This week we would like to show you a demo about the contained item routing options for Autoroute Part among the latest changes of Orchard Core. Then don't forget to check out our updated Orchard Core Training Demo module and the brand new Helpful Libraries and Helpful Extensions from Lombiq! Orchard Core updates Toggle all widgets in Flow Part It could be hard to use Flow Part with multiple widgets because you always have to expand each widget item individually. Sometimes it's quite annoying and it breaks the editing flow. To fix this issue now there is a little toggle all widgets button in the insert widget hover line. Using this button you can show and hide the content of a given widget. And of course, if you click on this button in the case of the Container Widget, the whole content of it will be hidden. A future improvement could be to add the same behavior for the Bag Part and Widgets List too. ViewComponents should be searched in Views and Pages There was a need to put a ViewComponent in the Shared folder of the Pages folder and not just into the Views. This is supported in Razor Pages, so now the ComponentViewLocationExpanderProvider has been updated to also search for the ViewComponents in the Pages/Shared folder. Select All checkbox should react to selected items In many views, we had the same issue and this has been fixed in the Contents, Lucene, Tenants, Users, Workflows and Workflow types pages. Now when you select some items from a list (but not all of them), then the select all checkbox will show you a minus icon, instead of a tick. The tick will be only shown there if every item is selected from the list. Let's see an example for it in the Tenants page about how it worked before and how it is working now. Update taxonomy docs The Taxonomies page of the Orchard Core documentation has been updated with two new additions. First, you could find a new example there about how to use the QueryCategorizedContentItemsAsync Orchard Helper, that provides a way to query content items that are categorized with specific terms. Secondly, you will find some words about Tags. What is the purpose of tags and how to access the TagNames property using Razor and Liquid? Move Header zone to body There was a misunderstanding about what the Header zone is in Orchard Core. The Header zone is for the content and not for the metadata, which could be confusing. If you check the Footer zone, you will find that it's inside the body HTML tag, but the Header zone is rendered inside the head HTML tag. From now the SafeMode theme renders the Header inside the body HTML Tag and the TheAdmin theme does that too and also defines a new zone called HeadMeta that renders the content in the head of the layout. Deployment cards equal heights There was an issue that the deployment step card heights are not equal. If the description of the deployment step is only one row long, it will take less space than a deployment step, which description is more than one length long. Now, this issue has been fixed. Demos Contained item routing options for Autoroute Part Let's say you created a new content item with the Taxonomy content type (or just used the Blog recipe) and attached the Autoroute Part to it. Now let's see the settings for this attached Autoroute Part first. Here you will see three new checkboxes to use: 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 Put a tick to these three and head back to your taxonomy content item to check the editor of it. Here you will see a new checkbox with the label of Route contained items. Put a tick here and now view your categories content item. The term content type itself doesn't have an AutoRoute Part on it so we just automatically generate a route for them based on the content item ID and the display text. If we want to make the routing a little bit nicer then you could also add an AutoRoute Part to the term content types as well. Let's add the Autoroute Part to the Category content type and set the container settings of the Autoroute Part that we have just mentioned before. Then if you head back to your taxonomy (Categories in case if you are using the Blog recipe) and edit the definition of the Travel Category, you will find a box that will let you specify that a child content item will be routed to an absolute path. Put a tick here and save the content item. And now if you navigate to your taxonomy again and select the Travel term, you will see that the URL of it will be: https://localhost:44300/travel If you uncheck the absolute option of the Travel category, the URL would contain the URL of your taxonomy, like https://localhost:44300/categories/travel But we are just scratching the surface here. If you are interested in the full demo, don't hesitate to go to YouTube and view the recording! News from the community Updated Orchard Core Training Demo module to RC1 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. Now, this module is fully compatible with the RC1 version of Orchard Core. Yes, we know the RC1 version is quite old now, but we've done it a long time ago but didn't get to finish it. 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. Helpful Libraries and Helpful Extensions for Orchard Core from Lombiq The Helpful Libraries for Orchard Core containing various libraries that can be handy when developing for Orchard Core CMS, to be used from your own Orchard modules. Includes: Contents Libraries DateTime Libraries with TimeZone conversion Dependency Injection Libraries Localization Libraries MVC Libraries Resource Management Libraries with Resource Filter feature Utilities The Helpful Extensions for Orchard Core is an Orchard Core module containing some handy extensions (e.g. filters for Projector). 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. A new website using Orchard 1.x The project Metis enables EETT adjust its strategy regarding Quality Indices in modern technologies and practical measurements in order to be able to measure more effectively the quality characteristics of telecommunications networks, harmonized as much as possible on best practices of other regulators and domestic providers, be in line with the newest international standards and recommendations, and take advantage of the improvements offered by modern research measurement practices. 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 Dojo Newsletter Now we have 125 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!

The Tags feature is now merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core! In our post, you can also read about the improvements of the Content Picker field, see a demo about the Publish Later module and many more! Orchard Core updates Make content picker default to displaying all content types when none are selected There is no reasonable use-case for a content picker to be configured with no DisplayedContentTypes other than it just hasn't been configured yet. On the other hand, it seems reasonable that some circumstances may necessitate picking a content item of an undeterminable content type at setup. So, by using the content picker you could select which content types you wanted to display in the list when you are searching for a content item. Now there is a new option which is called DisplayAllContentTypes. This way when you add a new content type you won't have to select it again when specifying the content types to display in your content picker. To try this out just simply add a new Content Picker Field to your type and then head to the settings page of the field. Here you can find the Display All Content Types checkbox, that we have just mentioned before. Put a tick in this box and then create a new content item of your content type. We have added a Content Picker Field to a Page content type. Here you could see that the list of the picker is showing menus, landing pages (named Orchard Core) and page content items, so, everything is here that we have defined on our tenant. Tags The tags PR was merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core. The editor of it shows the list of taxonomy terms as tags and stores every DisplayText of every taxonomy term that is tagged inside the field itself under a custom dynamic property which is not available on the field class itself, but there are extension methods called GetTagNames and SetTagNames to retrieve and set the name of the tags. There is a property on the field itself (on the JSON document of the field) that's called TagNames, that gets all the tag names as a string array based on the DisplayText, when a tag was added to the content item. If you change the DisplayText of a term, then every existing content item that was tagged with this term won't have the new DisplayText. That's a caveat for using this property, the GetTagNames on the field. But it would be super useful when you want to just list the names of tags and the TagNames never change, which they should never do. Don't change the name of the tag from one day to the other. If you do, then your responsibility to update the content items or not to use the TagNames property, but resolve all the content items for every tag and use a dynamic DisplayText. Maybe we want the same possibility on even the default TaxonomyField. And have that property on the field itself as a static property, by explaining the limitation of this property. You can see great demos on YouTube about tags using taxonomies and Open Tags. We have already mentioned these demos in the following This week in Orchard posts: Tags using taxonomies Open Tags Fix for SameSite cookie issue By following the recommendation of the ASP.NET team, now we are checking that based on the browser vendor ID what default value we should send for the SameSite cookie. Most of the servers never set the SameSite property of the cookie. It used to be a default value like None by default. But now Google assumes that no value will mean Lax. So, if you want to keep the None value (that was before by default) we have to set it. There is an update on the ASP.NET framework that set's it by default but there is configuration to change the behavior. But this behavior should not change for some browsers that won't be updated. And this is why the only solution is to check what kind of browser is doing the request to know what value we need to set as the default, like Unspecified, None or Lax or whatever. That's an issue and this is done now. Maintain content item ID across BagPart.ContentItems Before this code every time you would change the elements of a BagPart (even updating some properties), it would regenerate some content item JSON payload for each of the BagPart items, which means the content item IDs would be unique, but new. And it would cause issues when you do workflows or when you do routing for containers. Now the content item IDs are immutable even for BagParts. Recipe properties step There is a new deployment step called Recipe File that lets you define customized properties of the recipe file. If you want to customize the recipe file you have this step and then you will be able to set the properties that you can see on the screen. Demos Publish Later module In the admin UI, head to the Configuration -> Features and enable the Publish Later feature. This module adds the ability to schedule content items to be published at a given future date and time. If you would like to use this feature with your content type you have to edit its definition by attaching the Publish Later Part to it. Let's attach the Publish Later Part to the Blog Post content type! Now create a new blog post! At the bottom of the editor, you will see a new input Tag Helper with the datetime-local input type. If you set the date and the time here and hit the Publish Later button, the current version will be saved as a draft and at the given time it will be automatically published by using a background task. We also have a Cancel Publish Later button, so we can cancel the publishing process from here. And in the SummaryAdmin list, you also had a little message that shows you the date and time when the content item will be published. If you are interested in the full demo, don't forget to watch the YouTube video about it! This contribution is sponsored by a company called Weiss Ratings. News from the community How we are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic? In light of WHO characterizing the Coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic we wanted to disclose how we're dealing with the issue: https://lombiq.com/blog/how-we-are-dealing-with-the-coronavirus-pandemic Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 124 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!

Updated Trumbowyg plugin, configure your Azure Blob and Data Protection with Liquid and many more improvements are waiting for you in our upcoming post. Did we forget to mention that Orchard Core is now on the Area 51 site of Stack Exchange? Orchard Core updates Upgrade to ASP.NET 3.1.0 Orchard Core now using the v3.1.0 of the ASP.NET Core framework. This version is included in Visual Studio 16.4.0, so if you are using at least this version, you can build your own solution using Orchard Core. Here you can read a great article about the new features of this release. Validate Site Settings BaseUrl property You can set up the BaseUrl of your site under the Configuration -> Settings -> General on the dashboard. If you enter a URL, which is a not fully qualified URL, you will get a validation error. So, here you need to enter an absolute URL. Template Azure Blob and Data Protection blob configuration with Liquid You can customize the base path of the Blob Storage for media, for data protection and also for the container that you want to use. These can use a template in Liquid. If you have some custom rules to name your container or the base path, then you can define it this way. You can have access to the ShellSettings and the ContainerName properties. This will give you all the flexibility you need for instance to use the same container for all your tenants and then use a custom folder for each tenant. Or a custom container for every tenant and then the same path. You can also ask for the container to be created and it will be done when the tenant is started. You can read more about this feature in the documentation. Trumbowyg 2.21.0 and resizimg plugin Orchard Core using Trumbowyg, a lightweight WYSIWYG editor, that makes easier to edit your HTML content. Thanks to Antoine Griffard, Orchard Core now using version 2.2.10, including the resizimg plugin. For instance, when you set the Trumbowyg as the editor type of your HtmlBodyPart and insert a media with URL, you can just simply set the size of the image with a friendly user interface. Use GetLanguageDirection method everwhere When you check the content of the OrchardCore.Localization.Abstractions module, you will find a GetLanguageDirection extension method in the LanguageDirection static class. This method is used to get the language direction for a given culture. So, if we have an extension method like this, let's use it everywhere in the code. For example, check the code of the CultureDir extension method in the RazorHelperExtensions class, where you can see an example usage of the GetLanguageDirection method. Fix localization accessors names In ASP.NET Core we have many ways to use localization. The IStringLocalizer interface represents a service that provides localized strings and the IHtmlLocalizer interface provides localized HTML content. In Orchard Core, we used T, S, H, TS and TH, so it's time to unify these names and avoid the confusion. From now in the source code, the S will be used for the IStringLocalizer and the H will be used for IHtmlLocalizer. When localizing the views, the name T will be used like before. Scoped Liquid TemplateContext The goal was to improve perf on the Liquid rendering because we were creating a new TemplateContext and resolving all the services for each template. Here the idea is to create a shared Liquid TemplateContext only once per scope for perf, on which we do once a shared contextualization and then a specific contextualization before each rendering. Shared contextualization is done once per scope: add scoped services in ambient values, call Liquid handlers to add more ambient/scope values and access strategies, add all scoped Liquid filters. Specific contextualization before each rendering: e.g contextualize the localizer with the current view context, update the specific model value and its access strategy. And there are many places where we add a ContentItem value to the Liquid scope, we could remove them because now most of the time it is already accessible through Model.ContentItem. Here you can see that there is no need to create a new TemplateContext and add the ContentItem and the Model to it, it's enough to just simply pass the MarkdownBodyPartViewModel. News from the community Orchard Core on Stack Exchange Area 51 Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone, where users come together to build new Q&A sites. New site ideas are proposed, discussed, and the best go on to beta. There is a request on Stack Exchange to create a custom community for Orchard Core. If you want to create a community you have to push for an idea and people need to approve and follow that idea. For this, it's needed more people to join and every person can vote for 5 questions and create 5 questions so, the community can continue on to the next stage. If you are interested in, check the FAQ of the Area 51 site and feel free to join the proposal! Orchard Nuggets: How to use Orchard Core without the sample themes? Try to reference the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet package instead of the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets in your ASP.NET Core web application, that will only add the TheAdmin theme to your solution. In our third Orchard Nuggets post, we show you the differences between these two packages! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 112 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!

The first release candidate of Orchard Core has been shipped! Read our post about the latest improvements of the new release and everything you need to know about where you can download the release and how you can work with an application that uses .NET Core 3.0! On Orchard Core Add contentitem tag helper and liquid tag Now we have a new contentitem tag helper and a Liquid tag. By using this tag helper we can render a content item directly and can also use caching. We still need to use the menu shape, because it has custom alternates that are specific to it, so we can't remove that. But at least now we have a contentitem helper that also do it for anything. Handle standard Startup class Until now if you add the Startup.cs to your module, you need to inherit the Startup class from StartupBase and you need to have to override the ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) or the Configure(IApplicationBuilder builder, IRouteBuilder routes, IServiceProvider serviceProvider) method. Now you can define a Startup class and don't have to inherit from anything like in ASP.NET Core. Of course, you can include the ConfigureServices or the Configure method to configure the app's services if you want, but you don't have to override anything. Fallback to Detail display type for bag parts If you create a BagPart and in the settings, if you remove the display type of the content types that you want in the BagPart, then it will be null in BagPart.cshtml and will fallback to Summary. Because they are widgets if you haven't implemented the Summary view of the widget that you are rendering, it will fallback to template Widget__Summary. But this thing doesn't exist. So the result will be a shape not found error. The solution is to fall back to the Detail, which is the default display type that we use for widgets when we render them. Configure ContentParts and ContentFields with IOptions<ContentPartOptions> or IOptions<ContentFieldOptions> We don't inject a ContentPart in the DI directly. We add the type of the ContentPart to an option, which is IOption<ContentOptions>. In this case, we don't have to resolve the ContentPart to get instances of ContentParts to know what are the ContentParts that are available. We do the same for ContentFields. Content items: Bulk actions and Filters UX Here you can see a concept to redesign the content items page for the bulk actions and the other filters: As you may see, Antoine has been mainly inspired by the GitHub issues UX. The new features are: Select all aligned vertically with the other checkboxes. Smaller left and right padding in the items list. All filters and actions on only one line. Dropdown actions with a light background (correctly displayed on a small screen). Even the Culture filter could appear. Display the number of items and the number of selected items when checked. It is just a POC. To make it work completely, we will need to find a way to select and display the state of the different filters like GitHub does it. For example: type:Article status:published sort:created Just to have a big picture of the two different screens, the current UI looks like this: This feature hasn't been available in Orchard Core yet but will be added in the next version of Orchard, because it was too risky to change the content items page before the RC in this huge way. Add translation metapackage to Cms.Targets As expected we added the OrchardCore.Translations.All to the Cms.Targets. If you use the Cms.Core.Targets you won't have it, but if you use the Cms.Targets you will get the themes and all the localization in your solution. But it didn't work, because there were some missing MSBuild Targets. Now it has been fixed. Orchard Core first release candidate has just shipped The community proudly presents the first release candidate of Orchard Core! RC means that the software is almost ready for the final release. No feature development or enhancement of the software is undertaken; tightly scoped bug fixes are the only code you're allowed to write in this phase, and even then only for the most heinous and debilitating of bugs. Let's see the list of changes for this release. As you can see from the list, Orchard Core is now on ASP.NET Core 3.0. That means now if you would like to contribute to Orchard Core you will need to install Visual Studio 2019 16.3. By updating to this version you will automatically get .NET Core 3.0 too because it is included in this version, but from here you can download both the SDK and the Runtime. The NuGet packages in NuGet.org are also updated and have the version number 1.0.0-rc1-10004. Don't forget that from now you can also download the translation packages from NuGet.org. There is an OrchardCore.Translations.All package that contains all the languages, but you can find the packages for every language separately too. Oh, and don't forget the Docker images of Orchard Core! You can also try the new version on Try Orchard Core. So don't hesitate, upgrade your Orchard Core site from Beta 3 to RC now! Building modular, multi-tenant ASP.NET Core apps with Orchard Core framework There was the .NET Conf this week, which was a 3-day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Sébastien submitted a talk about Orchard Core modularity and multitenancy and he was able to speak! At September 24 at 00:00 (UTC), he made a great talk about building modular, multi-tenant ASP.NET Core apps with Orchard Core framework. If you haven't seen his section yet, you can watch the recording in Twitch. On Lombiq Silent improvements in the background in DotNest As you may now DotNest is a SaaS provider that gives hosted Orchard CMS web applications hosted by Lombiq Technologies. We are thrilled to develop and maintain a provider like that and improved our services for time to time to make a better DotNest for you! Now we have just added some infrastructure improvements and making payments safer with PSD 2. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 94 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!

Lots of PRs merged to Orchard Core this week that adds new improvements, fixes, and features. You could also read a demo about the Content Fields Indexing, that is a very useful feature for the developers: they can now query content items based on the value of the fields! Oh, and we will have a meetup soon in Budapest, where Lombiq will giving a talk on Orchard. Get ready for a longer post about these amazing features! We promise: you won't regret reading it! On Orchard Core Add ORCHARD_APP_DATA Environment Variable section If you want to change where the App_Data folder is, you can define an environment variable called ORCHARD_APP_DATA. Paths can be relative to the application path (./App_Data), absolute (/path/from/root), or fully qualified (D:\Path\To\App_Data). If the folder does not exist the application will attempt to create it. Localization files publishing When we deploy the app it will also publish the Localization folder, which is where the localization files go. Instead of the App_Data/Localization, they go into the Localization folder of the content root. Content Culture Picker improvements There is a new Liquid helper called switch_culture_url, that is responsible to return the URL of the Action that switches cultures. The ContentCulturePickerContainer is the template of the culture picker, that you can add in your front end themes to display a customized drop-down or a list of options to change the culture of the website. There was no example about how to override this using Liquid, now the documentation has an example using the new switch_culture_url helper. Workflows Internationalization Now every Task and Event have a LocalizedString property called DisplayText. With this change, you can localize the title of every activity. Make setting the page title format accessible to site administrators When you navigate to the general settings page you can find a new option called Page title format. Here you can now provide a Liquid expression to customize the way how you would like to render the title of your page. In the screen, you can see that we set the Page title format to {% page_title Site.SiteName, position: "before", separator: " -.-.-.- " %} By providing before as the position, we will show the name of the site first, then the title of the page with a custom separator. Check the second tab in the screenshot above to see the result of the expression. Handle UnauthorizedResult When trying to access an unauthorized ContentItem in the front end, the ItemController returns an UnauthorizedResult. Until there, it's correct. However, UnauthorizedResult is treated like any other error and an error message is returned: "An error occurred while executing this request." leaving us thinking there is a bug. The solution is we need to return the Forbid or Challange results, not just Unauthorized. If you are authenticated, we can just return Forbid to say you don't have access to this page. If you are not authenticated, we return a challenge, that will be redirecting you to the login page to give you a chance to authenticate yourself. In the future in most of the controllers, we should use this logic. Add documentation to health check The HealthChecks module is just enabling the middleware and the new documentation now mentions that the default endpoint is 'health/live'. Add support for typed shape tag helper properties There is a shape tag helper with the following syntax: <shape type="Foo" /> This will render the shape typed Foo. The Razor syntax to do the same is: @await DisplayAsync(await New.Foo()); You can pass parameters inside your page: @await DisplayAsync(await New.Foo(Age: 18, Color: "Green")); You can do the same using the shape tag helper: <shape type="Foo" age="18" color="Green" /> Let's say you create a file Foo.cshtm, that is the default template for the Foo shape. Inside that you can do the following: @Model.Age. What happens here is that you don't have IntelliSense for Age, because it's not typed. When you write the following in your template, what you get for the @age is the string 18. @{ var age = 18;}<shape type="Foo" age="@age" color="Green" /> In Razor, if the property doesn't exist on the type (which is the case here, because it's dynamic) it will be assigned as a string. It will evaluate that doing a .ToHtmlString(). If you really want to get integers, you have a new option in Razor tag helpers to bind a custom property with a prefix. <shape type="Foo" prop-age="@age" prop-color="Green" /> Using the prop- prefix the value will be converted to a property on the shape with the type of the variable that is passed. The @age will be the variable itself, in this case, it will keep the type of that we passed here directly to the property age, which is assigned to the shape. So the shape will keep the properties with the variable type instead of converting them to IHtmlContent. With this new improvement, you can pass complex objects to your shape types. For example, you can pass your object directly to a shape without needing a ViewModel. Demos Content fields indexing Now we have a new module which is Content Fields Indexing (SQL), that adds database indexing for content fields. You can also find documentation about the available tables for the database indexing and the usage of these index tables from a class, from a Razor template and from Liquid too. First, enable the Content Fields Indexing (SQL) module from the admin. If you are using the Blog recipe, you will have a Blog Post content type, thas has a Subtitle Text Field. Let's create some new Blog Posts. Let's create two published and one draft posts. Now head to the database, where you will see the new tables, like DateFieldIndex, BooleanFieldIndex, TextFieldIndex, etc. Because the Subtitle is a Text Field, let's check the content of that table. You can see the three blog posts here, where you can also notice that one of them hasn't published yet. If you enable the SQL Queries module, you can add a new SQL query to list the Blog Posts from the TextFieldIndex table. Hit Save and then Run the query. At the bottom of the screen, you will get the result of the query: the three BlogPost content types. Do you know developers from your company who'd love this feature? Show them that now they can query content items based on the value of the content fields! On Lombiq Talentera.Net meetup This one is for our friends in Budapest: we've partnered with the agile carrier building agency Talentera to bring you .Net meetups! The first one will be in three weeks, us giving a talk on Orchard. Join if you're in the city! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 91 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 start our post with a new contribution from Lombiq about back-porting Orchard Core's Live Preview feature to Orchard 1.x. Then read about two demos of Orchard Core's upcoming huge features: the Azure Blob Storage as CDN and about supporting custom Lucene analyzers! We also have other updates around our house as well. Check out our current post for more! On Orchard 1.x Demos Live preview feature A new Orchard module is available in Orchard 1.x, called Content Preview. This is the back-port of the Live Content Preview feature that you can meet within Orchard Core. To use the Content Preview feature, head to the Modules menu from the admin and enable the module. The main concept is the user wants to see the changes of a content item immediately somehow without needing to save the changes. Here you can see a Page content type with several parts attached. Here you can update the TitlePart, the BodyPart, and the LayoutPart too with a TextField and a NumericField. You can also have more than one TinyMCE editor in the editor of the content item, it will work without issues. If you edit a content item with invalid data (for example typing some text in the editor of a NumericField), you will see the error notification immediately in the preview window. In the live preview window, you can find a warning message: "The Content Preview feature doesn't support properties where there are relationships to ContentPartRecord (e.g. Taxonomies, Tags). These won't update in the preview windows but otherwise, keep working." You can see this message because this feature hasn't been implemented yet, but feel free to have a contribution and add this feature to the Content Preview in Orchard 1.x! Thank you for the contribution to Milán Keszthelyi from Lombiq Technologies! On Orchard Core Add more detail step on README.md of OpenId In the documentation, there are more steps about how to add the relevant identity of OpenId when using MMC.exe. New Orchard Core collaborators & teams in GitHub There is a new OrchardCore Devs team in the GitHub repository of Orchard Core. The members of this team now have wright access to the repository, they can merge PRs, create and delete branches, but can't merge to master. They contributed enough and with good quality that we can trust them now. They learned how to contribute to Orchard. :) Demos Azure Blob Storage as CDN We don't want to serve the Azure Blobs directly by rendering their own URLs that points to their Blobs. So, the clients load the Azure Blob directly and not us. We want Orchard to load the Blob, save it locally on the server and we serve the file directly. This file, which is copied locally from the Blob Storage is what we call the Media Cache. We do that because if we want an actual cache, that the clients don't ask us to serve a file, we will use a CDN which Azure Blob Storage is not and by doing that we can process the files to resize them if they are to be resized by ImageSharp. So, there are two things to solve here. For example, if you would like to show an image on your page with three different sizes, there are three requests coming for the same image with different sizes. But there is only one Blob on Azure. You just send one request to Azure to get the file, store it locally and then resize it to the three different pipelines and serve the three different files, which are cached by ImageSharp also. There is a cache of the Blob file in the Media Cache, and there is three cached, resized images from ImageSharp. This Purge Media Cache button under the Configuration -> Media Cache section is responsible for delete the Media Cache, not the ImageSharp cache. This feature is still under development. Supporting custom Lucene analyzers and additional Lucene indexes settings In the Lucene Indices settings page, you can now have an Edit button for each index. If you click on Edit, you can set the content types and also have an option to index a draft version of the content item. Before - by default - it was indexing everything, not just the ones we want. And - by default -, it was only indexing the published versions, without an option to index draft. If it's checked, it will still index one content item, but the latest version. When we index and tokenize the text, we need to tokenize based on the language. Using the Analyzer Name select list you can provide different language analyzers for each index. If the text of these items will be French, then you can use a French analyzer. This feature is still under development. On Lombiq Improving your employment security with Orchard Did you know that the Employment Security Department of Washington State also uses Orchard? Well, they do and thanks to them we've back-ported the Orchard Core live content preview feature to 1.x! See our post about it: https://lombiq.com/blog/improving-your-employment-security-with-orchard Migrate from Bitbucket Mercurial repositories to Git - we can help! Do you need help after Bitbucket dropping Mercurial support? If you want to move to Git, check out this page in our website about what are your options now. We've been doing hg-git conversion for six years! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 92 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!

In our post we review the happenings after the Beta 3 release, then head to the open pull request of Orchard Core and see what will be merged soon, that will be available for the next release! On Orchard 1.x Style.Include and Script.Include register the wrong resource key in debug mode When you are injecting resources using the Script.Include or the Style.Include methods, you have to pass the debug version for the first parameter, and the release version for the second parameter. Let's see the following code: Script.Include("webfont.js", "head.deferred.min.js").SetAttribute("defer", "").AtHead();Script.Include("jquery-migrate.js", "head.deferred.min.js").SetAttribute("defer", "").AtHead();Script.Include("slick.js", "head.deferred.min.js").SetAttribute("defer", "").AtHead(); We have 3 separated js files that will be bundled when compiling in release, as a single js file but we want to render them as separated js files when developing/debugging. The ResourceManager.Include method registers the webfont.js as head.deferred.min.js causing the other files (jquery-migrate.js and slick.js) not to be rendered because they use the same key of webfont.js. The ResourceManager.cs has a virtual RequireSettings method, where we return the following value: resourcePath = FixPath(resourcePath, relativeFromPath);resourceDebugPath = FixPath(resourceDebugPath, relativeFromPath);return Require(resourceType, ToAppRelativePath(GetResourceKey(resourcePath, resourceDebugPath))).Define(d => d.SetUrl(resourcePath, resourceDebugPath)); Where a new method, called GetResourceKey has been introduced to decide when we need to return the release or the debug path of the requested resource. Now there is an issue in Orchard Core too, to do the same thing when injecting resources in this way. On Orchard Core Docker images If you navigate to the Docker Hub of Orchard Core you can download the updated docker images. Here you can see that the Windows version of Orchard Core has more than 5.0K downloads and the Linux version has more than 10K downloads! Both of the images have the following supported tags: latest: The latest public release 1.0.0-beta3: The latest release of 1.0.0-beta3 dev: The current development branch NuGet packages If you visit https://www.nuget.org/ and search for orchardcore, you will find a new package called OrchardCore. This is a new package, which is only available since Beta 3. You will see there are two packages because we merged on master and later on a new tag for beta 3 has been created to know which commit was Beta 3. And by creating a tag, AppVeyor restarted the build and republished everything on NuGet. We could change AppVeyor script to do not deploy or build on tags, just on commits on master. The YamlDotNet is still a dependency for Orchard Core Beta 3, but we do not use it anymore. In the next version it will be removed, we just kept it for the migrations from Beta 2 to Beta 3, because we convert all the YAML files to JSON and we still need YAML for the conversion. Open Pull Requests When you navigate to Orchard Core's GitHub page and check out the open PRs, you will see that there are currently more than 50 open PRs waiting to be merged to the dev branch. The reason for being as many open PRs is that these branches containing quite huge changes and by merging these into the dev branch could break some features of the framework. By being careful, we thought it would be better to merge these PRs after Beta 3 has been released. Now the Beta 3 is out, so it's time to merge these pull requests to dev branch! Let's see some of these! Add custom Widget styles and classes with Flow After this PR will be merged you can customize the classes and the styles for each widget in the flow. Technically, this PR provides Classes and Styles fields in the FlowMetadata on a Widget for users to add custom classes and styles to the widget container. Features matrix A list of features of Orchard Core, so people don't have to look for the available features and the ones that are currently in development or excepted for an upcoming version of Orchard Core. It could be good if they compare Orchard Core with other CMSs. Add user avatar to the admin site This PR is about to add the avatar to the top right with the name of the currently authenticated user. It could also be interesting to have a Liquid filter to generate a Gravatar. RTL support for TheAdmin theme This PR is using a Gulp pipeline that will convert the admin.css into RTL, by switching all the left margin to right margin and so on. In this week there was an article about how Spotify implemented to support Arabic. They used a similar technique, but not using the same pipeline from the PR, they used PostCSS-RTL in their build step. It's the same process, but with a different library. It looks like this one solves the part of the issue that exists in the PR. It's not replacing the existing CSS, but extending it with more rules that are specific for RTL. It's one CSS which will adopt the look and feel based on RTL or not. It will let us do it automatically for any CSS that we want to instead of manually specify which CSS we want to include. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 58 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 every time when 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!

There was no Orchard Podcast this week, but we have lots of news around Orchard Core and the Orchard Core Beta 3 release! On Orchard Core Updated website for the Orchard Core Beta 3 release The community has been developing Orchard Core for more than 3 years now, but the official website of Orchard hasn't provided much information about Orchard Core. For the Beta 3 release, orchardproject.net got a huge update to focus on Orchard Core instead of the Legacy CMS. However, if you are interested in the 1.x of Orchard, you can still reach the old page by clicking on the Legacy Orchard option from the menu. In the new page, when you click on the Try Orchard button, you will be navigated to https://try.orchardproject.net/, under the Getting started section you can try our Docker images, and the Portfolio is also filled with websites created using Orchard Core. In the Features section you can see we mentioned that you can use Orchard Core as a full, decoupled, or headless CMS and thanks to ASP.NET Core, you get one of the fastest CMS solutions you have ever tried on any OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS). Visit orchardproject.net now! A new website using Orchard Core California School Information Services has a website which runs on Orchard Core! Check out this site to see the loads of capabilities that you can achieve using the CMS. 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. Customize Login and Registration pages in Orchard Core CMS A few weeks ago we wrote about Orchard Core now allows theming for Login/Registration/ResetPassword screens. In this post, David Hayden wrote about how to display the login and registration pages using the active site theme. If you have created an Orchard Core CMS site using The Blog theme, you could see what the Login Page looks like now with the setting enabled. We see the consistent header, footer, and copyright of the site theme along with the login form. Normally it's just a login form. Custom Admin Menus in Orchard Core CMS One of the new features in The Blog Theme and its setup recipe is the use of the Admin Menus module to add custom menu items to Orchard Core's Dashboard. In this post, David wrote about how he changed the admin menu using the Admin Menus module. Portfolio Widget - Orchard Core Theme Development In this post, David wrote about which new features of Orchard Core he used to build a new portfolio widget for his themes using the liquid template language instead of Razor, where you can create, modify and override templates in the Orchard Dashboard using the Templates module. Orchard Core Blog Recipe and Running Custom Recipes Orchard Core Themes come with a setup recipe, but an Orchard Core CMS Developer is not limited to setup recipes. There can be custom recipes that are part of the theme or module that are not setup recipes and add functionality on-the-fly. Read David's post about what you can achieve using separate custom recipes that can be run on demand. Create an Orchard Core CMS Website using Orchard Core Code Generation Templates The Orchard Core Code Generation Templates that work with the .NET Core CLI make it really easy to create a website, Orchard Core Module, Orchard Core Theme, and even a modular .NET Core MVC Website. Here is a quick Orchard Core CMS Tutorial that shows you how to create an Orchard Core CMS Website. Modern Business theme Last September we had a demo about how to create a decoupled theme based on the Modern Business one. Thanks to Sijmen Koffeman the theme for Orchard Core is available in this repository. To use this theme in a solution that uses the full Orchard Core source (not NuGet packages), you have to do the following set up, after copying the source to your themes folder: Add this theme as an existing project to your solution. Reference ModernBusiness to OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets project. Remove the referenced NuGet packages and add them as a ProjectReference. Now head to the admin site and make this theme as default. When you set up your site using The Blog recipe and open a blog post, you will see your blog post as in this screen: You can also take a look at Start Bootstrap's Modern Business Theme for Orchard Core as a decoupled Razor Pages Module. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 57 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 every time when 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!

Orchard Core Beta 3 is here! Read our post about the latest improvements of the new release and a way about how we could store static media files in the future using Orchard Core! On Orchard Core Orchard Core Beta 3 release We are proudly announcing that the community shipped Orchard Core Beta 3 release! Head to the GitHub page of Orchard Core to download the assets of the new release, where you can also find the list of changes for this release! Fixing DataAnnotations localization Using the PO file string localizer, users can't localize data annotations. When you have a model with some Required or DisplayName attributes, the value of the Error Message will be translated automatically using the StringLocalizer. In Orchard 1.x it never worked, but in Orchard Core, it supposed to work because it's using the correct service for translating which Orchard implements. The IStringLocalizer is created by a StringLocalizerFactory. The question is should a StringLocalizer know about the culture supposed to render or is it when we call _localizer.GetString that we should check what is the current culture? Our assumption was that the localizer should be localize for a specific culture because it had a method called WithCulture to return a new one for another culture. But actually, it's not working in this way. In our case is that we were creating a localizer for the current culture (like English, because it's our default), then we go on a page for Spanish, and it will still reuse the same localizer. Now we do the culture resolution when the GetString is called on the instance. It worked in the case of views, because the views get a new StringLocalizer instance every time they rendered, but not when the attributes are evaluated. It's important because this package is not just for the Orchard Core Framework or the CMS, it's a NuGet package, that anyone can use to localize their ASP.NET applications based on PO files. We support pluralization and dynamic PO files too. How to create Media content items in Orchard Core? In Orchard Core media are not content items, they are just files with a path. The Media Field is just a list of path to a file that is handled by the media storage. Most of the time we don't need a content item for the media. It's faster to store just the path and then to load the content item to store the data and render an image. But we can have Media content items by just create a content type (call it Image, Video or whatever) and attach a Media Field to that. Then you can have content pickers on your other content items to select this kind of media. Localization files guide Last week we wrote about that the new localization guide has been added to Orchard Core documentation. And we have good progress on some translations! As you can see, the Arabic is over 40%, the Chinese more than 80% ready! And we have just added the Orchard Core project to Crowdin! The documentation just has the dev version Now when you visit the ReadTheDocs page of Orchard Core, you will not see the option to read the latest or the dev version of the documentation, only the dev version is available. There can't be any misunderstanding about which branch you are targeting, we always show the latest branch (dev branch), and if we have documentation that only relates to the dev branch, we should make some notes in the documentation to say this won't work with the master. Improve the create button on List Part When you have only one content type attached to a List Part, then instead of having a drop down to select it, there is a button to create the given content type. Storing static Media By using the IFileStore, you can get files, store documents into a file store, etc. The IMediaFileStore implements IFileStore and provides two additional methods: MapPathToPublicUrlKnowing a path for media (like /images/thumbnail.png), this method will return the public URL that we need to render when we render a media. This file store can serve the correct media when it's requested. It's a bridge between an HTTP request to the file that is contained by the store. The default one is using the file system implementation (the folder), so it's just saying whenever you want to access /images/thumbnail.png, it will return /media/images/thumbnail.png. MapPublicUrlToPathThis is the opposite. When we have a public URL, can you guess which image it will present? This is done for a very specific reason. If we have an Azure Blob Storage, we want to render not the local path to the image, but the path to Azure Blob Storage. When we have an image to the media manager, it will store the image for example on Azure Blob Storage and then when we get the path for this media from a content item we need to find what is the public URL of this media in Azure. So the custom implementation for Azure Blob Storage will return http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob. The next step would be to remove the whole IMediaFileStore interface. Therefore we don't have to care about where publicly the media is accessible.What about serving the Blob Storage from our web server? When we go in /media/myimage.png, the path will be: "myimage.png". In case of an Azure Blob Storage, the public URL will be http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myimage.png. This is the URL, where the browser finds the image. When /media/myimage.png is requested, Orchard will download the blob (corresponding to that from Azure, and either render it directly on the request or save it as a cache locally) and serve it for the next request without having to ask for Azure. In terms of perf, it won't be slow and it opens other possibilities: 1. Resizing images If we do a resize, we could use the following URL: http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myimage.png?width=123 But this won't work, because if we do something like this, the server of Azure doesn't know about ImageSharp or whatever. This thing can only be done if we server the image by ourself. To be able to resize images, we need to process them, that means we need to load them and serve them not from a public URL. 2. CDNs Content Delivery Networks are local caches of the files we request. Some people use Azure Blob Storage because they want CDNs. But we can use CDNs even for our local images. The idea is to use CDNs even for Blob Storage. We could say that yes, we have Blob Storage, but just for storage, it's not for serving the images. We could also make it completely private, so nobody can access our Azure Blob Storage. It's the Orchard web server that will download the media, serve it in a way (/media/images/thumbnail.png) and if we have a CDN, then the CDN itself is responsible for asking us for the media (which will download from Blog Storage, so it will be slower for the first time), but then every time the users will hit the CDN, then they will get the image from the CDN, not from us. We won't even serve the image. Instead of having an interface, that gives us a public URL, every time we render a media is to have a configuration setting with the public CDN prefix for media files. In this configuration, we would define //myownsite.azurecdn.com. What you would do is configure Azure CDN to be a CDN on your website which is mywebsite.com. And whenever we render a media file, we would prefix the URL with that. The browser will ask the CDN for the resource, which will itself ask our site for the resource and then get the blob storage thing. We serve it, that means it will be resizeable, even with a CDN. If we make a request like //myownsite.azurecdn.com/foo.png?width=123, it will request that on our server, so we can resize everything. That would work with any CDN, like Azure CDN, Akamai, Horizon, CloudFlare, etc. Another option is to add a configuration setting with public CDN for resources. When we define a resource, we can set the debug version and the minified version, and also the CDN version. And we also have a setting to say I want to use a CDN version of my resources instead of the local ones (if they are available). We could also be able to set the CDN prefix for these files too, and then they would be also cached by a full CDN and the site would be much faster. However, we need to purge ImageSharp cache automatically with some thresholds. If we cache media items, need to have a way to purge. That's doable because every time we store a media we can store how much data we already stored like in a file that is also on the file system. There are many ways to do that. There is a website using the Blog recipe under sebastienrosdotcom.azurewebsites.net. It's hosted on the east coast, if we look at the Network tab using Google Chrome Developer Tools, it takes about 150 ms to render the page in Hungary, plus the static files, which are either in CDN or loaded by Orchard Core. Seb enabled the CDN and mapped this website to cdn.sebastienros.com. In the first time, it will be slower, but after if you hit F5, it takes less ms. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 56 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 every time when 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!

UPDATE (2017-11-22): Dojo Course 2 is released with new, updated videos! First of all thank you all for the enrollments into the Dojo Course! It's great to see you wanting to deep-dive into Orchard! (If you enrolled and haven't received a confirmation, don't be afraid: we don't send confirmations not to clog your mailbox. If you sent the form you'll all set.) So the Course starts in just a couple of hours now! This week we already had the second lesson on the university, so there are two tutorials in the tube. Enroll now if you'd like to and keep an eye on Orchard Dojo!