You can type to search or just simply select your item from the list. We will select our newly created page here. Publish the menu and navigate to the homepage of your site to see your menu. We placed the new menu item after the About, but of course, it's your choice to set the position of your menu item. If you are interested in the full demo don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube! Note that this feature is under development and can be found in this branch! News from the community Orchard Nuggets: How to add a culture URL segment for localization in Orchard Core So you're building a localized Orchard Core site and want all URLs to be in the form of /culture-name/rest/of/the/url, e.g. /hu-HU/my-page. What do you need to achieve this? In our newest Orchard Nuggets post, we give you the answers! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Helping Kast build a multi-tenant platform on Orchard Core Kast is an Australian company and one of their primary goals is to implement the Kast platform with the Kast Group Finder component. We worked together with Seth Cleaver (Co-founder and Director of Kast) on this tool to be able to create an intuitive self-service process that enables people within a church to easily find a suitable group to attend, simplify the administrative processes required for getting people into groups, and provide information to the group co-ordinators that might assist in planning and measuring effectiveness. Check out this case study about how we've developed this multi-tenant social group management platform for churches! 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. Orchard Core Training Demo module: combining ASP.NET Core Options with Orchard Core site settings Our Orchard Core Training Demo module has a new tutorial on combining ASP.NET Core Options with Orchard Core site settings. In the SiteSettingsController you could see how to use the Site Settings to access tenant-level settings and any other custom settings! Orchard Core Training Demo module is a demo Orchard Core module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that including the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can use it as part of a solution the uses Orchard Core NuGet packages, however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. The module assumes that you have a good understanding of basic Orchard concepts and that you can get around the Orchard admin area (the official documentation may help you with that). You should also be familiar with how to use Visual Studio and write C#, as well as the concepts of ASP.NET Core MVC. Bug reports, feature requests, and comments are warmly welcome, please do so via GitHub. Feel free to send pull requests too, no matter which source repository you choose for this purpose. Updated Lombiq Technologies logos You may have noticed that we rolled out our updated logo in the last few days. The spirit is the same: The lab flask with which we distill our IT solutions ("lombik" in Hungarian means lab flask :)). So, please welcome it! 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 140 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! 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! 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!

So you're building a localized Orchard Core site and want all URLs to be in the form of /culture-name/rest/of/the/url, e.g. /hu-HU/my-page. (Figure out what "hu-HU" is! Hint: It's not an owl, neither a rock band from Mongolia!) What do you need to achieve this? Well, we've already seen how to localize content items to achieve this, but that's just for content pages. There is one small piece missing though: How to get the same functionality for controller actions, i.e. coded pages? There is nothing built into Orchard Core for this, actually. And the reason is that all you need is available in ASP.NET Core MVC already. First, you'll need to set up RouteDataRequestCultureProvider so the URL segment indicating the culture will be used to set the culture of the current request. Just add this to your module's or theme's Startup class (if you don't yet know how to build a module, check out our Training Demo!): services.Configure So far so good. Next, you'll need the controller actions you want to be culture-aware to be routed in a way that the culture name is included in the URL: public class CultureAwareController : Controller { [Route("{culture}/culture-aware"] public ActionResult CultureAwareAction() { // Build the result here. } } So now you'll be able to reach this action from under /hu-HU/culture-aware for example. There's one final part missing: Building URLs for these actions. This is quite simple too, you'd e.g. create a link for this action like following: <a asp-action="CultureAwareAction" asp-controller="CultureAware" asp-area="CultureAwareModule" asp-all-route-data="routeParams">Click here</a> That's it! Of course, this can get more complex. You can make route configuration as well as URL generation easier by centralizing this culture parameter handling, which is useful if you have loads of such controllers and links. Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

This week we continue the journey with the new upcoming feature of Orchard Core called Click to deploy. But before that, we will check out the new Liquid helpers, the contributors' page, and many more! Finally, don't forget to take a look at our newest Orchard Nuggets post and the improvements in our Orchard Core Training Demo module! Orchard Core updates Themes standardization It can be hard sometimes to keep all the themes updated with the latest changes and improvements of Orchard Core. Now in every theme, you can add a custom template for the title or can use the features of the built-in one. If you check the code of the PageTitle shape in the PageTitleShapes.cs file, you will see the usage of the LiquidTemplateManager that helps you to customize the way how you would like to render the title of your page. We wrote about how to customize the title in Liquid here: https://orcharddojo.net/blog/this-week-in-orchard-09-06-2019. And in some themes, the HeadMeta zone hasn't been used in the layout. Now you have the possibility to show the content of this zone in every theme and rendering this at the end of the head tag. In this case, you can add your custom CSS in this section and have the ability to override the styling of the theme that you are using. Let's check the layout.liquid file of the Coming Soon Theme for these changes. Contributors Orchard Core has more than 150 contributors! The repository of Orchard Core now contains a Contributors.md file, where you can find the profiles of the contributors. They can have different badges, based on the type of work. There are badges for answering questions, doing code reviews, writing blog posts, and so on. Autoroute container routing A few weeks ago we wrote about the new settings of the Autoroute part: Allow contained item routing: Check to allow users to enable routing of child content items. Manage contained item routes: Check to allow this part to apply routes to child content items. Allow absolute path: Check to allow users to enable absolute paths for child content items If you prefer videos you can also find a demo about this feature on YouTube. And now the huge PR that contains this feature is merged in the dev branch of Orchard Core! Would you like to try this out yourself? Use the latest changes of dev branch now by adding this OrchardCore-preview MyGet URL to your NuGet sources: https://www.myget.org/F/orchardcore-preview/api/v3/index.json as it described here. Thanks for this great feature for Dean Marcussen! Add support for DictionaryAttributePrefix and ModelExplorer property in Liquid You can find an OrchardCore.Demo module in the source of Orchard Core. The goal of this project is to show you the different features of Orchard Core by providing great sample codes. This project has been updated with the latest Liquid helpers. If you open the TodoController.cs in the module, you will find the endpoints of a simple To-do app. But that's not the interesting part. There are 4 related Liquid files in the module. Two in the Todo folder in the Views called Edit.liquid and Index.liquid and two in the root of the Views folder called Todo.Edit.liquid and Todo.liquid. Here comes the content of the Index.liquid file. Here you can see a simple table contains the to-do items. But after the table, there is a button that navigates the users to a page where they can create new to-do items. You can see the block Liquid helper here and the way about how to set the route values for the button. So, if you click on that button you will be navigated to the Create action of the TodoController, that is about to render the Todo.Edit.liquid shape. Here you can also find several new helpers. The form helper is about to render a form and the helper Liquid helper is invoke the input tag helper of ASP.NET Core and binds Text of the Model. If you check the rendered page of the Todo.Edit.liquid file you will see the form that is used to create new to-do items. Every new Liquid helper (form, input, label, validation_summary, validation_for, span) can be found in the Orchard Core documentation. Add icons to Configuration Settings menus When you navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and check the root menu items in the navigation bar, you could see that these items have icons. From now, some submenu items are just about to show you some icons too. Head to Configuration -> Settings or Security to see the new ones. Demos Click to deploy improvements If you haven't seen the demo about the upcoming feature called Click to deploy yet, head to YouTube to watch the recording or check out the previous This week in Orchard post because this will be the continuation of the Click to deploy feature. First, navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the three new features: Add Content to Deployment PLan Click to Deploy Content View or Export Content as JSON Now head to the content items list (Content -> Content Items) and hit the Actions button to open the dropdown. You can see that the context menu is now getting a lot more items. The Export to Deployment Target is about to automatically create a custom recipe file that can be downloaded locally or send it to a remote instance. You can use the Available Targets modal to select the destination. The Add to Deployment Plan is about to add a new content item step using this content item to an existing deployment plan. In this case, a new modal window will open again that lets you choose from the available deployment plans. The Export as JSON is about to directly download the recipe to your computer locally and the View as JSON is a very helpful feature because as you could see in the screen below it shows you the JSON representation of the content item. The same JSON will go to the content step of the recipe when you are hitting the Export as JSON button. Here you have the availability to copy the JSON structure by clicking on the copy icon at the top-right corner of the page. If you are interested in the full demo don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube! Note that this feature is under development and can be found in this branch! News from the community Orchard Core Training Demo module: creating a widget from code We have just added some lines to our Orchard Core Training Demo module to show you the way about creating a new widget from code. In the PersonMigration.cs file we defined a PersonPart, an index table for this part, a Person content type, and from now a PersonWidget. Orchard Core Training Demo module is a demo Orchard Core module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that including the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can use it as part of a solution the uses Orchard Core NuGet packages, however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. The module assumes that you have a good understanding of basic Orchard concepts and that you can get around the Orchard admin area (the official documentation may help you with that). You should also be familiar with how to use Visual Studio and write C#, as well as the concepts of ASP.NET Core MVC. Bug reports, feature requests, and comments are warmly welcome, please do so via GitHub. Feel free to send pull requests too, no matter which source repository you choose for this purpose. Orchard Nuggets: How to add a favicon under /favicon.ico in Orchard Core Every website needs a favicon of course and you can easily add one to your Orchard Core site from a theme or module with a link tag in a template. However, there's a catch: Certain browsers will still search for it (as a first attempt) under the path /favicon.ico. This can be a tiny bit detrimental to the client-side performance, and show up as annoying errors in your logs. So what can you do to serve a favicon under that path too? In our newest Orchard Nuggets post, we give you the answers! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 139 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! 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! 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!

Every website needs a favicon of course and you can easily add one to your Orchard Core site from a theme or module with a link tag in a template. However, there's a catch: Certain browsers will still search for it (as a first attempt) under the path /favicon.ico. This can be a tiny bit detrimental to the client-side performance, and show up as annoying errors in your logs. So what can you do to serve a favicon under that path too? You could do e.g. the following: Add an actual file to your web project's wwwroot folder directly. This will work but you'll most likely have more than one icon for the site, and you'll keep them in a theme. So having two places with icons is less than ideal. Serve the same file that you have in your theme with a middleware or something. Doable but you'd teach the affected browsers that what they're doing is actually acceptable :). Redirect a /favicon.ico request to the actual favicon. This is what we'll do with the code snippet below! Open up your theme's Startup class and add this to its Configure() method (or add the method first if you haven't used it otherwise): public override void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IEndpointRouteBuilder routes, IServiceProvider serviceProvider) => app.Map("/favicon.ico", appBuilder => appBuilder.Run(context => { context.Response.Redirect("/My.Theme/favicon.ico", true); return Task.CompletedTask; })); As you can see this simple snippet will listen on the /favicon.ico path and redirect the client to the favicon you have in your theme (in this case we assumed it's in the root of your theme's wwwroot folder but of course it can be in any subfolder). Very simple! Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

This week we come with a demo about an upcoming new feature of Orchard Core called Click to deploy. We also mention the improvements of the workflows and the documentation. Don't forget we published three new Orchard Nuggets post this week! And it's time to release Orchard Core RC 2! Orchard Core updates Tab placement documentation You have the option to place a part in a different tab in the editor of the given content type. To do that, you have to add a custom placement.json file to your module. In that file, you can tell the name of the part that will be moved to another tab and the name of the tab which will be created on the fly. Fixes Workflow Timer There was some issue with the Timer event that would reenter themselves. There is a new parameter called isExclusive: when we invoke a workflow task we can say this task should not be re-entered. If it's true, a new workflow instance is not created if an existing one is already halted on a starting activity related to this event. If you would like to run it and it's already running, don't start it again. It's also fixing some background tasks executed in every minute and runs longer than one minute. Here you can see the TriggerEventAsync method in the WorkflowManager class with the optional isExclusive boolean parameter. And here you could see the TimerBackgroundTask that is responsible to trigger workflow timer events. Here you could see the TriggerEventAsync method call with using the isExclusive parameter. Upgrade documentation to Material 5 Orchard Core documentation is using MkDocs, which is a static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. You can find several open-source themes for MkDocs, Orchard Core documentation is using the theme called Material Design theme. Material 5 has been released and now Orchard Core documentation is also using the new version. Here you can see the highlights of this new version. You can also find a Samples page with great examples about how to use the different kinds of formattings which come from the extensions provided by the new theme. If you click on the pen icon at the right-top corner of the page you can see the Markdown syntax of this page. Adding Update Content Workflow Task When we create a new workflow, we had three different tasks related to content operations: Create Content Delete Content Retrieve Content Unpublish Content Publish Content From now we have a new task called Update Content. If you create a new workflow and hit the Add Task button, you will find this task in the Content category. Here you can set the content type and the content item ID to update and of course the JSON representation of the content item which will be used to update the content item. Demos Click to Deploy Click to Deploy is about adding a deploy action to the content item list. First of all head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Click to Deploy Content feature. Now go to the content items list by clicking Content -> Content Items. You have a dropdown called Actions for every content item. By clicking on this button you will see a new option, called Deploy. When you click that you will see the Available Targets window where you can choose any of the targets that you have preconfigured. If you choose the File Download option you will get a recipe that contains the particular content item in it. But you can use bulk actions too to deploy multiple content items as well. It's configured by creating a particular deployment plan and it's possible to add just the Click to Deploy Content deployment step to the plan or you can also choose to add a content definition step for example. So, in case of every time if you ship a new file to a remote server you will transfer the content definitions too. There is a little setting that you have to set under Configuration -> Import/Export -> Click to Deploy Content. Here you have to pick the particular plan that contains a Click to Deploy Content deployment plan. And the selected plan will be used when you are hitting the Deploy button in the content items list page. If you are interested in the full demo don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube! Note that this feature is under development and can be found in this branch! News from the community It's time to release Orchard Core RC 2! Orchard Core RC 1 was released on Sep 24, 2019, which was more than a half year from now. In the meantime Orchard Core has several new features and bug fixes, which makes it a more stable CMS, that is now used in several sites in production as well. Just remember the sites in Show Orchard with the Orchard Core category. Another issue is that the RC 1 release is using the .NET Core 3.0 version of the .NET Core framework, which is now at the end of support, that means that release has reached the end of life, meaning it is no longer supported and it is recommended to move to a supported release. If you navigate to the issues page in GitHub, filter for the rc2 milestone. Here you can see only the things that are required for RC 2. The real issue here is to update module manifest URL and version and to prevent custom scripts by default. After that, the community will ship the new release of Orchard Core! New Orchard Nuggets posts Let's imagine you've already created an Orchard Core app and now it's time to show it to the world. How do you publish it, or rather, how do you create its publish package? Build processes of .NET Core apps like Orchard Core are getting quite complex nowadays, and the MSBuild build pipeline also commonly includes steps for building client-side resources or doing a lot of things out of the .NET world. What can you do if something goes off course with all those targets and props files and you're just scratching your head? How to figure out what happens during the build if you can only see that the results are incorrect? In our newest Orchard Nuggets posts, we give you the answers! Read this Nugget for an answer about how to publish an Orchard Core app, the second one about how to debug an MSBuild build process when building Orchard Core and the third one for 4 ways to display something from your module nested within a page in Orchard Core! Don't forget to check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 136 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! 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! 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!

A common question during Orchard Core development, something that came up again recently, is how to display something within the context of an Orchard page when that piece of data comes from your module? How can you "inject" something into the Orchard layout when you want to display e.g. a list of products retrieved from an external API? There are a couple of ways to do this depending on what exactly you need. All are fairly straightforward so let's see a quick rundown! Creating a whole page from you module If you want a whole page served by just your module then it's really simple: Create a module, add a controller as you'd do in standard ASP.NET Core MVC, make an action produce a view and that's it! The view will be wrapped into the Orchard layout so the theme you've selected will be visible around it: The basic styling will be there, the header and menu, any widgets you have put onto layers... Our Training Demo module has a simple sample exactly for this, just check it out and you'll see what we're talking about. The above screenshot comes from our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution BTW. Creating a widget Widgets (see official docs) are basically little boxes of content or other functionality that you can put anywhere on the site. For example, an infobox about the site, a search box, a recent articles box, a footer can all be widgets. You can use them in two ways: Add a widget to a content item with Flow Part: Flow Part can be used to build flexible layouts out of various widgets, including nesting them (like putting widgets into a Container Widget). When you set up Orchard with the built-in Agency recipe and theme then you'll get a Page content type that has Flow Part out of the box: You can get the same content type from our Helpful Extensions Orchard Core module too. Another option to use widgets is to put them onto a layer, a sort of container of widgets. There you can place the widget into a global zone, an area of the Orchard layout, like the header, footer, or sidebars. The widgets on a layer will be displayed whenever the layer rule of that layer matches (you can think of it as a logic expression producing a boolean value), like on every page except the home page or on every page but only for authenticated visitors. For more info check out the docs. OK, but how can you create a widget? A widget is just a content item whose content type has its stereotype set as "Widget". You can change this value from the admin from under Content / Content Definitions and also from code. So, basically, the task is to create a content part of yours that'll display the data you want to show from its driver, then create a widget content type where that part is attached. Seems like a lot? It isn't, check out the relevant content part development tutorial again from the Training Demo, including creating a widget. Injecting a shape into the layout This can be a lot easier than developing a widget but also less flexible to use. You can also write your own code in a template (like a cshtml Razor file) and inject that into the Orchard layout directly. You can see an example of injecting a shape in the Training Demo module too. Displaying a shape from a Liquid Widget The Liquid Widget is a widget that can render a piece of Liquid markup. While there is such a widget in the Agency theme and you can throw it together from the admin quickly too the Helpful Libraries module has it built-in as well. With this widget and Orchard's pretty advanced Liquid support you can of course just write Liquid directly. However, for more complex apps maintaining templates editable from the admin quickly becomes an issue so we'd recommend keeping code in your modules and themes. The good news is that once you have a piece of Razor code in a cshtml template (or Liquid in a .liquid template) then you can just display it from a Liquid Widget! For example, if you have a WeatherData.cshtml template fetching some weather information from an external API then you can display it from a Liquid Widget, and thus use it just as any widget with this little piece of code: {% shape "WeatherData" %} There's more to it, check out the docs on the shape Liquid tag. Conclusion Pretty much that's it. There are other ways too but these are the most straightforward and most flexible ones. Do you have another technique you'd like others to know? Add below in the comments! Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!