Spatial Search, 5000+ Stargazers - This week in Orchard (02/05/2021)
This week you could see a demo about an upcoming Spatial Search feature for Orchard Core! Do you know that Orchard Core's repository now has more than 5000+ stargazers? Check out our post for more!
Orchard Core updates
Map Shape's public properties
You could not do stuff like Shape.Classes, Shape.TagName, etc. in your Liquid templates. It was broken by the upgrade to Fluid 2.0. In Fluid, Shape, and ZoneHoldings uses ShapeAccessor which didn't map all properties (ie: Id, TagName, HasItems, Attributes, and Classes). Now it's fixed.
Workflow CommitTransaction in a separate Workflow Feature
Head to the admin UI of Orchard Core then navigate to Configuration -> Features. If you type the Workflows word in the search bar, you will get all the features that are related to Workflows. Now you will find a new one here called Session Workflows Activities. But there isn't anything new here really, it's just about having the Commit Transaction task in a new feature, because for some security reasons and usually, we don't need to use it quite often. If you miss that activity, now you will know where you can find it. :)
Fix notification locale when the site is restarted
There could be scenarios where there are multiple notifications in the same controller. But if we are restarting the shell meanwhile in the controller, we could face some issues. This fixes an old localization bug, especially when the default culture is set, some of the notifications are localized with the culture before the new culture is taking a place.
Demos
Spatial Search
Let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. Now go to the admin UI of Orchard Core and first, enable the feature called Spatial. This feature provides the ability to add spatial locations to content items. Let's try that out now! For the sake of demonstration, we will create a new content type called Venue. Let's say that our goal, for now, is to be able to query nearby venues. The Venue content type will have a Title Part and an Html Body Part. But that doesn't really matter right now. Apart from that, we will add a new field to our content type, which will be a Geo Point Field. The Geo Point field can have a Leaflet editor type.
Let's keep the other content type settings as default. Now let's see what kind of editor we will have if we open up the editor of our content type. As you can see, you can use a nice editor for the Geo Point Field to set up the Latitude and Latitude coordinates. This means you can simply enter them in the text boxes with these labels or you can just click on the map which will place a marker there with the given coordinates. Of course, you can zoom in and out using the plus or minus icons on the top-left of the map or just by simply scrolling. When you persist this content item, the position will be indexed in Lucene.
Lucene now has some spatial search features which this PR implements. Now let's navigate to Search -> Queries -> All queries and add a new query. Select Lucene from the available query types. In the following example, we have just created a query that returns Venue content items based on a given location. You can see a geo_bounding_box filter here, which is about to return Venues where the location is within the boundaries of the given box. You can set the top, left, bottom, and right parameters of the box by using a JSON object. And that object contains parameter values for this query, which will be the parameters of the box in this case.
But we are just scratching the surface of the upcoming Spatial Search feature of Orchard Core here. If you would like to know more, check out this recording on YouTube!
News from the community
Orchard Core repository: 5000+ stargazers and almost 200 contributors
If you have visited the Orchard Core repository nowadays, you may notice that Orchard Core has almost gained 200 contributors! Right now the project has 197 contributors!
Users on the GitHub website are able to "star" other people's repositories, thereby saving them in their list of Starred Repos. Some people use "stars" to indicate that they like a project, other people use them as bookmarks so they can follow what's going on with the repo later. And if you check out the number of Stargazers you will see that Orchard Core now has more than 5000 stargazers!
Decoupled CMS Orchard Core tutorial for the Dojo Course
After a long wait, last December we released the new Orchard Core version of our legendary Dojo Course tutorial series, the Dojo Course 3!
Are you a newcomer and want to learn Orchard Core from the ground up, both from a user's and a developer's perspective? Are you somewhat familiar with Orchard Core but would like to get up to speed and become an Orchard pro? Look no further, check out Dojo Course 3! Dojo Course 3 guides you from the very basics of Orchard Core all up to be able to write your own themes and modules, utilizing various APIs of Orchard. Here you can check out the Dojo Course 3 YouTube playlist. All the video tutorials are here, in the recommended viewing order. Note that the video descriptions contain links if any were mentioned in the video.
And now we are thinking about making a decoupled CMS Orchard Core tutorial for the Dojo Course to extend it a little bit. Orchard for the admin and content store, Razor Pages for the frontend. What do you think about this one? Are you interested? If yes, please tell us your opinion under this Tweet to be able to create that kind of tutorial in the future that you would love to see!
Consultant needed for scalable TeamCity+Azure setup
Do you have a lot of experience in configuring and operating TeamCity, hosting apps in Azure, and building a scalable Continous Integration environment? We're looking for you! Check the details here!
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