Our blog contains the activity stream of Orchard Dojo: general news, new resources or tutorials are announced here.

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Dojo Course opened! Learn Orchard with us!

UPDATE (2017-11-22): Dojo Course 2 is released with new, updated videos! Our new free and open online Orchard course Dojo Course just opened! Do you want to learn how to use and extend Orchard from the ground up? Would you like us to review what you create and help you to make it better? Enroll in the course and join us for a semester of Orchard!

The Orchard test instance updated in Dojo Library

We upgraded the Orchard test instance in the Orchard Dojo Library to version 1.7. Also the Training Demo module got a corresponding update and since the Orchard Mini Profiler is now compatible with the latest release we updated that in the solution as well.

How-to: running Orchard locally through IIS using SQL Server

This tutorial shows you how to run Orchard on your development machine (that doesn't run Windows Server) not with Visual Studio's built-in Cassini webserver, but using a proper IIS webserver. As the database we'll use a standard SQL Server database, that's advised for non-trivial production installations, unlike SQL CE. Update (25th of June, 2016): Added link to a later blogpost about installing SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server Management Studio 2016. The video shows everything in detail, but here are the main points you have to follow, together with corresponding links. First we'll install IIS, corresponding tools and set up our Orchard instance as a website in IIS. Then we'll set up a local SQL Server too. Install WebMatrix, this will install Web Platform Installer as well. You may ask yourself "Why do I need WebMatrix? I'm not a rookie!" However WebMatrix is still a nice lightweight tool for certain tasks, especially for checking the SQL CE database of your experimental Orchard instances your run locally: WM's SQL browser is much more straightforward to use than SQL Server Management Studio for small datasets (what you'll likely have when you develop something and you want to dig around int the DB) and it supports SQL CE out of the box.Also, installing WM will install some dependencies that we'll need anyway, like IIS Express.If you absolutely want to avoid WM you could install Web PI directly, then install the latest IIS Express through Web PI as a minimum. Install IIS Manager (IIS Manager for Remote Administration) from Web PI. IIS Manager will enable us to edit the setup of IIS from a graphical interface. Actually as its name tells, you can use IIS Manager not just to manage your local IIS, but also remote servers (if they enable this). Install the following extensions through Web API: ASP.NET 4.5 or newer if you have it listed in Web PI (needed for running ASP.NET web apps) and IIS Recommended Configuration, HTTP Errors at least, but you'll likely need URL Rewrite too. If you don't have .NET 4.5 or newer already installed (because you run a system older than Windows 8) then you should install that (also possible through Web PI) first. Set up your first Orchard website in IIS by opening IIS Manager and doing the following: Add a new web site from under Sites. Under Physical Path browse the Orchard.Web folder of the instance you want to run with IIS. As the default binding the most simple value you can use is something like "mysite.localhost". This way you can run your sites with a nice url that is only reachable from your machine. Go to Application Pools in IIS Manager. Make sure the app pool you've created runs on the latest .NET framework.Also change the app pool's identity (under its Advanced Settings to your account with your user's credentials. This will come handy when setting up the SQL Server connection where we'll not use an SQL database user/pass combo but the connection will have "integrated security" (i.e. will use our user). If you use DB users then you don't need to change the app pool's identity, just remember to include that user/pass in your site's connection string then. Don't forget to build your solution latest at this point otherwise you'll see "Parser Error: Could not load type 'Orchard.Web.MvcApplication'." messages. At this point you can open up your site and install it with SQL CE just as usual. But we want more! We want full SQL Server! That's why we download SQL Server Express 2012 Advanced Tools (look for SQLEXPRADV_x64_ENU.exe), or if you're from the future, then the 2140 version of the same tool (I don't think SQL will ever die...). This includes everything we need. Update: here is SQL Server 2014 Express SP 1 (again, download SQLEXPRADV_x64_ENU.exe to get everything). Please visit our later blogpost about installing SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server Management Studio 2016. In the setup choose "New SQL Server stand-alone installation" and install SQL Server. You can basically leave everything on the default (you can set up your server as a default or named instance, it doesn't really matter most of the time; if you want to access your SQL server from under "localhost" though, select default). Now you can connect to your local SQL Server and explore it through SQL Server Management Studio that was installed through Advanced Tools. You can connect with your server's name (if you've chosen to give the server a name when installing), using just "localhost" or by using your computer's name. In Sql Server Configuration Manager make sure to enable TCP/IP connections under "SQL Server Network Configuration" (and as prompted, restart the SQL Server service under "SQL Server Services" in the Config Manager). Otherwise Orchard wouldn't be able to connect to the server. Now you can install Orchard backed by a full SQL Server! Orchard will need an existing DB, so create one from SQL Server Management Studio. Then you can use the following connection string at setup: "Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=MyDatabase;Integrated Security=True". Notice "Integrated Security": this means the connection won't need a user/pass as it will just use your Windows user's credentials. This is only possible because we've set up the app pool to run as your user in 4/4! Here we only showed how to run Orchard using IIS, but not how to also make Orchard development. But this part is fairly easy: you can always run your site through IIS by opening its url, without even opening Visual Studio. If you change something on the code because of Orchard's dynamic compilation feature you don't even have to hit Build (just remember to save project files too: use Ctrl + Shift + S to save all in VS if you've added a new file to your module for example). Naturally you can also attach the debugger to the IIS process running Orchard, that can be made a matter of a mouse click with the AttachTo extension.

Basic Orchard course at Óbuda University

Start Date: 10/29/2012 5:00:00 PM End Date: 12/10/2012 6:00:00 PM In the fall of 2012 we held a free, open introductory course at the John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics of Óbuda University in Budapest, Hungary after an inital introductory session. On the weekly lessons the 24 attendees were guided through the concepts and admin UI of Orchard as well as got to know the basics of theme development. The lessons were also recorded (in Hungarian).

One-week intensive Orchard training for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in Manchester

Start Date: 1/23/2013 9:00:00 AM End Date: 1/29/2013 5:00:00 PM We were contacted by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which is a governmental organisation in the United Kingdom, that they would like to migrate both their intranet and internet applications to Orchard - a process they already started to execute. NICE has an experienced team of software developers at the Manchester HQ for whom they sought training solutions in Orchard: that's where we came into picture. Since we already had a set of training methods outlined (and some experience gained at our university) besides our Training Demo module we happily accepted their request and started working on the refinement and customization of the training materials. The training came in the end of January, 2013. It was a great experience: not to mention that we discovered some new things about Orchard (and a few bugs) we worked with great people (about 10 attendees) who also got to know the great things about Orchard development (and its heavier sides). The five days of training was divided into four sections: 1.5 days of user training to discover the Admin UI of a fresh Orchard instance 2 days of developer training covering the basics of Orchard module and theme development 0.5 day hackathon: divided into two groups we worked on actual problems that needed to be solved for NICE 1 day pair programming: while working on their current tasks, we worked together with each of the participants for a while to help them advancing in their work We could conclude that last two sections were the most exciting and profitable (we had to build up the basic knowledge before those, of course), since "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" to quote a Hungarian proverb. We will implement these experiences in our training methods to make the upcoming ones better and more efficient. Some feedback participants were kind enough to provide: Carolyn Warburton: Excellent training in Orchard CMS which will benefit our team at NICE going forwards. The highly skilled trainers delivered a well thought through training package customised for our needs and which will enable us to hit the ground running with our Orchard CMS project. Boris Karaberberov: The training helped us understand some of the more subtle and complex aspects of Orchard. In addition it gave us ideas how to improve existing code and solve a few long-standing problems.

Forum favourites: records, database indices and about the necessity of drivers

Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting: "Record persisting advices": checklist if you want to store something in a low-level (non-content part) record "Adding empty part to type fails": always create a driver for your part "Records only in Models namespace: good?": remember to put your records under the Models namespace "Indices with SchemaBuilder": you can add database indices from migrations, but only from AlterTable

Forum favourites: model editors with shapes, accessing a shape's generated html and accessing content fields programmatically

Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting: "Passing my own data types to a view": using form field html helpers with dynamic models and in alternates defined with the shape attribute "Dynamically built html with Clay": capturing the generated html coming from a shape "How to access fields of a content item again?": ways of accessing a content field's value by using dynamic or statically typed extension methods

Projector in-depth at Harvest

As you surely know, Projector is the built-in Orchard module that you can use to query content items in many customizable ways. Getting a grasp of Projector is not easy at first however. In the following video, recorded at the first Orchard Harvest conference in 2012 Bertrand Le Roy explains not only how to use Projector but also sheds some light on the programmatic techniques behind it.