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

Blazor guide for decoupled CMS, Workflow Trimming Task - This week in Orchard (06/09/2024)

Blazor guide for decoupled CMS, a new Workflow Trimming Task, and our renewed Orchard Dojo website are the topics for this week. You can still cast your votes for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award! Only one week left until the Orchard Harvest conference! Let's see the news for this week!

Featured tags

IIS
API
All tags >

Add supported_cultures Liquid filter, use TextArea in Markdown Field By default - This week in Orchard (05/07/2024)

Add supported_cultures Liquid filter and use TextArea in Markdown Field by default are the topics for this week. Don't forget that the registration for the Orchard Harvest 2024 conference is still open! Without further ado, let's dive in! Orchard Core updates Add supported_cultures Liquid filter The Culture context variable got new properties for fuller Liquid culture support: DisplayName, NativeName, and TwoLetterISOLanguageName. These are the same as their .NET counterparts. A new filter named supported_cultures was added to allow you to get a list of supported cultures. Let's see a quick example of using this new filter! We have a site set up with the Blog recipe. This recipe defines a Page content type by default with the Flow Part attached. We modified the content definition of this Page content type a little bit by removing the Flow Part and adding a Liquid Part to it. We did it under the Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types option and edited the Page content type. After that, we have to make sure that the Localization feature is enabled, to be able to add multiple supported cultures to our site. We can enable this feature under Configuration -> Features. And if you navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Localization -> Cultures, you can add as many supported cultures as you want. Now, we can go back and create a new Page content item. As you can see, we utilized the new supported_cultures Liquid filter and printed the names of supported cultures using a list. Use TextArea in Markdown Field By default Before this change, the Markdown Field used a single-line input field by default (named the Standard editor) and offered two different editors: Multi-line with a simple textarea and WYSIWYG with a rich editor. Now, by default, it uses a textarea as the Standard editor, and the separate Multi-line option has been removed. You have nothing to do, fields configured with the Standard or Multi-line editors previously will both continue to work. Note though, that their editors will now be a textarea. To try this out, we simply added a Markdown Field to the predefined Blog Post content type. If you edit this Markdown Field, you may notice that there are two editor types: Standard and Wysiwyg. And if we create a new blog using the Standard editor type, you will get a Multi-line editor. News from the community Orchard Harvest 2024 date and location Get ready to power up your Orchard skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! Join us on September 12th-13th at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in lively Las Vegas for two days packed with learning, coding, and community fun. What can you expect at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024? Hands-On Workshops: Elevate your coding game with interactive sessions led by industry experts. Insider Insights: Learn best practices, advanced techniques, and real-world insights from qualified developers. Global Connections: Connect with fellow enthusiasts, exchange ideas, and forge meaningful relationships within the Orchard community. Special Perks: Participants get exclusive discounts on accommodations at the Orleans Hotel and Casino. Can't wait until September? Check out recordings from last year's special online Orchard Harvest on our YouTube channel here. Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? Reserve your spot today and take advantage of early-bird pricing at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024. This year's leading themes: Leading up to a v3.0, what will the future Orchard Core look like? What's the role of a CMS nowadays (with the decoupled/headless operating models, and AI development tools) Explore some advanced topics such as Shapes, Placements, Cloud Integrations, Performance, module extensibility, etc. Showcases on implementing Orchard Core in action. Want to support our mission? Become a sponsor! Reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] to explore sponsorship opportunities. Secure your spot today and get ready to level up your skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! See you there! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 470 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 GraphQL support to User Picker Field, add Azure and AWS-specific Image Caches of ImageSharp - This week in Orchard (31/05/2024)

Add Azure and AWS-specific Image Caches of ImageSharp, and adding GraphQL support to the User Picker Field are the topics for this week. And don't forget to join our next Orchard Core Pair Programming session where we'll look into the basics first, how you'd start with decoupled Orchard Core! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Add Azure and AWS-specific Image Caches of ImageSharp When caching images resized with ImageSharp, we use PhysicalFileSystemCache. This can cause an IO bottleneck like it happens on Azure App Services. The Microsoft Azure Media and Amazon S3 Media modules have new features for replacing the default PhysicalFileSystemCache of ImageSharp that stores resized images in the local App_Data folder. Instead, you can now use Azure Blob Storage with the Azure Media ImageSharp Image Cache feature (that utilizes AzureBlobStorageImageCache), and AWS S3 with the Amazon Media ImageSharp Image Cache feature (that utilizes AWSS3StorageCache). Depending on your use case, this can provide various advantages. Check out the Azure Media and the Amazon S3 Media docs for details. Add GraphQL support to the User Picker Field You attach a User Picker Field to your content type and want to retrieve the selected user via GraphQL. To try this out, we use a site set up with the Blog recipe and head to the Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types menu to edit the content definition of the predefined Blog Post content type by adding a new User Picker Field to it. For demonstration purposes, we also created a new user on the site using the AuthorUser as the user's name. Now, we can edit the predefined blog post content item and pick the newly created AuthorUser via the recently attached User Picker Field. To try out this newly added GraphQL feature easily, we need to enable the GraphQL feature under Configuration -> Features. After that, you will find the new GraphiQL option under the Configuration menu. Here, we say that we want to retrieve the email, phoneNumber, userId, and userName properties of the user who is attached to our blog post via the User Picker Field. News from the community Orchard Harvest 2024 date and location Get ready to power up your Orchard skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! Join us on September 12th-13th at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in lively Las Vegas for two days packed with learning, coding, and community fun. What can you expect at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024? Hands-On Workshops: Elevate your coding game with interactive sessions led by industry experts. Insider Insights: Learn best practices, advanced techniques, and real-world insights from qualified developers. Global Connections: Connect with fellow enthusiasts, exchange ideas, and forge meaningful relationships within the Orchard community. Special Perks: Participants get exclusive discounts on accommodations at the Orleans Hotel and Casino. Can't wait until September? Check out recordings from last year's special online Orchard Harvest on our YouTube channel here. Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? Reserve your spot today and take advantage of early-bird pricing at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024. We also opened the registration form for the speakers: https://forms.office.com/e/fewh7hh20d This year's leading themes: Leading up to a v3.0, what will the future Orchard Core look like? What's the role of a CMS nowadays (with the decoupled/headless operating models, and AI development tools) Explore some advanced topics such as Shapes, Placements, Cloud Integrations, Performance, module extensibility, etc. Showcases on implementing Orchard Core in action. Apply to be a speaker until the 15th of June, midnight Anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest until the end of June. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event. Want to support our mission? Become a sponsor! Reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] to explore sponsorship opportunities. Secure your spot today and get ready to level up your skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! See you there! Decoupled Orchard Core CMS for QTA with Hisham Bin Ateya - Orchard Core Pair Programming by Lombiq We'll have the fifth session of Orchard Core Pair Programming by Lombiq! In these, we do an hour of pair programming with an Orchard Core community member about a project of theirs. We learn together a lot, share best practices, and write some good code. All this is live, and you can join us with your questions! Here, you can find the previous pair programming sessions, and here, you can find the stream for the upcoming one! See you at 5 PM UTC on the 3rd! Hisham Bin Ateya, a core contributor of Orchard Core, joins us with a decoupled CMS project he built for the Quality Training Academy for Health Training from Saudi Arabia. We'll look into the basics first, how you'd start with decoupled Orchard Core. Next, we'll check out more of it in action: Decoupled CMS using Razor Pages/MVC Modularity We could explore some other features like import content, taxonomies, etc. We'll see! Your host and the "navigator" of the pair programming session will be Zoltán István Lehóczky. Would you like to be our guest? Just let us know! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 470 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!

Collapsed fields collision in GraphQL, Building a Content Warning Module - This week in Orchard (24/05/2024)

Add a possibility to open a selected content item in a Content Picker Field in a new tab, and fixing collapsed fields collision in GraphQL are the topics for this week. And don't forget to join our next Orchard Core Pair Programming session where we continue building a Content Warning Module! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Collapsed fields collision in GraphQL When you add a Named Part to a Content Type and also check the Collapse checkbox, data is not returned using GraphQL. You can reproduce this issue just by creating a new Content Part and adding at least one Content Field to it. It will be a Named Part, so put a tick into the Reusable checkbox when creating it to allow this part to be attached multiple times. Now, create a new Content Type and add our newly created Content Part as a Named Part. After, we can create a new Content Item based on the new Content Type. And it's time to enable the GraphQL feature by navigating to Configuration -> Features. The GraphiQL option will display under the Configuration menu, where you can query the data. Also, there is an issue when you try to add many parts with the same field names, if those parts are also "collapsed". To solve this problem, you will find a new checkbox if you edit the content definition of the Content Part, which is visible only when the Collapse checkbox is checked. So, you can decide, whether to prevent collisions or not. Add a possibility to open a selected content item in a Content Picker Field in a new tab Let's say that you are using a lot of Content Picker Fields in your solution, and sometimes you lose track of what exactly one item contains versus another one. To know this now, you would need to navigate to the item list of the type, view it, and then navigate back to where you were before. This can be tedious if done a lot of times. It would be nice to be able to open the selected item in a Content Picker Field via having links in the Content Picker Field. This change is about making the rendered title of the selected content item in the content picker clickable which allows to open the selected content item in a separate tab. News from the community Orchard Harvest 2024 date and location Get ready to power up your Orchard skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! Join us on September 12th-13th at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in lively Las Vegas for two days packed with learning, coding, and community fun. What can you expect at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024? Hands-On Workshops: Elevate your coding game with interactive sessions led by industry experts. Insider Insights: Learn best practices, advanced techniques, and real-world insights from qualified developers. Global Connections: Connect with fellow enthusiasts, exchange ideas, and forge meaningful relationships within the Orchard community. Special Perks: Participants get exclusive discounts on accommodations at the Orleans Hotel and Casino. Can't wait until September? Check out recordings from last year's special online Orchard Harvest on our YouTube channel here. Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? Reserve your spot today and take advantage of early-bird pricing at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024. We also opened the registration form for the speakers: https://forms.office.com/e/fewh7hh20d This year's leading themes: Leading up to a v3.0, what will the future Orchard Core look like? What's the role of a CMS nowadays (with the decoupled/headless operating models, and AI development tools) Explore some advanced topics such as Shapes, Placements, Cloud Integrations, Performance, module extensibility, etc. Showcases on implementing Orchard Core in action. Apply to be a speaker until the 15th of June, midnight Anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest until the end of June. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event. Want to support our mission? Become a sponsor! Reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] to explore sponsorship opportunities. Secure your spot today and get ready to level up your skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! See you there! Continuing a Content Warning Module with Drew Brasher - Orchard Core Pair Programming by Lombiq We'll have the fourth session of Orchard Core Pair Programming by Lombiq! In these, we do an hour of pair programming with an Orchard Core community member about a project of theirs. We learn together a lot, share best practices, and write some good code. All this is live, and you can join us with your questions! Here, you can find the previous pair programming sessions, and here, you can find the stream for the upcoming one! See you at 5 PM UTC on the 28th! Drew Brasher will join us again with a Content Warning Module project that she started in the previous stream. Here you can find the source code. We implemented a shortcode provider last time; now, we'll develop a content part to display a content warning for a whole content item. Your host and the "navigator" of the pair programming session will be Zoltán István Lehóczky. Would you like to be our guest? Just let us know! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 469 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 Harvest 2024 survey, Lombiq Login as Anybody for Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (09/02/2024)

Use the file name instead of the technical name in the Media Field, add Environment accessor in Liquid, a demo about our Login as Anybody module, and a survey about the upcoming Harvest conference! We have a lot to cover today, so let's get started! Orchard Core updates Use the file name instead of the technical name in the Media Field When selecting a file using the attached Media Field, it shows the technical name, which is not user-friendly. With this change, we use the uploaded file name if it exists. Let's try it out quickly! If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, it will create a predefined Blog Post content type. That content type has one Media Field called, Banner Image. We uploaded a new image to the Media Library (Content -> Media Library) and will use that for the predefined Blog Post content item. Once we select our file and click on it, you can see the Media Field displays the file name (Loki.jpg) instead of its technical name. Add Environment accessor in Liquid Currently, you can't check if you are in the Development or the Production environment in Liquid. This change introduces a new environment accessor in Liquid which represents the current hosting environment. The following properties are available on the Environment object as mentioned in the docs: IsDevelopment: Checks if the current hosting environment name is Development. IsStaging: Checks if the current hosting environment name is Staging. IsProduction: Checks if the current hosting environment name is Production. Name: Gets hosting environment name. Here, we have created a new template under Design -> Templates with the name Content__BlogPost. This template is called when displaying the Blog Post content item with the Detail display type, for instance, when accessed from its URL. We have one predefined Blog Post content item so we will use that one for testing purposes. The template itself is straightforward, we just print the name of the environment and two boolean values, as you can see in the screen below. Demos Lombiq Login as Anybody for Orchard Core This demo is about the Lombiq Login as Anybody module for administrators to be able to log in as any user. This feature is only available to site owners, thus it's no way to get around security. It's time to see this feature in action! The easiest way is to clone Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution. This Orchard Core Visual Studio solution contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries, containing the Lombiq Login as Anybody module too. Let's run the Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution and head to Configuration -> Features to enable the Lombiq Login as Anybody feature. After enabling the module you'll see a new button on the Security -> Users page. You can log in as any registered user there. This is useful if you want to see how your Orchard Core app behaves for certain users. Here you can see that we are logged in with the admin user, and the Log in as user button appears near the two other users on the list. Once you hit that button, you will be logged in as the selected user and will be redirected to the homepage of the site with a notification "Successfully logged in as {UserName}." If you want to see a short demo of this feature, don't forget to head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Harvest 2024 survey For those too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last in-person one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference. The point is that we should think about organizing the next in-person one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2024. Last year it was held online due to economic reasons. But first, we would like to assess the potential interest and what would be needed. You can fill in the questionnaire here, which should take about 5 minutes. Share your thoughts with us in the survey. We are curious about who we will meet in 2024! :) Work with Lombiq! Do you like developing apps with Orchard Core? Would you like to apply your skills to some of the most challenging Orchard Core apps out there, working with other OC experts? Then come work with us at Lombiq, the biggest Orchard Core team in the world! We've been contributors, supporters, and users of Orchard Core and Orchard 1 for more than a decade (Benedek Farkas and Zoltán Lehóczky, the two founders, for even more), with a huge open-source portfolio. There you can also check out the code we write, and some of the projects you could take part in. We do a lot. Ready for keywords? Open-source, Orchard Core CMS, .NET software development, ASP.NET Core MVC, distributed team, cloud-first, Microsoft Azure, self-funded R&D, Vue.js, jQuery, Bootstrap, SASS, training, hosting and operations, GitHub Actions, TeamCity, support, SaaS (the only Orchard CMS SaaS, DotNest), Selenium UI testing, xUnit, university courses. And also, greenfield experimental projects like Hastlayer, turning software into computer chips. Write to us at [email protected], and let's talk! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 479 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!

Upgrade the Default Theme to use Bootstrap 5.3.2, migrating an Orchard 1 DotNest site to Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (03/11/2023)

Upgrading the Default Theme to use Bootstrap 5.3.2, adding placeholder for Taxonomy Part and Taxonomy Field Settings, and a case study about migrating an Orchard 1 DotNest site to Orchard Core! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Upgrade the Default Theme to use Bootstrap 5.3.2 Last week we mentioned that the admin theme of Orchard Core has been upgraded to use Bootstrap 5.3.2. Now the Default Theme also utilizes this version of Bootstrap, and the same improvements are applied here as for the admin theme. Now, you can use the same Bootstrap version for a front-end theme and a back-end theme. It also affects performance because from now on you don't have to worry about loading or caching two different libraries. The front-end theme now also has a theme toggler, so you can easily switch between a light theme and a dark theme, and if you want to implement your color, you can add your theme and use that for the admin and the front-end theme, as well. In this case, we set up our site with the Software as a Service recipe because the default Site theme here is the TheTheme. As you can see in the GIF, both the back-end and the front-end theme have three modes, and you can easily switch between them. Add placeholder for Taxonomy Part and Taxonomy Field Settings When adding a new Taxonomy, the Term Content Type dropdown by default selected the very first content type that is available in the menu because there is no placeholder. This happens because we do not have an option with no value. By default, we should have a placeholder so that the user knows that they need to select a value. Also, the Term Content Type should be a required field, and the Title Part should be required by default. Also, in the TaxonomyFieldSettings, we have the same missing-placeholder problem. And now these issues have been fixed. Here, we have a site set up with the Blog recipe. We edited the definition with the Blog Post content type and added a Taxonomy Field to it. When we hit Edit near our newly added Taxonomy Field, you can see the Select a Taxonomy placeholder in the dropdown. And if you create a new Taxonomy content item, you can see another placeholder in the Term Content Type dropdown. News from the community Show Orchard case study: Migrating an Orchard 1 DotNest site to Orchard Core Maybe you have already heard about 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. If we add a new website to Show Orchard, we always announce it in the This week in Orchard series. Like we just did a few weeks ago when we added the website of Property Brokers, which is New Zealand's largest regional real estate agency. Though the Show Orchard website is simplistic in its design, migrating data and re-implementing various elements presented its own set of challenges. Nonetheless, we are pleased to announce that the site is now seamlessly operating on DotNest Core. Our next step is to transition all of our remaining DotNest sites to Core as well. If you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to DotNest Core, this is an excellent time. Should you have any questions or encounter challenges, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We're always ready to bring our expertise to your unique project needs. Get in touch with us today, and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better! And don't forget to check out our case study about the details of the migration! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 485 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!

New Catch Workflow Fault Event, interactive mode in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - This week in Orchard (01/09/2023)

New Catch Workflow Fault Event, add additional text info to the Content Picker Field, and a demo about adding an interactive mode to the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates New Catch Workflow Fault Event If you have the Workflows feature enabled, you can create workflows by clicking on the Workflows option from the admin menu. Here, you can create workflows and add events to your workflows by clicking on the Add Event button. In the list of available events, you will find a new one, called Catch Workflow Fault Event, that triggers and captures exception information when an exception occurs in any other workflow. If you select this event, you will find a text area called Trigger Condition, and the code inside it is automatically generated when you open the editor of the Catch Workflow Fault Event for the first time. Add additional text info to the Content Picker Field Let's play around a little bit with a site that we set up using the Blog recipe. First of all, we want to have an option where users can assign pages to blog posts, like "if you need more info, check out this page, or click here for this related content, and so on.". To do that, we can utilize the Content Picker Field. If we navigate to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and hit Edit near the Blog Post content type, we can find the Add Field button. By clicking on it, we can set the display name (let it be Related pages in this case) and select the field type (Content Picker Field). Now we can click the Edit button near our new Related pages Content Picker Field and do the magic here. We set up this field to allow multiple elements to be selected and said that we only want to choose from Page content types when working with this field. But the new stuff is the Title Pattern editor. Here, you can define the pattern used to render the title with Liquid support. Here, you can see that this field renders the Display Text of the content items by default (keeping the current behavior), but you can modify this as you want. This can be a huge help for other users because, for example, using only the display name has become a problem for multilingual sites with pages named "blog" in multiple languages. Here, we modified the pattern to include the display URL too, not just the display text of the content items. And now, the last step is to try this out in action! We will just simply edit the predefined blog post and click on the Related pages Content Picker Field to see what will happen. As you can see, we have two Page content items on our site where we used the sample display name. It's hard to distinguish the content items but by seeing the URL too, we have an idea which Page could be which one. OK, maybe we are not using the best URLs for illustration, but I think you get the point here. :) Demos Interactive mode in the 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, and 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 you can use WebApplicationFactory or a fake video capture source. This time, we will check out a slightly different topic! Basically, the Orchard Core process and the UI testing process are running together, you can't actually do testing and continue running the web application itself. So, for that, we have a new method called SwitchToInteractiveAsync, which enables the interactive mode for debugging the app while the test is paused. If you run the test, you are able to pause at that point, like hitting a breakpoint when debugging the code. So, sometimes you want to debug the test session, and assuming direct control would be nice. But you can't just drop a breakpoint in the test, since the Orchard Core web app and the test are the same process so it would pause both. The SwitchToInteractiveAsync extension method opens a new tab with info about the interactive mode and, then causes the test thread to wait until you've clicked on the "Continue Test" button in this tab. During that time, you can interact with OC as if it was a normal execution. If you open up the InteractiveModeTests.cs file, you will find a demo of the feature with two tests: SampleTest and EnteringInteractiveModeShouldWait that illustrates how you can use the new SwitchToInteractiveAsync extension method. If you want to know more about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 535 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!

New Meta Pixel feature, Enhance the two-factor authentication process - This week in Orchard (14/07/2023)

New Meta Pixel feature, in progress indicator for the Attached Media field, and a demo about enhancing the two-factor authentication process and making the UI extensible. Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates New Meta Pixel feature We have multiple integrations with Meta. But we do not have a way to enable Meta Pixel like we do for Google Analytics. But what is Meta Pixel? The Meta pixel is a piece of code for your website that lets you measure, optimize and build audiences for your ad campaigns. You can think of this as an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. So, from now on a new feature called Meta Pixel was added to allow you to easily enable Meta Pixel tracking into your website. Due to Facebook's recent rebranding, all of the Facebook features have been renamed to Meta. This only concerns UI labels and documentation, but technical identifiers remain, so you shouldn't expect anything breaking like classes and project names still say Facebook to prevent breaking change. But how can you use this new feature? First of all, navigate to the admin UI of your site and enable the Meta Pixel feature under Configuration -> Features. This will show you a new option under Configuration -> Settings, called Meta Pixel, where you can provide the Pixel ID found on the Meta Data Sources portal. In progress indicator to the Attached Media field When you add a file to an attached media field, it uploads the file once you select it, but it does not indicate that it is uploading, so if you have a large file like audio or video that takes some time to upload, it looks like it just didn't add the file. This change introduces a progress bar showing you the current progress of the file, that you would like to upload. This PR also fixes an error about messages not showing in this editor, like the "This file exceeds the maximum upload size". To try out this feature, we just simply modified the content definition of the built-in Blog Post content type by adding a new Media Field to it. After we set the editor type of this field to Attached, instead of Standard. Finally, we edited the predefined blog post content item and tried to upload a file utilizing the newly added Media Field. Demos Enhance the two-factor authentication process and make the UI extensible A few weeks ago, we showed you a demo about adding the two-factor authentication feature to Orchard Core. This time we will see some improvements related to the 2FA feature. The first issue was the UI was not extensible, and we only have an authenticator app to use as a 2FA. Sometimes you might not want to use the authenticator app, you might want to authenticate users with other methods like email or SMS. From now on, we have a way to extend the 2FA in a way where we can say I want to enable the app authenticator, I want to enable an email authenticator, but you can implement your own authenticator, whatever the case might be. Let's see this in action! After you set up your site, head to Configuration -> Features and search for the two-factor keyword. This will list 3 features related to 2FA. Two-Factor Authentication Services: Provides Two-factor core services. Two-Factor Authenticator App Method: Provides users with a two-factor authentication method through any Authentication App. Two-Factor Email Method: Provides users with a two-factor authentication method through an Email service. For this demo, we will enable all of these features. Now, let's create another user in the system with the Contributor role for example. When we login with that user, we can navigate to the Security page (which you can reach under the /TwoFactor URL or by clicking on the Security option using the drop-down, which you can see if you click on the user icon on the top-right corner. Here you can see the site says two-factor authentication is not enabled yet, in order to enable it, you have to add a two-factor method. You can allow email authentication by clicking on the Verify Email button. You see this button here because this user hasn't verified their email address yet. If you click on this button you have to request a code, and this user will get a code via email, which they can paste here. After verification, the email address of this user has been confirmed, and the site displays the recovery codes to log in with. If you go back under the same screen under Security, you will see that the email is verified and 2FA is enabled because we have just enabled it. Let's quickly add a second method, which is the authenticator app. If you do that, you will have two authentication methods, and using the Preferred Two-Factor Method drop-down, you can select your preferred method. Let's select the Email one, for example. Now, let's log off and try to log in again to see what will happen. The first thing that you can see here is it's asking to authenticate via email. If for some reason, we don't have access to that email, there is a new option here called Sign in another way. You can also log in with your recovery codes if you have them. If you click on the Sign in another way link, it's prompting me to use the other method, which is the (non-default) app authenticator. The reason why we can use both methods is that we enabled the Two-Factor Authenticator App Method and Two-Factor Email Method features. And as we mentioned, from now on, you can implement your own method (SMS, for example) and can extend the list of the two-factor methods. And that's not nearly all of the improvements! If you want to know more about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 474 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!

Fluid.Core 2.3.0, add Content Field handlers to enforce validation in the content API - This week in Orchard (23/12/2022)

Fluid.Core 2.3.0, add Content Field handlers to enforce validation in the content API, and please help the community to decide whether to merge the Responsive Admin Theme or not. Check out our last post for this year! Orchard Core updates Fluid.Core 2.3.0 The 2.3.0 version of Fluid.Core is here and merged into Orchard Core. Let's see some of the important changes in this version! The first one is adding support for TimeSpan. Now, if you have a C# TimeSpan object that you pass in a model, it's converted to a DateTime starting from 1970. The second one is adding replace_last and remove_last filters. These are standard Liquid filters that can now be used in Fluid as well. Fluid now targets .NET 7.0. When you go to NuGet.org and search for the Fluid.Core package, you will see that the latest version of this package now also targets .NET 7.0. Let's continue with the one about fixing the case/when tag multi-statements evaluation. In Shopify Liquid a case will return multiple expressions if multiple conditions are met. This can happen because a when can contain multiple values. In Fluid the first condition that is true will return the expression and then exit the case in the same manner that a SQL "case" works. If you check out this screenshot, you can see the Liquid behavior on the Shopify API. Now Fluid supports this behavior. Add Content Field handlers to enforce validation in the content API When creating content using the Contents API, the content is stored as the user sends it without any kind of validation. For example, if you create a type with a required TitlePart, and post a new item with no title, the content item gets created with no title. Here the goal was to implement the ValidatingAsync method in every part/field handler so that way, each part/field is validated against its own settings. Also, add field handlers to be called so we can validate fields. So, to summarize this addition, this is about adding a way to attach handlers for fields. For example: services.AddContentField<TextField>() .UseDisplayDriver<TextFieldDisplayDriver>() .AddHandler<TextFieldHandler>(); // this was added TitlePartHandler was modified to validate the part against the TitlePartSettings. New handlers were added: TextFieldHandler to validate a text field. One handler for each part/field will be added "if it does not exist" which would implement that ValidatingAsync(...) event. This would be part of a follow-up PR to ensure the team is in agreement with the approach and to reduce the code change. News from the community Help the community decide whether to merge the Responsive Admin Theme or not Last month you could see a demo of the Responsive Admin Theme where one can change the look of the forms. Now we need to decide whether we want to merge this PR or not for the reasons explained in the meeting where the feature was demoed (and also in the meeting on 12/20/2022). To vote please use reactions for this comment (not on a new comment please, but you can still comment on the PR on top of it). The limit for the vote will be January 3rd, 2023. Thank you! Christmas in Lombiq Sometimes we do stuff. Together. Not (just) in front of computer screens. These are some usual events in Lombiq that are all announced and arranged in advance. We periodically have an event called RnDay: this is a few hour-long event where we share with each other what we recently worked on and what we plan to do. E.g., If we recently finished a project, then the project's team members demo what they've done. We had our last RnDay for this year in the Aranytíz Budapest, which is an event space where we held this event. And at the end of the day, we visited a nearby restaurant to have dinner together. We would like to thank you all for reading our posts and making the Orchard community stronger together with us! We hope that we can give you valuable news and demos about the happenings around Orchard and Orchard Core from time to time by reading our posts and of course the This week in Orchard newsletter. We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year with some photos of our latest event! Orchard Harvest 2023 For those who are too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference. The point is that we should really think about organizing the next one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. If you have any feedback or you are looking forward to having a Harvest again, please share your opinion with us by filling out this survey about the upcoming Orchard Harvest! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 379 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 you think 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 way to retrieve a UTC now DateTime in Liquid, Responsive Admin Theme - This week in Orchard (04/11/2022)

Add a way to retrieve a UTC now DateTime in Liquid, change the Query Schema editor to Monaco Editor, allowing multiple INavigationManager, and a demo about the responsive Admin Theme! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Add a way to retrieve a UTC now DateTime in Liquid Orchard Core has a new Liquid helper called utc, which converts a local date and time to the UTC date and time based on the site settings. Let's say we type in the following expressions: utc: {{ "utc" | local | date: "%c" }}local : {{ "now" | local | date: "%c" }}local is the default : {{ "now" | date: "%c" }} This will appear as follows. You can see the current date time in UTC and in the site time zone as well. This new helper is also added to the documentation of Orchard Core. Change the Query Schema editor to Monaco Editor If you have a site set up with the Blog recipe, you have one predefined query, called RecentBlogPosts. You can edit this query under Search -> Queries -> All queries. And as you may notice, the schema editor now uses the Monaco Editor that powers VS Code too. Allowing multiple INavigationManager In the past, if you were trying to have multiple INavigationManagers, you could not do that because the TryAddScoped is replacing the existing implementations. So, to be able to have multiple INavigationManager implementations, you have to use TryAddEnumerable, which adds a ServiceDescriptor if an existing descriptor with the same ServiceType and an implementation that does not already exist in services. And here, you can see that the NavigationShapes class can now handle multiple INavigationManager implementations. Demos Responsive Admin Theme This demo is about a feature that you can see in this pull request to make the Admin Theme responsive. First of all, you can see that fields are listed with the title being at the start point, in this case on the left. So, if you have an RTL text direction, it will be on the right. The cool thing about this is that you utilize more of the width of the screen when the screen is large and you reduce the scrolling if unnecessary. But if you have a smaller screen, the labels go back to the top as what you used to see. We have the same thing for content parts as well. Here you can see how everything appears if you have a wide or a narrow screen. But not everybody may like to see the labels on the left like this, it means this is optional, and by default, nothing will change unless you explicitly change it. This one was done by adding a new StyeSettings section under the TheAdminTheme section to the appseetings.json where you can define classes. If you chose to utilize this, you can add a setting per tenant, and you can customize the look and feel of the Admin Theme for every tenant. And how does this work is the classes are placed by helpers. Let's check out the TitlePart.Edit.cshtml for example. As you can see, the GetLabelCssClasses() and GetEndCssClasses() Orchard helpers read the settings and apply the class names that you have provided in the appsettings.json file. This means that if you want to use this feature, your custom views have to be updated to utilize these helpers. And all the new built-in views of the source code of Orchard Core have to use these helpers in the future. If you would like to know more about this feature, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Harvest 2023 For those who are too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference. The point is that we should really think about organizing the next one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. If you have any feedback or you are looking forward to having a Harvest again, please share your opinion with us by filling out this survey about the upcoming Orchard Harvest! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 386 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 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 Orchard meeting!

Orchard Harvest 2023, User Notifications - This week in Orchard (28/10/2022)

Adding default form templates for the Default Theme, adding wrapper element for all content fields, demo about the User Notifications module and don't forget to fill out a survey about the next Orchard Harvest conference! Orchard Core updates Adding default form templates for the Default Theme Currently, all of the form widgets are rendered using Widget.cshtml which renders too much HTML without any added value. The goal here is to create default Widget-Form, Widget-Input, Widget-Label, Widget-Select, Widget-TextArea, Widget-Validation, and Widget-ValidationSummary templates. It means that now, you will find these default form templates if you open up the Default Theme. Adding a wrapper element for all content fields There is no easy way to hide/show content fields "label and input as a group" using JavaScript event because there is no wrapper element to select. The goal here is to add a wrapper element to all of the content fields to allow the user to easily hide/show the entire field block using JavaScript. Here you can see the editor of the Text Field where the wrapper has now new classes with ones that you can easily use to distinguish the same kinds of Text Fields from each other. For example, the Text Field called Subtitle of the built-in Blog Post content type has the following HTML structure. Here you can see that the third class and the ID contain the technical name of the Text Field, which makes targeting the given field easier. Adding GetPageSize method to account for MaxPageSize throughout the code Now we have a new GetPageSize method in the PagerOptions class that returns the maximum number of the allowed page size based on the values of the default and maximum page size numbers. And we are using the value coming from this method for every occurrence, where we are constructing the Pager by passing it as the second parameter. Which is the default page size in this case. Demos User Notifications The goal of the User Notifications module is to push notifications to the user, meaning notify the user somehow. There are many ways you can notify a user, one of them being a web notification, you can do SMS, you can do push to a mobile application, etc. In Orchard Core right now, there is no way to send notifications, but there is a way to send emails. Let's navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the Notifications module. This will provide a way to notify users. After you enable this module, you will see a new bell icon near the Dark mode icon at the top right. If you click on that icon, you will see a list that shows you all of the notifications that you have right now. You can click on them to mark them as read, or you can click on All Notifications at the bottom, which will redirect you to the page where you can see all of your notifications. Here you can see a list of all of the notifications available. You can use the search here, and filter them only to see the read or the unread notifications. You can sort by recently created, or by previously created. You can also mark the unread notifications as read, mark the read notifications as unread or you can delete the notifications as well. You can also hit the Mark All As Read button to mark everything as read. Now let's see how you can generate notifications! Notifications can be generated via code by injecting INotificationManager. But you can also generate notifications via Workflows. Here you can see we have a workflow called Notify Content Owner, which contains the custom activities provided by the Notifications module. Here we put two events, one for when the Blog Post content item is published and one for when the Article is deleted. And here, you can also see the two new Notify content's owner activities as well. Let's check out the content of the first Notify content's owner activity! Here you can see we have proper Liquid support to customize the summary, and the body of our notification. If we open up the editor of the second Notify content's owner activity, you can see here we have some HTML code in the body as well. To be able to render the HTML properly, don't forget to put a tick in the "The body contains HTML" checkbox. And that's not everything! If you would like to know don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! And if you want to try out this feature for yourself, you can find the code in this PR! News from the community Orchard Harvest 2023 For those who are too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference. The point is that we should really think about organizing the next one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. If you have any feedback or are you looking forward to having a Harvest again, please share your opinion with us by filling out this survey about the upcoming Orchard Harvest! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 381 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 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 Orchard meeting!