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

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Orchard Dojo opened!

What Orchard missed till now is a place where the various pieces of knowledge related to it are stored in a structured, accessible form. We aim to provide a solution for this with Orchard Dojo: a website dedicated to learning Orchard. On Orchard Dojo we want to gather all the information related to Orchard in a well-structured and well-presented form so nothing worth while gets lost. We also created the Orchard Dojo Library, a nice big package of various Orchard goodies, including development guidelines and best practices, a wiki, Visual Studio code snippets and more. Also with Orchard Dojo we'd like to bring our Orchard trainings what we've done through Orchard Hungary to the next level. We really hope you'll learn a lot on Orchard Dojo!

A small Orchard API reference: Orchard Cheatsheet

The Orchard Cheatsheet is a nice little API reference for some lesser known objects, made by Orchard's lead developer, Sebastien Ros. The cheatsheet's list only contains elements of the API that are accessible from (sometimes very specific) shape templates (well, ExtensionDescriptor seems to be an exception), but e.g. WorkContext is something you definitely encounter elsewhere too.

Orchard extensibility explained - aka why Orchard's flexible content model rocks

Bertrand Le Roy's not-so-recent article "Orchard Extensibility" in MSDN Magazine explains the various aspects of - surprise - extending Orchard. The article mainly covers Orchard's content model, its concepts and flexibility: something we all love in Orchard. Bertrand also lists some other important parts of the Orchard API, all worth knowing.

"Writing an Orchard Webshop Module from scratch" module development tutorial

"Writing an Orchard Webshop Module from scratch" is an excellent, 11-part (planned for 15) tutorial on Orchard module development by Sipke Schoorstra. Everyone who has ever written at least a short tutorial will feel what amount of work such a series contains: not surprisingly it's well worth reading, even for ones already somewhat familiar with Orchard module development.

Performance-tuning modules you should know about

These modules are really useful if you want to squeeze out the performance of your Orchard website: Mini Profiler for profiling Orchard.Caching for a wide variety of caching solutions Cache for output caching (included in Orchard as of Orchard 1.7) Combinator for bundling and minifying static resources (stylesheets, scripts)

Orchard university subject at Óbuda University

Start Date: 2/11/2013 11:00:00 AM End Date: 5/13/2013 1:00:00 PM The world-wide first Orchard university course started in February, 2013 at Óbuda University in Budapest, Hungary, with 23 students subscribed. The attendees were guided through the basics of the administrative usage of Orchard, then the basics of ASP.NET MVC, theme development and module development. Our two lessons per week covered the most important parts of module development so students got the necessary knowledge to expand their Orchard skills further on their own. Students got their marks on their team projects: every team (consisting of maximum four students) developed and presented an Orchard application with a custom-developed theme and module. These were the final projects, delivered: a website's design which hosts tutorials for a certain image editor application, mostly theme development a personal website for a stylist with a nice theme and a custom-developed voting module a website built around recipes with self-developed content and some theme development a website for buying and selling car parts with a more complex module and some theme development a website for ordering pizza with self-developed content and some theme development All those who got to the "finals" and participated in a project got good marks, with an average of 4,22 (from 5).

Orchard CMS "Jump Start" video series

These videos are not new but are definitely not outdated but still valuable resources: Brent Arias created a 4-part series about the most important concepts of Orchard, covering parts of the dashboard that a user will use most. The below video is just the start; check out Brent's Youtube channel for the other ones!