Add permission check for the content type filter, prevent the Users feature from breaking when the Roles feature is disabled, add new database options, and a demo about the new Build Version Display module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add permission check for content type filter The content type filter should only show accessible content types. The user should only see content types that they can view. Before this fix, all of the content types were listed, even if you don't have permission to see it. Let's say that I am an editor user who has no access to view the Blog content type. In this case, when this user navigates to Content -> Content Items and clicks on the content type filter, the predefined Blog content item will not appear in the list. Prevent the Users feature from breaking when the Roles feature is disabled This was an old issue in Orchard Core if you disable the Roles module, the site crashes because the Users module needs the following services to work: IRoleService RoleManager IRoleStore This issue is now fixed, and you can disable the Roles module from the UI without facing an error. You can find the implementation details in this pull request, thanks to Mike Alhayek! Add database options like TablePrefixSeparator, Schema, IdentityColumnType, and DocumentTable Here is a summary of the changes: both TableNameConvention and TablePrefixSeparator were removed from YesSqlOptions. The following properties were added to the ShellSettings of each tenant: TablePrefixSeparator when this value does not exist, we assume _, however, if an empty string is found, we use no prefix for the tables. Schema was added to allow you to provide a specific schema to use. IdentityColumnSize when this value is empty or invalid, we assume Int64. DocumentTable when this value is empty, we assume Document. If adding a new tenant failed due to missing Encrypt=false or TrustServerCertificate=True, we add the error to the log file to provide the admin with more about the issue. The following means that now you can find a new section in the configuration called OrchardCore_Data_TableOptions. Now you can define the name of the Document table if you want to change it, change the table name separator (changing the _ in tenant1_tablename), and the default identity column size, which is Int64 by default. Every existing tenant will work with Int32, but the new tenants will use Int64. It can happen because YesSql now supports Int64 as well. You can find some new lines about these settings in the documentation as well. If you want to migrate the existing tenants, you have to do your own migration. You can also define the schema of the tenant (DatabaseSchema) which is also configurable from the UI. This way all the table names are the same, just the schema that could be changed for each tenant. Demos Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display The goal of the Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display for Orchard Core module is to display the build version (i.e., .NET assembly version or other) on the admin of the Default tenant. By using this module, you can see at a glance which version of the app is deployed. But of course, there are various ways to know what's currently deployed into a specific environment (like staging or production), but the goal of this module is to cover the following use case: when you are looking at the app, you will know what's there. The only thing you have to do is to install the module, and navigate to Configuration -> Features, and enable the Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display feature. After you navigate to the homepage of the admin UI, you will see the following on the dashboard. You can find the Orchard Core version, the version of the .NET assembly is currently being executed, which means the web application. If you have a CI build, usually that will generate a version number for you. And finally, during the build, you can also add a link to the build. This is just a dummy link for examples, but you can link to a GitHub action. You can read more about it in the Readme file of the module. Do you want to quickly try out this project and see it in action? Check it out in our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution, and also see our other useful Orchard Core-related open-source projects! And as always, 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 396 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 fallback alternate when a custom stereotype is used, validate database connection before allowing a tenant to be added or set up, remove localization workaround in Data Annotation Attributes, and a demo about the upcoming tenant removing feature! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add fallback alternate when a custom stereotype is used The idea here is that when you create a stereotype, before this change, you had to create templates for this stereotype if you intended to display or edit items of this stereotype. And now, there is a fallback shape for stereotypes such that if you don't create custom templates, it will use a standard, default template that is valid for any stereotype. How it works is just to let's use the Content shapes for anything when we don't have a custom template. It prevents showing error messages when you create a stereotype and try to create a content item from this stereotype. And you can test this one easily. Just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and head to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types, where you can find the Create new type button to define your new content type. Add a name to it and hit Create. We will not add any Parts to it right now. Set the Stereotype to Cat and hit Save. Now we can create a new Animal content item by clicking on the New button and selecting Animal under Content -> Content Items. And as you can see, Orchard Core now renders the default Content_Edit template as a fallback instead of throwing an exception. Validate database connection before allowing a tenant to be added or setup When adding a new tenant, we allow the user to set a prefix to the tables to enable reusing the same database for multiple tenets. However, we don't validate that the prefix isn't already used first. The problem with this is that it throws an exception. Let's say we have a tenant with a URL prefix test and we selected the SQLite database. Now let's create another tenant using the same URL Prefix and database preset. As you can see, now we have a validation error. But we also have validation for connection strings as well. Let's say we would like to use SQL Server and provide a connection string that is invalid. In this case, you will face an error like "The provided connection string is invalid or server is unreachable". Remove localization workaround in Data Annotation Attributes Two years ago, when Hisham Bin Ateya started the support data annotations PO localization PR, there was a long discussion to support localization in data annotations. Back in the day, Antoine Griffard did a workaround to achieve the goal by using IValidatableObject, and now it's time to remove this workaround and use the new way of doing this. This means we can remove the need of implementing the IValidatableObject from several ViewModel. And from now, on you can use some attributes which help you print localized error messages. And now there is an attribute for email validation and URL validation as well. Let's see an example quickly! As you can see here, the RegisterViewModel implemented the IValidatableObject to be able to validate the properties inside the class. Now, instead of using the IValidatableObject, we can add attributes to these properties, and here comes the new EmailAddress attribute as well. As you can see from the screen, the new implementation of the ValidationAttribute can be used to validate your model by returning a localizable error message. Demos Tenant Removing The option to be able to remove tenants is a long-requested feature, and for now, we are very close to shipping this feature, thanks to Jean-Thierry Kéchichian. Let's see how it will work! For this demo, we will navigate to GitHub and checkout this branch. Now, let's add some tenants to be able to try out this feature. As you can see, we have added 3 tenants. The Agency and the Blog ones are tenants that we have already set up, but the tenant called test is waiting for setup. Here you can see that we have the Sites folder under App_Data where each of the tenants has its own folder containing the Media files for example. And now we also have a wwwroot folder under OrchardCore.Cms.Web, which contains a folder per tenant like in the previous case. This means now each tenant can manage their own cached files under wwwroot. When we remove a tenant, the logic will also remove the folder of the tenant under the wwwroot and the Sites folders. And now it's time to delete a tenant! To be able to delete a tenant, we should disable it first, which means it will be not served, and we will be able to compose an internal ShellContext with all the features that the tenant has, even if it is installed or not. You can also remove multiple tenants by using bulk actions. And this is just the surface, there are still some things to do. If you would like to see the current state of this feature and do a deep dive under the hood, check out this recording on YouTube! This feature is sponsored by Lombiq. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 347 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!

This week we would like to show you two new Orchard Core demos: the user account activation and the new CORS module. But before that let's take a quick look at the newest features and improvements of Orchard Core! Finally, let's see what about the next Harvest? Orchard Core updates Add more Resources documentation The Resources page of the Orchard Core documentation has been improved a lot. Now on this page, you can find examples about how to register a named resource by implementing the IResourceManifestProvider interface, how to render your registered resources in the different sections of the page using Liquid or Razor and many more! Update the OpenID YesSql stores to execute a concurrency check on updates We have a new feature in YesSql when saving a session. Check out the following line: _session.Save(application, checkConcurrency: true); In the code snippet above, we would like to save the Open ID application and check that nothing has changed the application between it was loaded in this process and saved with the current changes. And if there is an issue, it will throw an exception when we call await _session.CommitAsync(). Then it will catch the ConcurrencyException saying something else changed the application while you were saving it so, please try it again. Fix issue with layers that can be drag and dropped to zones The targets for the zone dragging were too loose and then you could drag a widget to a layer or a layer to a widget. Now it's fixed. Fix regression for Tag Helpers not working There was an issue that some things were working in development mode and not in release mode. In development, Orchard Core finds the Tag Helpers because views are compiled at run time in the context of the application, while published .Views.dll files have been precompiled in the context of their related module or theme. In production, it will not work, because for example if you would like to use the ContentItemTagHelper, the reference was missing from one module to the OrchardCore.Contents module. Dean Marcussen created a new OrchardCore.Contents.TagHelpers project, that contains the Tag Helpers of the OrchardCore.Contents module. And now whenever we have Tag Helpers, we put them in their *.TagHelpers library. So, when our themes and other modules will need those Tag Helper, we can just reference this library and not the full module. In the _ViewImports.cshtml files where we are using the OrchardCore.Contents assembly to find Tag Helpers we need to look for the assembly named OrchardCore.Contents.TagHelpers. It should not break any websites if you are using Liquid, but if you are not using Liquid, it's possible that the site will be broke after this change, meaning the Tag Helpers won't be found and as we said, you need to change your _ViewImports.cshtml. In the future, we have to do the same for all of the Tag Helpers. Standard display option for each field If you want to add a Display option for a field that does not have a standard one, when you re-edit the settings and save, the new one will be selected as the default even if you don't want it. To solve this issue we added a Standard option for all the fields. Let's see the HtmlField.DisplayOption.cshtml file as an example. Sort Workflow instances Your Workflow could have several Workflow instances and if you have many of them, it could be hard to find the one you want. In the past, you had the option to filter the instances by their status (all, faulted, finished), and now there is a new option to sort these instances. You can sort them by the recently created or the least recently created. Simplify part settings retrieval for ContentPartDisplayDrivers In the ContentPartDisplayDrivers, we need to resolve the ContentDefinitionManager, query the type definition and then find the part that is named the same that we are using, take the first one and get the settings. But in the BuildPartEditorContext and UpdatePartEditorContext we already have the TypePartDefinition of the part that we are currently editing, so we can just get the settings from there. This change made the code simpler and technically faster. Just take a look at the changes in the AutoroutePartDisplay! Demos User Account Activation Currently, Orchard Core supports registration and approval or manual entry. What about having a way to have the option to invite users onto the platform and let them choose their password and then activate their account? Let's see a possible future release for this feature! Install your site and then enable the Users Registration feature. Now head to Security -> Settings -> Registration, where you will find a new option: Administrators can send an activation email to a user. Put a tick in this box and select the AllowRegistration from the select list. Now go to Security -> Users and hit the Add User button. Here you could see a new switch called Send Activation Email?. If you create this user with this switch enabled and hit Save, this user will get an email that email will contain an activation link. If the user clicks on this link, they can choose a password for the account. After they set the password their account is activated and they can log in to the site using the newly created password. To do that, you should disable the account of the user when creating it. But what's behind this feature? Create two new Workflows to send emails. Let's call the first one to UserAccountActivation and add the Account Activation event as the startup event for this Workflow. Then add a Send Email task that will send the email to the user. This email will contain the activation URL of the user. Create another Workflow that will send another email that tells the user that their account is activated. Let's call this Workflow UserAccountActivated. Here you could use the Account Activated event as the startup event and again, add a Send Email task. The feature will be improved in the future because as you can see, the Send Activation Email switch is not really about sending an email, it's just about rising an event, that you can use in your Workflows. Instead of this, we could have for example a user state (Needs Activation) similar to the IsDisabled switch. And that's not all! If you would like to know more about this feature, head to YouTube, where you can find the full demo about the user account activation! Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) module If you head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Cors Configuration module, you will find a new option under Configuration -> Settings, called Cors. If you navigate here you can add as many policies as you want using the Add a policy button. On this page, you can add the name of the policy, set that as the default policy and configure everything that you will need to enable CORS. If you are interested in the full demo, don't forget to check out the recording on YouTube! News from the community The possible date of the next Harvest We had two possible dates for the next Harvest: one in February and one in April. Now it looks like it won't happen in February, so the only option left is to do a Harvest in April. The possible days could be between 13 and 17 in April. We also have two possible locations, which are Nice and Miami. Stay tuned for more information about the next Harvest! Tell us about your .NET performance challenges! - Hastlayer developer survey Help us build the nerdiest .NET thing, Hastlayer: It turns performance-critical sections of .NET programs into computer chips! If you fill out our short questionnaire you can win a cool compute accelerator board worth $265! Check it out here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCIMkFNjqW2E1Pm4v3YMcflMNUOVlDNUE3MlpDS044VDI1OEFSMUgxUkxSTC4u The reason we're asking this is that we're building a .NET hardware accelerator, Hastlayer (https://github.com/Lombiq/Hastlayer-SDK it turns your program into a chip!) and want to better understand what other developers do. Thank you in advance! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 114 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Many Orchard developers, including ourselves act as early adopters of the Orchard source and use the code from the 1.x and other work-in-progress branches. While it gives us the opportunity to try the new features and get the latest bugfixes, some changes introduce important bugs every now and then. That was the case lately on the 1.x branch, when a problem surfaced regarding the infoset storage: for shifted, versionable content parts the infoset data was not saved in the ContentItemVersionRecord table, but into the ContentItemRecord table instead. Sébastien discovered this issue before 1.8 release and provided a method to fix it. At this moment, we are in the middle of upgrading all our sites to Orchard 1.8+ (+ means we are running 1.x, of course) and after careful testing in our local and staging environments we'll soon hit the big red button to make it go live: every Lombiq-related website will run on the latest source, that includes every DotNest tenant too! While upgrading your sites and testing the fix for the infoset storage, you may need to check if your data was really restored to its desired state, so here's a little help: below is an SQL-script that you can run against your DB, which checks if there's any corrupted infoset entry left, so you can verify if the upgrade mechanism worked. USE [MyDatabase]GOSELECT Item.Id AS ItemId, VersionItem.Id AS VersionItemId FROM [dbo].[MyPrefix_Orchard_Framework_ContentItemRecord] AS Item INNER JOIN [dbo].[MyPrefix_Orchard_Framework_ContentItemVersionRecord] AS VersionItem ON Item.Id = VersionItem.ContentItemRecord_id WHERE VersionItem.Latest = 1 AND VersionItem.Data IS NULL AND Item.Data IS NOT NULL ORDER BY Item.IdGO Happy upgrading!

Sébastien just tweeted about his new blogpost to tell you how Orchard manages the content items' data in the database by demostrating simple use-cases and the corresponding queries. It's a great read even if you're new to Orchard or a seasoned veteran!

Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting: Running Orchard on two nodes: this is a tricky thing but in this discussion there some good tips Community features in Orchard: a lot of built-in and third-party modules bring "social" functionality to Orchard. You won't be able to just install Contrib.Facebook but there are some decent fundamentals. A tale of database table locking, transactions and low-level data access in Orchard: sometimes you just have to bury deeper.

A very useful video by Bertrand Le Roy. Migrating an SQL CE database, the simple-to-use self-contained database format used by Orchard, to a standard SQL Server database is a necessary step when your site grows. SQL CE is great for development and for small sites, but the full SQL Server DBs are much better performing.