Fix background task description is no longer editable, add validation type for Validation Summary Part, demo about fake video capture source in Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox, and announce that Orchard Core goes to Oxford! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Fix background task description is no longer editable There was an issue with the Description of the background tasks were not editable. If you navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Background Tasks feature, you can manage your background tasks under Configuration -> Tasks -> Background Tasks. The Orchard Core solution contains a module called OrchardCore.Demo. If you add it as a project reference to the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets project, you can utilize this module, which contains a test background task. The Lombiq Training Demo for the Orchard Core module also contains a sample of how you can implement your own background task. Add Validation type for Validation Summary Part In the Validation Summary widget, it is useful to be able to specify the type of summary we want to show. By default, we can show all errors. However, in some cases, we may only want to show a model-level error instead of all. This improvement is about simply adding an option that would allow the user to determine the type of summary to add to the form. By default, it would be all errors. To utilize this feature, you must enable the Forms feature, which provides widgets to implement forms. Now, if you edit a content item with the Flow Part attached (for example, the Page content item coming from the Blog recipe), you can build a simple form. We added a Form widget to this Page with some other widgets, and of course, with the updated Validation Summary widget. As you can see, now there is a Show Model Only Error checkbox, which you can use to decide to only display model-level errors or all errors. Demos Fake video capture source in Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox Maybe you have already heard about the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox, our web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. We wrote about it several times here as well, first when we open-sourced it, when we added some Orchard Core Features tests to it, when we added the automated monkey testing feature to it, or when we introduced the Visual verification testing. At the end of last year, we showed you the latest updates about integrating UI testing into Orchard Core and the way how you can use WebApplicationFactory. This time, we will check out a slightly different topic! Imagine you have an application that uses video sources to access visual information from the user or the environment using Media Capture and Streams API. The goal can be QR or bar code scanning, user identification, or other computer vision applications. To make sure that future changes to the code do not break anything, we need a way to automate testing. Here, the fake video capture source comes into play. If you check out the documentation, you can see that you can use y4m or mjpeg video files as a fake video capture source in the Chrome browser. In the demo, you can see a virtual business card service where the front end is built by Vue.js, and the back end is of course Orchard Core. If you show a QR code for the application, the back end gives you back a content item, which is a Business Card. This sample can be found in the Lombiq Vue.js module for Orchard Core under the Samples folder. Both of these modules are included in Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution, so we will open this solution and find the BehaviorVueTests class where you can find two tests, called QrCardScanShouldWorkAsync and QrCardScanShouldReportNotFoundAsync. The ConfigureFakeVideoSourceForPositiveTest and ConfigureFakeVideoSourceForNegativeTest extension methods are responsible to retrieve mjpeg files, which are embedded resources that we can utilize for these tests. If you run the QrCardScanShouldWorkAsync test, you will see that the test retrieves the information from the QR code and displays the card's content based on the card ID, which can be found in the QR code. And as always, if you want to know more about this new addition to the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core, check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Core goes to Oxford Zoltán Lehóczky will give an Orchard Core intro at .NET Oxford on the 16th of May. .NET Oxford is an Oxford-based .NET meetup/user group. It'll be online, so you can join from anywhere if you're just learning about Orchard! Check it out here! Orchard Harvest Online As many of you know, we have been working hard over the past months to organize the next Orchard Harvest in Las Vegas after the last Harvest in 2017. Unfortunately, based on the current economic situation and personal feedback, Las Vegas won’t work this year. Not to mention that unfortunately Microsoft Build, announced after we decided on our dates, also falls in line with the original dates we chose. So, a date change was also necessary. However, we did not want to let go of this opportunity to meet completely. Therefore, we are pleased to inform you that we will be holding our first online Orchard Harvest starting on the 31st of May at 13:00 UTC. You can start your registration for the event right now. Of course, we are still looking for speakers. You can apply to present by 12 May at the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/pfiExtEUuZ. Jump into the following GitHub discussion for the details! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 446 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries, enhance the Search module and UI, and a demo about the System Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries In a recent change to the background tasks, a title was added to the background tasks. This works great for entries that have not been saved into the database. However, for entries that are already saved in the database, we do not have a title to show so it leads to no name being displayed on the UI. Since the title is not an editable field, we should always set the title to the default settings when showing tasks on the UI. Enhance the Search module and UI Currently, we have two different SearchController. Each one handles its own search provider, Lucence and Elasticsearch. We should be able to combine these two into one and place it on the Search module since that module's sole purpose is to export a front-end UI for the search. Also, we should add a setting to change the placeholder for the search bar. Additionally, we should have a Search Form widget that would allow the user to add a search widget. So, this update contains the following enhancements: Remove the SearchController from both Elasticsearch and the Lucene module. We now have one common SearchController in the Search module. The new controller now returns a shape instead of a view model which allows the user to override the default views. Adds settings to allow the user to define a title for the search page and also a placeholder text for the search bar. Add a Search widget that a user can add to their site. The default widget will direct the user to the /search route. Allow the user to optionally pass the index name in the route value. For example, /search/index-name the index-name is an optional value, and when it is not provided, the default index is used. Let's see some of the improvements mentioned in action! For this demonstration, we set up our site using the Blog recipe, and to be able to test the enhanced Search module, we have to enable the Search module itself and one search provider, which will be Lucene, for example. Now, we need to create a Lucene index under Search -> Indexing -> Lucene Indices. Here we added the name BlogPosts and included the Blog Post content type to the index. After that, we navigated to Search -> Settings -> Lucene and selected the BlogPosts search index as the default index to use for the search page and put a tick into the "Allow Lucene queries in search form" checkbox. Now we have a simple search set up, let's see the new Search Widget in action! We decided to place this widget on the home page. The predefined Blog content item is the home page in this recipe, so we edited the content definition of the Blog content type by adding a Flow Part to it. By having a Flow Part, we can add the new Search Form widget to the Blog content item. Here we can add some placeholder text if we want and can define the index name. Now it's time to utilize our widget! If we navigate to the home page of our site, we will see our Search Form widget. Let's type something and hit the Search button. As you can see, it lists our test posts which contain the "post" word. And you may notice the index name in the URL too (BlogPosts). If we had multiple indices, we can replace the BlogPosts one with any other existing index and that would mean that we search for something based on the content of that index. Remove .tiff from the supported images array Most modern web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, do not support the display of TIFF images natively on web pages. This is because TIFF files are typically very large in size and may take a long time to load. If you check out the MediaOrchardHelperExtensions class, you will see that the .tiff is now missing from the _imageExtensions. Demos System Module For this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by the community members who love Orchard Core. This will encourage all the passionate developers to build modules that aren't included in Orchard Core. Such modules may be necessary for the community or essential for any sort of CMS. This repository contains several modules, this time we will check out the one called System Module, which provides information about the currently running application; it can display the available system updates and put your site in maintenance mode while you upgrade. If you run this repository and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the "system" word. This will list the following features: System, System Maintenance, and System Updates. Enable them all! Now you will find a new option on the menu called System. Click on the Info under System! This page lists several useful information, like the ASP.NET Core Version, the OS Version, the Tenants, the enabled features, and so on. But you can find another option under System, called Updates. On this page, you can make sure that you are using the latest version of Orchard Core. If you are using the latest one (1.5 currently), you will see a "You're all up to date!" text, meaning there is no newer version of Orchard Core. And the third thing is the Maintenance mode. You can enable this mode by navigating to Configuration -> Settings -> System -> Maintenance and putting a tick into the "Allow maintenance mode" checkbox. If you do that and navigate to the front end of your site, you will see the page which shows you that the site is currently offline for maintenance. And as always, if you would like to learn more about this module, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 430 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add a title to background tasks and improve the UI, update Azure AD Docs, add hidden content type settings to allow hiding a content type from GraphQL Schema, and a demo about the Lombiq Node.js Extensions project! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add a title to background tasks and improve the UI Currently, the background task name/technical name is the full name of the C# class. This is not a user-friendly name for a UI. The long technical name (aka task Id) should not be visible to the UI. The improvement here is to add a user-friendly title to every background task. We can continue to use the current "name" in the URL, and locate the task. So, here is a summary of the changes regarding the background tasks UI: A new search bar was added to the list page. The technical name is no longer visible. Instead, we show a title. The Create action was removed from the controller as we can never create a background task using a UI. The Edit action will now create a settings entry in the document if an entry does not exist. The following screen shows you the before and after screens of the Background Tasks landing page and the Edit background task page. Improve Azure AD Docs The documentation of how to authenticate users with the Azure AD Account had a few errors and omissions, so after figuring out what needs to be configured to make login work, the documentation has been updated. Add hidden content type settings to allow hiding a content type from GraphQL Schema GraphQL exposes all content types to the user. A permission check is applied to filter out content types users can't view. There is no way to control which content types should be exposed to the API. Not everyone wants to expose every content type. For example, if we have a SitePage content type we want everyone to be able to view it, but we do not want anyone to query it from the API. The solution was to simply add a content type setting to hide the content type like we do today for the content parts. Demos Lombiq Node.js Extensions The Lombiq Node.js Extensions project is supposed to provide front-end asset pipelines as a reusable project where under the hood, we actually run some Node.js scripts. We tried to do that in a way that the consumer of this project doesn't really have to know much about how it works and doesn't really have to configure much or anything at all. And we also set out to make this available as a NuGet package. So that you can drop in a completely working, but also configurable Node.js front-end pipeline which means compiling/minifying and linting SCSS and JS files and things like that. One more thing to know is that we drop Gulp from the equation altogether because Gulp is officially not compatible with anything higher than Node.js 12. It does work on Node.js 14, but we had problems with upgrading to Node.js 16, which came out over a year ago, and now the current LTS version is Node.js 18, so we decided to drop Gulp from the whole pipeline and build the whole project just using npm scripts and some custom written node.js scripts. Now let's see a quick example of how to utilize it! We will check it out in our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution. You will find our other useful Orchard Core-related open-source projects there, too. Here you can find a class library called Lombiq.NodeJs.Extensions.Samples where we added a configuration section called nodejsExtensions to the package.json file. Here you can see we are looking for JS files in the CustomJsFolder and SCSS files in the NonDefaultScssFolder and rendering them into those target folders. We also have assets copying, which we do a lot in our modules where we copy files from node modules (for example, Bootstrap or other front-end libraries) into Webroot. Then we also have Markdown linting with another sample package.json file in the Lombiq.NodeJs.Extensions.SolutionMarkdownAnalysis project. The markdown can be enabled by providing a source folder which can be any relative path. And we have a lot to cover! If you want to know more about this new project, check out this recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 400 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core 1.2.1 is now available to fix some security issues. Check out this post to know the content of this release of Orchard Core and to see the latest features of the framework! Orchard Core updates Remove exists check for blobs Instead of querying the blob, if it exists any time, we just try to get it, and maybe the server will return with a BlobNotFound error. This way, if it's there, we prevent one external network communication to check if it's there before asking for it. So, we just ask for it, and then if it fails, it fails. It's a pretty common issue with Blob Storage because of its high latency you need to do as few communications as you can. Starting background tasks without waiting for initialized tenants You can have a scenario where you would like Orchard itself to starts its background tasks without the need of a request for each one of the tenants. Until now, you need to make a request to as parent tenant and to every child tenant to be sure background tasks of each tenant start to run. So, by default background tasks are waiting for their shell to be lazily built on a first matching request. From now, you have a ShellWarmup bool option in the appsettings.json that allows you to eagerly build shells just before executing their first background task. News from the community Orchard Core 1.2.1 release Orchard Core 1.2.0 has been released on the 6th of January. But after a few days, a vulnerability security issue has been filed. That's the reason why the community had to create a new Orchard Core 1.2.1 release, to fix that security issue. You can update to the new version as usual. If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! But let's see the fix that is in this release! It's not critical in the way that only users that are authenticated and have access to the dashboard can do things. Looking at the security issue and then how to not have them anymore. These are XSS issues, which means you can inject custom JavaScript in a page that could be triggered automatically, and then if you inject some fancy JavaScript you can force a user to submit queries and on this site, you could extract secrets or have them do things they don't want to do on the site. We encode everything we output. This means if the thing you output contains some JavaScript, it will be encoded, which means it will be rendered and not the JavaScript itself to be executed. In this case here, what was happening is that the translation was called on a variable, but we can't translate it. When we call T[], the IHtmlLocalizer will lookup for this text. If it finds this text in the translations, it will render the translation, otherwise, it will render the text as-is. That's why we always pass the English versions, such that if it doesn't find a localization, it will render this text in English. So, we don't have to create the translation for English, we just use that key that we passed. But the T[""] can contain HTML. And that's how we do to translate notifications, links, and stuff like this. And because it can contain HTML, the @ before that will just render it as is. So, whatever is passed there, it will be rendered as-is and not encoded. If we put some HTML or JavaScript inside that, this will be rendered as is and not encoded. What happened there is that when we do any string, like @T["Add widget"] is fine because we know this is a static string to generate. So, we know what we are rendering. But when we do it in a variable like @T[item.value], it can contain anything. And we don't know what it contains. And if it's user inputted, then there can be bad issues. So, we should never translate a user inputted value like this. This is an encoding issue over a bug. This is a list of SelectListItem, which itself contain a localized string instantiated value. There is no reason to use a localized string here. We use localized string as a type when we know that the property needs to be a localized string and should be a sign with a call to T for instance. This piece of code from the DashboardController is just to list the display name of the content type and the technical name of the content type. It's just a list of content types to allow you to create a new content item based on the type. The first solution is to don't translate variables. We have the design and started the PR for dynamic content translations, which is supposed to fix that, to provide a solution to be able to translate content types, permissions, and all the things that are user inputted and dynamic in the database (not static text). We should either not translate dynamic variables or use the new localization PR. The second option is to explicitly encode it for just this vulnerability. In this case, it's not breaking anyone, and it's secure because here, we explicitly translate the encoded value of the display name. So, it would break people who have spaces in their content type display name, because now they have to translate Foo content&nbps;type not Foo content type. .NET Foundation Most Active Community Projects 2021 Shaun Walker shared this image on Twitter that contains the most active community projects based on the number of pull requests, the number of commits, and the number of new contributors. As you can see, Orchard has 1507 pull requests in 2021, which is great. Orchard has 1291 commits, which is weird. Why do we have more pull requests than commits? Do we really close that many pull requests? We have some mini PRs created by Dependabot. And we haven't talked about which projects are using squash and merge and which projects aren't. But it's still a nice thing to be able to see Orchard in the top 10! :) Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 238 subscribers! 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 is 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!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 1.2 is now available! Check out this post to know the latest features of this release of Orchard Core and see a demo about an upcoming feature to have a jobs queue for scheduling! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Support data annotations PO localization This feature is about to be able to localize data annotations. Let's say you have a required field and you would like to save your form without providing any value for that field. In this case, you will get a validation error of course something like: The {fieldname} field is required. And from now you can easily translate the default error messages for data annotations attributes. If you open up the DataAnnotationsDefaultErrorMessages sealed class, you will find the default error messages that you can translate. But how can you translate these? In your PO file, you have to target the DataAnnotationsDefaultErrorMessages marker class, provide the value of the variable that you want to translate (msgid), and provide the translated text after the msgstr keyword, which is the Arabic version in this case. In the following GIF, Hisham Bin Ateya shows you the given scenario mentioned above by using the Arabic translation for a required field. Code cleanup For C# code files, Visual Studio 2022 has a Code Cleanup button at the bottom of the editor (keyboard: Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E) to apply code styles from an EditorConfig file or the Code Style options page. If a .editorconfig file exists for the project, those are the settings that take precedence. After you've configured code cleanup, you can either click on the broom icon or press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E to run code cleanup. You can also run code cleanup across your entire project or solution. Right-click on the project or solution name in Solution Explorer, select Analyze and Code Cleanup, and then select Run Code Cleanup. For more information about code style, check out this page. The codebase of Orchard Core got this cleanup, which means 312 file changes in this PR. And if you would like your code to be nicer, check out the Lombiq.NET Analyzers repository. Our Lombiq .NET Analyzers repository contains .NET code analyzers and code convention settings for Lombiq projects. We also had a demo about the analyzers in This week in Orchard post! Fix index cursors management When there are hundreds of thousands of rows the results returned by QueryIndex() may not be ordered by Id by default. In that case, services as AutorouteEntries using an index cursor on the Id column are not working properly, the _lastIndexId being not well managed. In this case when first publishing an item having an Autoroute, in place of only adding one Autoroute entry, it was trying to add thousands of them in an unordered way and was taking a very long time. Jean-Thierry Kéchichian also enhances the lookup of Autoroute entries to evict, the ones related to contained items of a given container. Demos Background Jobs Orchard Core has a background task infrastructure that runs tasks on a minute-by-minute schedule on a CRON job. But it doesn't actually allow us to have a queue where we can put jobs into a queue. This demo is about an upcoming feature to have a jobs queue for scheduling. In this demo (to show you this feature), Dean Marcussen used the Publish Later feature of Orchard Core to keep track of the background jobs, and by running a scheduler, you can run the Publish Later Job immediately without the need of waiting for the given time to be elapsed. Watch this recording on YouTube to know more about this upcoming feature! News from the community Orchard Core 1.2 release Orchard Core 1.2 is released! If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Upgrade your solution to 1.2 now! If you head to the repository of Orchard Core and head to releases, you will find the 1.2.0 release with the list of changes and the contributors. Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat or use the Discussions on GitHub and ask questions! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 236 subscribers! 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 is 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!

It's time to rebrand Orchard Core for the upcoming 1.0 release! Share your ideas in a visual survey, then check out the newest features of Orchard Core, like the new filters on the Users page or the upcoming sticky toolbar! Check out our post for more! Orchard Core updates Update branding There was a discussion last month about updating the branding of Orchard Core and we also wrote about that in this post. So why do we want to start rebranding Orchard? Branding is super important to make Orchard a widely known, competitive product, to truly make it an industry sensation. And now you can fill out a visual survey to help the community choosing the logo you would like to see! If you haven't voted, please choose the logo, the color, and the type of font that you are like the most. Thanks for voting, it means a lot to the community! And don't forget to follow this issue on GitHub where you can freely add your opinion about the new logo to make Orchard Core even better! Expose BackgroundTask Events Currently, if you want to know from code when a background task is executed and how long it takes there's no easy way to do it, you can't easily tap into background task execution. It's probably a problem unique to application performance monitoring (and otherwise necessary if you want to collect telemetry on background tasks). ModularBackgroundService could raise events when the execution of a background task starts and when it ends (perhaps separately when it completes successfully and with an error). Basically, raise events when there's logging currently. Now you have the availability to see when a given background task starts for example to be able to create diagnostics. The only thing you have to do is to implement the IBackgroundTaskEventHandler. The ExecutingAsync method will be invoked before executing the background task and the ExecutedAsync gets called just after the execution of a background task. The Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights Orchard Core module enables easy integration of Azure Application Insights telemetry into Orchard. Just install the module, configure the instrumentation key from a configuration source (like the appsettings.json file) as normally for AI, and collected data will start appearing in the Azure Portal. The module will utilize these events there to make background task telemetry collection better. If you haven't heard about that module yet, take a look at this post! Support for SQL window functions Now Orchard Core has support for SQL window functions! Window functions are not part of SQL92 syntax, but they are quite useful and available in all modern database engines. They are part of SQL:2003 standard. lampersky extended SQL Parser and SQL Grammar to support OVER clause with PARTITION BY and ORDER BY so now you should be able to perform queries like: SELECT COUNT(1) OVER () as col1, COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type) as col2, COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type ORDER BY Type) as col3, COUNT(1) OVER (PARTITION BY Type, Id ORDER BY Type, Id DESC) as col4FROM Document; Now you are able to use other window functions (argumentless) like: ROW_NUMBER() RANK() DENSE_RANK() and more... Demos New filters on the Users page Head to the admin UI of Orchard Core then navigate to Security -> Users. If you check out that page closely you will see some new additions here. We already have a search feature here and now we have new filters too! You can sort users by user name and email address. You can say that you want to display only enabled/disabled users or all of them. But the most useful feature we think is the option that you can filter users by role. This is very useful if you have a lot of front-end users and you just want to see the authenticated ones. Head to YouTube now to see the new filters in action! Sticky action buttons Let's say you are on the admin UI of Orchard Core and you editing your content item. And that content item contains several parts/fields, which makes the editor page more complex and you need to scroll to be able to see every editor because it's now not fit on your screen. If you have just added a FlowPart or a BagPart to your content type, these will definitely make your editor longer. This makes publishing, saving, or previewing your content item a little harder. That would be great to have a sticky toolbar that stays in place if you scroll the page and you can see them all the time. This means a toolbar with the title of the current page on the left, and with the action buttons on the right. You can meet with the sticky toolbar on the create/edit content and on the Design -> Templates page because these are the longest ones where you may need this feature the most. This feature is still under development and might change in the future. If you are interested in a recording of this demo, head to YouTube now! News from the community 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 196 subscribers! 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 Application Insight module is now available for Orchard Core too! Check out our current post for tons of updates like the new HeadMeta zone alternate, the now() helper function in SQL Queries and many more! Orchard Core updates Support for now() helper function in SQL Queries If you do a query like this in the generic SQL language we support, this will be mapped to whatever database are you using. As you can see, if you are using the new now() helper function, you can get the current date and time. Check out the where condition of the query below: where the PublishedUtc value of the published BlogPost content types is bigger than the current date and time. Add HeadMeta zone alternate for layer widget wrapper When rendering resources using Layers in the HeadMeta zone the widget wrapper is applied, which makes for illegal HTML code inside the <head> of the webpage. Of course, you can render resources in the Content zone, but then you just end up with an empty widget wrapper. Which also makes no sense. The solution is to in the list of layer zones, also include a list of Zones which do not wrap with the widget wrapper. This is useful for other scenarios where the extra divs added by the widget wrapper are not wanted. Here you can see the two now Liquid templates for the Agency and the Blog theme, and the Razor one for the default TheTheme. Fix migrations from RC2 to the latest dev Dean Marcussen did some tests to validate that we can migrate easily without any issue from the RC2 release to the 1.0 release. The idea being is if you are using the RC2 release of Orchard Core and you want to migrate to 1.0, then there won't be any exception or database conflicts or whatever. This mainly means new or updated migration steps for the modules, or move something to a feature, or the migration dependencies are not ordered correctly. BackgroundTask Atomicity You could see a demo in this This week in Orchard post about workflows atomicity. Now here comes a continuation of that feature, the BackgroundTask Atomicity. In a nutshell, it means some additional settings like: Configurable per IBackgroundTask through a LockTimeout and an auto LockExpiration in milliseconds, by default, there are equal to 0 and in that case, it works as before without any locking. Configurable by code through the background task attribute. Or through the admin UI by enabling the existing OrchardCore.BackgroundTasks feature. Right now we have just implemented the IBackgroundTask interface and navigated to Configuration -> Tasks -> Background Tasks and hit the Edit button near the new background task that appears in the list. And in the Advanced tab of that background task, you can set the lock timeout and lock expiration values. Note that you need to enable the BackgroundTasks feature. Arrows for collapsible panels It's a minor change but fixes like this one make the admin UI of Orchard Core more consistent for the users who can access the admin panel. We have different collapsible panels in Orchard Core and the arrows were not consistent in any cases. Now, if you have a Bag Part attached to your content item, the arrow near the collapsible section will be directed to the right by default. And if you open that section, the arrow will be head to down. So now we use the same kind of arrows (Right if collapsed, Down if expanded) for all collapsible panels in the admin. And this also supports Arabic and RTL languages, where we need to direct the arrow left if the panel is closed. Demos Azure Application Insights module This Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights Orchard Core module enables easy integration of Azure Application Insights telemetry into Orchard. Just install the module, configure the instrumentation key from a configuration source (like the appsettings.json file) as normally for AI, and collected data will start appearing in the Azure Portal. Application Insights is an application performance monitoring tool. Withing Azure you can create such Application Insight resources and it will give you nice metrics and other data about your app that is running or production or staging or something. This is not for local but rather for seeing what happens in an application that is actually deployed somewhere. The Readme.md file in the repository shows you how you can set up the module and do the basic configuration just by editing your appsettings.json file. Let's say we have a site installed with the Blog recipe. If you add the module to your solution and enable it (Configuration -> Features -> Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights) you can go to the configured corresponding Application Insights account and for example, check out the live metrics. Or you can see what happened in a given request. You can see all the details correlated: the request, the page views, the dependency calls, everything. For example, you can see that there was a server-side request. The Item/Display action was called which actually returned you the content item that is the homepage. It happened on the development environment on the Default shell with the user named admin. If you would like to know more about this module, don't forget to head to the repository of the module and try out it now! And as always, here is a recording that you can check out anytime! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 194 subscribers! 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!

UPDATE (2017-11-22): Dojo Course 2 is released with new, updated videos! Dojo Course is almost over, so we move on to the spicy parts of the Orchard API that enable you to do really interesting things! An in-depth recap on what we did so far in our PersonList feature. Content querying: using Orchard's LINQ-like API, the IContentManager service to retreive content pieces (including usage and optimization points). How to integrate your features into the administration menu? Running code periodically using background tasks. Running code at a specified time using scheduled tasks. Creating system-wide event handlers to be able to communicate with other pieces of logic in an even more loosely tied way. And a little addition to migrations: you can implement an Uninstall method in your Migrations class to add some logic which will run when your feature is being removed from a system (hopefully nobody will use it ;) ). Stay tuned for the (really) last part of the Dojo Course before Christmas! Remember: if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask them by creating a new issue in the Orchard issue tracker with the "discussion" label. Make sure to prefix your thread's title with "Dojo Course - "! We keep an eye on these issues. Also follow us on Twitter to get notified about the latest Dojo Course news, including when a new tutorial is posted. Do you have some feedback about the course? Please send it in.