Add Cc and Bcc to Workflow Email Task, URI components Liquid accessors, Lombiq JSON editor, and many more coming this week! Do you want to know more? Then it's time to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates Add Cc and Bcc to Workflow Email Task If you would like to send an email using Workflows, you can use the Email Task to achieve your goal. Simply navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and go to Workflows (don't forget to enable the Workflows and the Email features) to create a new workflow. If you add a new Email Task to your workflow, you will see that this task has now two new fields: the Cc and the Bcc. RegisterUserTask: Subject & Template for confirmation email should not be required if Send Email is unchecked And while we are talking about the workflows, let's check out another workflow task, the Register User Task which registers users from form fields. When adding this task to your workflow, you can easily say that I want to send a confirmation email to the newly registered user with this subject and template. The issue was that the subject and the template for the confirmation email were required even if Send Confirmation Email is not checked. URI components Liquid accessors By default, the Liquid templates have access to a common set of objects. You can easily access the properties of the content item that is currently being rendered, the authenticated user for the current request, the current site settings, and the current request itself of course. Check out this page of the Orchard Core documentation to see all of the available properties on the Request object. If you use the Request object quite often, you will notice that this table now has new properties, like the QueryString, UriQueryString, Path, UriPath, PathBase, UriPathBase, Host, and UriHost. Generate Rule Condition TargetUrl in a correct location The rules module was designed with extensibility in mind; however, there is one line that is in the view for it, setting the TargetUrl property of the modal picker to the layers controller. It needs to be moved out of the view, and into the Layers controller so that the view can be used by other modules, pointing to different controllers. Demos Lombiq JSON Editor The Lombiq JSON Editor is our Orchard Core module for displaying a JSON Editor like on jsoneditoronline.org. You can easily clone or download the module from this GitHub repository. If 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! In this demo, we will go with the quicker way and use our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution. If you clone that repository and set up your site using any setup recipe, let's just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core, and under Configuration -> Recipes, you will find one called Lombiq Open Source Orchard Core Extensions - JSON Editor Sample that is about demoing the Lombiq JSON Editor module. Let's run the recipe! Now let's see the list of the content items where you will find a new one called JSON Example Page. This page has a JSON Field which comes from the Lombiq JSON Editor module. It's using a tree editor by default that you can use to manipulate the content of the JSON inside. But of course, you can have other types of editor for your JSON if you want, like you can have a code editor with numbered lines with syntax highlighting or you can just use a pure text editor and so on. Using a simple json-editor tag helper you can easily render the JSON editor. You can pass a string value to the editor that will contain the JSON itself, pass the JsonEditorOptions class that contains several configuration values like EscapeUnicode, SortObjectKeys, and so on. And you have several other options and use-cases for this JSON field. The JSON Example Page, which comes from the recipe, has a Liquid Part too that reads the values from the JSON field and prints the values in a simple list by using Liquid and JavaScript. Here is the display view of the JSON Example Page. If you would like to know more about this new field, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community New GraphQL sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core The Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core is a demo Orchard Core CMS module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that includes the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can also use it as part of a solution that uses Orchard Core NuGet packages; however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. And the module just got a new little GraphQL sample! Check it out if you would like to know more about Orchard Core's GraphQL module and learn how to extend the Orchard GraphQL APIs! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 226 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!

Allow to edit Time Field seconds and milliseconds, document dependency version selection in ResourceManagementOptionsConfiguration class, demo about a feature to include or exclude tenant features and/or themes, and many more coming this week! Check out our post for more! Orchard Core updates Document dependency version selection in ResourceManagementOptionsConfiguration class Let's say that in the theme layout, you want to enforce Bootstrap 4.6 and added this <script asp-name="bootstrap" version="4" at="Foot"></script> which includes Bootstrap 4 as desired. Now let's have a custom module that allows converting a select-menu to a searchable-menu. This module depends on Bootstrap and jQuery to be able to function. So in the ResourceManagementOptionsConfiguration class, we need to define the dependencies like this: _manifest.DefineScript("SearchableDropdown") .SetUrl("~/SearchableDropdowns/bootstrap-select.min.js", "~/SearchableDropdowns/bootstrap-select.js") .SetDependencies("jquery", "bootstrap") .SetVersion("1.0.0"); _manifest.DefineStyle("SearchableDropdown") .SetUrl("~/SearchableDropdowns/bootstrap-select.min.css", "~/SearchableDropdowns/bootstrap-select.css") .SetDependencies("bootstrap") .SetVersion("1.0.0"); Unfortunately, the SetDependencies("bootstrap") call here forces to include Bootstrap 5, which will cause Bootstrap 4 and 5 to be included! Obviously, this is a problem. But you can easily solve this problem. You can use the SetDependencies method to ensure the script or style is loaded after their dependency, where you can set a specific version of your choice or the latest version available. Check out this new section in the Orchard Core documentation where we used SetDependencies("bootstrap:4") to say that we would like to define a style that depends on Bootstrap version 4. Allow editing Time Field seconds and milliseconds Let's take a quick look at the improvements of the Time Field. In our example, we have set up our Orchard Core site using the Blog recipe and modified the content definition of the Blog Post content type by adding a new Time Field to it. When you navigate to the settings of the Time Field, you will see a new setting here, called Step. This is just about manipulating the value of the step attribute of the time input type. You can read a lot about the step attribute here, now we just want to show you a small example of how you can use this new option. Let's say we want to allow to be able to edit the seconds for the Time Field too, but not the milliseconds. If we type 15 for the Step here, users can choose from the following values when setting the seconds: 0, 15, 30, and 45. It means, setting the value of this field to 03:39:15 PM would be suitable. If the user would like to create a new blog post and enter an invalid value for the Time Field, they would see the following message by showing some suggestions about the nearest valid values. Do not enable OrchardCore.Feeds by default in standard recipes By default by enabling the OrcardCore.Feeds module your lists will have feeds capabilities but for the Blank and the Agency recipe. This doesn't make any sense because we don't have any lists defined by default in these recipes. The change here is the Blank and the Agency recipes now will not enable the Feeds module by default. Demos Include or exclude tenant features and/or themes This upcoming feature is about through app settings/configuration adds the ability to restrict the features and/or themes that are available to either a tenant and/or all tenants or a mix of both. If you checkout to the deanmarcussen/excludefeatures branch, you will see a new OrchardCore_Features section in the appsettings.json file where you can see rules that you can apply to the various features. The idea here is that you can have the rule to either exclude or include a given expression based on the feature name. By default, the OrchardCore.Templates feature and the TheAgencyTheme are excluded for all tenants, but the default tenant has an include rule with a "*" expression which means that tenant gets everything. Now let's see this in practice! Let's set up a site using the Software as a Service recipe to get the Tenants feature enabled by default. If you navigate to Configuration -> Features on the admin UI, you will see that the Templates feature is available with the TheAgencyTheme as well (Design -> Themes). But if you have a tenant called blog1 and search for templates on the Features page, you will only find the Shortcode Templates one because the Templates feature is excluded for this tenant. And the same will apply if you navigate to Design -> Themes and try to find The Agency Theme. A nice additional feature would be to have a UI, where you can specify what kind of features and/or themes would like to exclude or include for the given tenant. But we are just scratching the surface of this upcoming feature. If you would like to know more, don't forget to head to YouTube for a recording to learn more! News from the community Helping the City of Santa Monica with Orchard Core consulting A few weeks ago we mentioned a new website using Orchard Core: the site of the City of Santa Monica, which you can find on Show Orchard as well! 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. Santa Monica is a beachside city of 8.3 square miles on the westside of Los Angeles County. Offering an environment of unparalleled natural beauty, the city is home to a mix of residential communities, commercial districts, and recreational venues. And we actually had a small part in this by helping the creation of this site with some Orchard Core consulting. If you would like to know more, check out the case study on our site here. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 224 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 can write about several nice improvements this week! Adding missing deployment steps, new strongly typed example with update endpoint in the documentation, implementing Zone shape alternates, and many more! Orchard Core updates Implementing Zone shape alternates This feature is about adding Zone shape alternates like in Orchard 1. The Zone__[ZoneName] template is called when displaying a Layout zone. Which zones are available depends on the current theme. And now you can find a new section in the documentation of Orchard Core about what are the available properties of the Zone shape and how to display the content of a given zone using Liquid and Razor. Allow file attachments for deployment steps Let's say you need to create a custom deployment step that accepts an Excel file as an input with data to use for creating a custom deployment step. But the form posted does not accept attached files. The issue was that the OrchardCore.Deployment/Views/Step/Edit.cshtml file has no enctype="multipart/form-data" attribute. Expanded strongly typed example with update endpoint The Content Types page of the Orchard Core documentation is about showing you how to use migrations to create your new content type, how to change the metadata of your content type, or how to add content parts or content fields to your type. Now there is a new sample that shows how to update your strongly typed content item using an API in this case. The UpdateProductPriceAsync is just about getting the Product content item by an Id and updating the value of the Price Numeric Field of it, which can be found on the ProductPart. Add site settings deployment for Content Audit Trail Settings and Google features When you navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the Audit Trail module, you will have a feature that provides a log for recording and viewing back-end changes. If you navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Audit Trail and click on the Content tab, you will see a list that contains all of the content types of your installation. Here you can select the types of content whose events are recorded. And now you can export these settings using a deployment plan! To do that, just create a new deployment plan (Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans) and add a new deployment step to it. You just need to find the Content Audit Trail settings one that exports the content audit trail settings. If you execute your deployment plan, you will see that the recipe file contains the list of the allowed content types. And the same goes for the Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager modules. If you enable those, you will find some settings under the same Configuration -> Settings option called Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Now you just need to add the Google Analytics Settings and Google Tag Manager Settings deployment steps to your plan, and after you execute that, you will get the following recipe file. Demos Lombiq UIKit for Orchard Core The Lombiq UIKit for Orchard Core module contains reusable shapes like text editors, custom-style checkboxes, dropdown editors, and in the future potentially more complex editors. Add the module to your solution and enable the Lombiq UI Kit - Showcase page feature if you want to check out the currently available shapes. You can see them under ~/UIKitShowcase after the feature is enabled. The example code for using these shapes can be seen in Views/Showcase/Showcase.cshtml. This module contains only those stylings which are needed for these shapes to work. During one of our client projects, we needed to standardize UI elements both on the front end and the admin area. Like text fields, drop-downs, and so on. Once you go beyond the very basics with styling and functionality this comes a bit more complex. Centralizing things is a good option in this case, and while we are doing that let's have an open-source module about it. And we have already added this module to our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution! The only thing you need to do is to clone this repository and set up your Orchard Core site with any recipe you want. After head to the admin UI of Orchard Core and enable the Lombiq UI Kit - Showcase page and Lombiq UI Kit modules. Now you just need to navigate to the https://localhost:44335/UIKitShowcase URL, which showcases all the elements that are built-in into the module. But how can you use these? Especially they are just simple tag helpers. If you open the mentioned Showcase.cshtml in the Lombiq.UIKit module, you will see the content of the showcase page. Here you can see we have the editor tag helper that accepts several properties like the type, labelPosition, iconClasses, placeholder, and so on. By just providing these you can have nice, standardized UI elements that can be also used in Liquid as well. If you would like to know more about this feature don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community DotNest Core DotNest Core is a complete redevelopment of the DotNest platform, all on the latest version of Orchard Core. We've been running it with a couple of select few customers for a while now, and it's time to open it up a bit more. While you can't yet simply create an Orchard Core-based DotNest site, you can sign up for our limited beta here. You'll soon be able to get a fully functional, reliably hosted Orchard Core site on DotNest where you can build your personal website or something to showcase your Orchard skills with. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 219 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!

The development of Orchard Core of course has been continued after the release of 1.0. Are you curious about the newest improvements of Orchard Core? Well, let's check them out! Orchard Core updates Optimize AddTokenToPath The community tries to make Orchard Core as optimized and as fast as it could be. C# and ASP.NET Core with other third-party libraries offer several tricks and techniques to achieve this goal. For example, you can use ZString instead of StringBuilder. ZString is a library that provides StringBuilder and StringWriter with zero allocation, meaning it's allocating an array on the stack for small buffers, instead of creating new StringBuilders and StringWriters every time. All ZString methods only allocate the final string. Also, ZString has enabled to access the inner buffer, so if the output target has stringless API, you can achieve completely zero allocation. Or another improvement could be to not use string.Split that causing array allocation, use sub-strings instead. Add extension method for site setting deployments Whenever you would like to add a deployment step that allows exporting your custom site settings, you need to register three services with the transient, scoped, and singleton lifetimes. It's not a huge issue though because you can easily open a Startup.cs file of a module that contains these kinds of registrations and see how you can do it in your module but having an extension method for site setting deployments could reduce the lines that you need to copy every time. The new AddSiteSettingsPropertyDeploymentStep allows you to register your custom site settings deployments just in one line! Check out the Startup.cs files of any module to see the new way of registering your site setting deployments. Not use a current culture when checking invalid Autoroute path If you enable the Localization module and set a default culture to a non en-US culture, e.g. th-TH, you will get a validation error when trying to save a content item with an Autoroute part. Here is the screenshot when trying to save a content item and a default culture is th-TH. This issue is from AutoroutePartExtensions.ValidatePathFieldValue method. Inside the method, there is a call of autoroute.Path?.IndexOf("//") which returns 0 instead of -1 when a current culture is th-TH. According to the MS document, IndexOf(String) searches a word by using culture and case sensitivity. Refer to Recommendations for string usage, we should use StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase for the non-linguistic string search. There is no case in a space and //, so the fix here was to pick StringComparison.Ordinal and to match IndexOf which is case-sensitive. Cypress 8.2.0 and Trumbowyg 2.25.1 If you are a huge Orchard Core enthusiast and like to check out the recent changes of the CMS from time to time, you may notice that the community upgrades the different .NET/Client-side/Test libraries from time to time. The Orchard Core documentation has a Libraries page under the Resources one where you can see the versions of these libraries that are used across the main branch of Orchard Core. Antoine Griffard recently updated Cypress to 8.2.0 and Trumbowyg to 2.25.1! With these updates, you can make sure that if you would like to use the built-in libraries of Orchard Core you will always have the latest versions! News from the community Lombiq Technologies: new developer colleagues and new group photo We had a great company trip last week where almost all of the colleagues of Lombiq gathered together to spend the whole day together offline. This was a great opportunity to update our group photo on our official website, so head to the About us page where you can see the most, but not all of our team as of the summer of 2021. And we also have two new colleagues to introduce: Ádám Jakab and Szabolcs Deme. Don't forget to check out their bio too! DotNest Core DotNest Core is a complete redevelopment of the DotNest platform, all on the latest version of Orchard Core. We've been running it with a couple of select few customers for a while now, and it's time to open it up a bit more. While you can't yet just simply create an Orchard Core-based DotNest site, you can sign up for our limited beta here. You'll soon be able to get a fully functional, reliably hosted Orchard Core site on DotNest where you can build your personal website or something to showcase your Orchard skills with. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 215 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!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 1.0 is now available! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core. In the upcoming weeks, we will check out the newest features and additions of Orchard Core 1.0. Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Turn The Default Theme LoginMenu into a shape for easier overriding It was a partial view. While you can override this from a child theme, you can't override it from admin-edited Templates. So this is about changing it into a shape. Now the LoginMenu shape it's in the TheTheme theme, and it can be easily customized. Added more clarity about how migrations work When you are new to Orchard Core, you may be struggling with the concept of migrations while developing a module for the first time. That information on this very important topic is scattered, so brunoAltinet decided to propose a separate section for data migrations. Now you will find a new page on the Orchard Core documentation about: what are data migrations, how to add migrations to your custom module, and you will also find an example that showcases three different data migrations (recipe migration, creating a map index, creating content type and updating content type). Fix Connection String input styles When you set up a site or a tenant in Orchard Core, the first thing you will see is the Setup screen. The Setup screen contains a few questions that you need to answer to configure your site. And the connection string is one of them. We used the input-group-append class here but we should not be using a form-select and input-group-append, because that is deprecated in Bootstrap 5. Add signal_url description Many activities have settings that can contain either JavaScript or Liquid syntax. These types of fields allow you to enter Liquid markup, enabling access to system-wide variables and filters as well as variables from the workflow execution context. We have a table of the JavaScript functions that are available by default to any activity that supports scripts expressions. The signalUrl function was missing from this table, but now you can find that here too! News from the community Orchard Core 1.0 Orchard Core 1.0 is released! If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the first released version of Orchard Core! The Releases page of the documentation is also updated that now contains version 1.0 with some breaking changes and the new features. Upgrade your solution to 1.0 now! Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat and ask questions! A new website using Orchard Core: Wings Over Water The Wings Over Water movie tells the story of the epic journeys of three amazing bird families – the Sandhill Crane, the Yellow Warbler, and the Mallard Duck – with extraordinary footage of their fascinating behaviors. Check out this brand new, amazing-looking Orchard Core site here! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions now with Orchard Core 1.0 Looking for some useful Orchard Core extensions? Here's a bundle solution of all of Lombiq's open-source Orchard Core extensions (modules and themes). Clone and try them out now! This is an Orchard Core CMS Visual Studio solution that contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries. And we have also updated the solution to use Orchard Core 1.0! And what are these modules? Well, you will find a nice Readme.MD file for all of them. And if you like to use code snippets, you will love that our super-useful Visual Studio code snippets of the Orchard Dojo Library are now updated to Orchard Core v1.0! Check them out here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 208 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!

The new branding assets for Orchard Core are here! Check out our current post for a demo about a scheduling application, for the Auto Setup updates, and many more! Orchard Core updates New branding assets The issue was that we didn't really have concise branding guidelines or even proper branding assets. But the time has come, Orchard Core has now new branding assets! If you open up the Orchard Core Documentation, you will see the new icons and the new colors everywhere. If you click on the Resources option from the menu and select Branding from the left, you will find the updated guidelines and graphic assets for Orchard Core's branding. If you open up the admin UI of your site, you will see the new logo there too. When referring to Orchard Core, please use one of the logo variations without altering anything apart from the resolution (so don't change the colors, aspect ratio, graphics, or anything else). Bootstrap 5 for the front-end themes Orchard Core comes with some built-in front-end themes that you can use for your site. You can use a theme adapted for agency websites, a theme adapted for blogs, a landing page for a project that is under construction, and of course, the default Theme. When you use the latest preview source of Orchard Core you will notice that all of these now using Bootstrap 5, which means if you would like to use or customize them, you have the options to use the features that come from Bootstrap 5! Here is the content of the package.json file of the Blog theme. Add DistributedLock for Multi-instance AutoSetup It can happen that you have multiple deployments of Orchard Core, but you share the same database or the same Redis instance. Now you can see a new section in the documentation that explains how you can use the new optional distributed lock parameters like the LockTimeout or the LockExpiration. These help you to set the timeout in milliseconds to acquire a distributed auto-setup lock and the expiration in milliseconds of the distributed setup lock. Check implied permissions PermissionHandler should check ImpliedBy permissions. RolesPermissionsHandler doesn't have to check all user roles permissions, just Anonymous and Authenticated if applicable. RolesPermissionsHandler is scoped, so we can cache Anonymous and Authenticated permissions and not query them for each permission evaluation. Check out the default implementation of the IPermissionGrantingService interface, which evaluates if the specified PermissionRequirement is granted by provided claims. Demos Scheduling application The StatCan Orchard Core repository houses a collection of custom Orchard Core resources, modules, and themes that support various web applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. Built on top of Orchard Core CMS, developers have a suite of web application features out of the box (e.g., content management, authentication, forms, themes, etc.) by customizing the selection and configuration of components. The extensibility of the framework allows new features and components to be added easily. One of the custom modules called StatCan Scheduling provides types and utilities useful for scheduling appointments. Let's see that module in action! First of all, let's run the solution and set up your site using the Vuetify platform theme recipe. The scheduling application and the Vuetify platform theme recipe are heavily built on the VueForms module that you can also find in this repository. If you haven't heard about it yet, you can open up This week in Orchard post from last year, where you can find a demo about this module. The first thing that you will see is a calendar that you can use to add appointments to it. You can add a bunch of other calendars and employees to the system. Employees can be used to say that I would like to add an appointment to this calendar for this employee. To be able to add an appointment, first, you need to add an employee to the system. It can be done using the admin UI of Orchard Core (Content -> Content Items -> New Employee). Let's say we would like to add an employee, and we assign this employee to the Default calendar. If you would like to add more than one calendar, you will find a taxonomy named Calendars. This has an AppointmentCalendar term content type. If you add a new AppointmentCalendar, you can specify its color, which will mean if you add a new appointment to this calendar, the color of the appointment will be used from here. But without further ado, let's see the front-end if you add an appointment to this calendar using our newly created employee. As you can see, we have one appointment on July 6 for the employee Gábor Domonkos. The list of employees can be seen on the right, which contains only one employee right now. You have the option to edit the given appointment or employee just by clicking on the given appointment. As we mentioned, this application is heavily built on the VueForms module that means if you navigate to Content -> Vue Forms, you will see a Vue Form content item called Create appointment, which is the component that is responsible for handling the appointment creation logic. And we are just scratching the surface of this application here. If you would like to know more about it, head to YouTube now to see it in action! News from the community Lombiq Helpful Extensions: Helpful Content Types and Widgets The Lombiq Helpful Extensions module is an Orchard Core module containing some handy extensions (e.g., filters for Projector). This time we will see the Helpful Widgets and Helpful Content types features. The Helpful Widgets adds multiple helpful widget content types. These are basic widgets that are added by built-in Orchard Core recipes though in the case of using a custom setup recipe these can be added by this feature too. Includes: ContainerWidget: Works as a container for further widgets. It has a FlowPart attached to it so it can contain additional widgets as well. HtmlWidget: Adds HTML editing and displaying capabilities using a WYSIWYG editor. LiquidWidget: Adds Liquid code editing and rendering capabilities. The Helpful Content Types includes basic content types that are added by built-in Orchard Core recipes though in case of using a custom setup recipe these can be added by this feature too. Includes: Page: Highly customizable page content type with FlowPart and AutoroutePart. The only thing you have to do is to navigate to Configuration -> Features on the admin UI and enable the Helpful Content Types - Lombiq Helpful Extensions and Helpful Widgets - Lombiq Helpful Extensions modules. And as may you guess, if you would like to add a new widget in your zone, you will see the three mentioned widgets without the need of running the given recipes that contain the definition of those widgets. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 207 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!

Improving the UI of the Audit Trail module, new user event handlers, feature to lock-out users on wrong password, and many more additions to Orchard Core in our current post! Orchard Core updates New User Event Handlers You can already work with several user event handlers. Let's say you want to do something after a user is created. For example, after a user has been created, I would like to send a welcome email to that user. And from now you will find more events if you open up the IUserEventHandler interface in the OrchardCore.Users.Abstractions module. Like now you can implement the CreatingAsync method, which occurs before a user is created. Or you can use the UpadatingAsync or UpdatedAsync events too! ListPart shape names for placement The issue is that placement doesn't take into consideration the display type convention, i.e. _SummaryAdmin when placing shapes, so the convention for shape names fails, and placing a ListPart shape tries to collect all three shapes, and render them. Fixed whitespace parsing in output tags in Fluid Let's say you have the following Liquid expression which is totally a valid one: {{ "foo" | size }} But what if you write this expression in the following way {{ "foo" | size}} it would say a parse error. But from now, if you have only one expression in different lines, the parser will work as expected. For example, now you can do something like this, this will be valid: {{ "foo" |size}} Lockout on wrong password The Lockout settings are set with the settings configured in ASP.NET Identity. Those options are used to define, for example, the TimeSpan a user is locked out for when a lockout occurs or the number of failed access attempts allowed before a user is locked out. So, from now you can define the logic where you want users to be locked out and you can also set how long you want to lock out that user after how many failed access. And if you check out the documentation you will find some lines about how you can read the configuration from an external config file. Here you can say that we want to allow this feature for every new user. And if they provide a wrong username or password 5 times a row, we lock out them for the next 5 minutes. And you also have an option to unlock users from the admin UI right away. If you navigate to Security -> Users you will find an Unlock button if the given user locked himself out. As you can see in the screen below, the user with the editor user name is a locked-out one. Adding docs for the absolute_url and href Liquid filters The page about the Liquid module in the documentation is a super-useful one because here you can see the list of all the available Liquid filters that you can use in Orchard Core. And now this page got an update by adding the absolute_url and href Liquid filters to it. The absolute_url creates the full absolute URL for the given relative virtual path and the href creates a content URL for a relative virtual path. Recommended for generating URLs in every case you want to refer to a relative path. Demos Audit Trail module UI improvements The Audit Trail module provides log records for creation, deletion of any content type, and events like user events. We wrote about the Audit Trail module for Orchard Core in this This week in Orchard post, if you haven't read about it yet, start by checking out that one first. Now, we will focus on the new UI. First of all, set up your site using the Blog recipe. After, head to the admin UI of your site and enable the Audit Trail and the Users Audit Trail features under Configuration -> Features. Audit Trail: Provides a log for recording and viewing back-end changes. Users Audit Trail: The users audit trail feature allows logging of user events. Now you can set up the Audit Trail module that you can do under Configuration -> Settings -> Audit Trail. Here you will see 3 different tabs: Events, Trimming, and Content. Under the Events tab, you can select what kind of events you would like to record. For example, you can say that I want to record the fact when an attempt to login failed, but I don't care about the event when a user was disabled. Under the Trimming tab, you can say how long you want to keep your records in your database. You can say that I want to keep the records for 30 days and delete the older ones. The Content tab is about setting the types of content whose events are recorded. If you don't want to log the changes for a given content type, you can just simply untick the given one. Let's say that now we want to log the changes of every content type. We need to do some changes to be able to see records in the Audit Trail list. Let's just modify the built-in blog post. Don't forget that you still have the Audit Trail Part that you can attach to any content type. If you do that, you can optionally provide a comment about this change for the Audit Trail. Now, let's open up the Audit Trail to check out our changes. As you can see here, we published the built-in blog post two times in a row. We also published the built-in About article but for this time, we attached the Audit Trail Part too. The content of the part (the comment) can be seen under each event. Also, notice that the user with the editor username has two failed login attempts. Now, let's hit the Details button near one of the content events. The Content tab here shows you some basic data about the event: the name of the event, the timestamp of the event, the current version, and so on. You can see the JSON representation of the content item under the Diff tab. Here you can choose between two types of views: Split: the content of the previous version can be seen on the left side of the screen and the content of the selected version can be seen on the right side of the screen. You can see the previous, changed data in red and the current, modified data in green. This screen shows that the ContentItemVersionId has just changed with the ModifiedUtc and the PublishedUtc values. The reason for that is we changed the Markdown text of the blog post, by adding a new paragraph to it. Unified: the meaning of the colors is the same here, the only difference is that you can see the whole changes in one view, instead of a split one. You will see a whole new user experience when you would like to list or sort the events in the Audit Trail list. Last week we wrote about the improved search filters to the contents and users list where you could read about the syntax for the filters. And slightly the same applies here too. If you click on the funnel icon before the search box and select the Filter Syntax one, you will see a modal window that shows you the available filters. This modal describes all the registered filters that you can use with the given properties. It also shows you the current values of the given filters and a little bit of information about the syntax. And then down the bottom, you just get the current filter and the normalized version of it which describes how it's being constructed. And as always, if you would like to see more about the new UI of the Audit Trail module in action, head to YouTube for a nice and detailed recording! News from the community Piotr Szmyd Last Tuesday June 22nd 2021, our dear friend Piotr Szmyd passed away. Piotr was a respected member of our community, a steering committee member, and a passionate contributor. Everyone loved him. By creating this issue we hope you can share a story or a thought to help keep his memory alive and show his family and his friends how much he meant to us. This picture was taken in LAX on September 2012 on the way to the first Orchard Harvest conference ever. From left to right: Zoltán Lehóczky, Benedek Farkas, Piotr Szmyd and Sipke Schoorstra. May our branches merge again, Piotr! Lombiq Helpful Extensions: Flows Helpful Extensions The Lombiq Helpful Extensions module is an Orchard Core module containing some handy extensions (e.g. filters for Projector). This time we will see the Flows Helpful Extensions which adds additional styling capabilities to the OrchardCore.Flows feature by making it possible to add classes to widgets in the Flow Part editor. But how can you use the Flows Helpful Extensions feature? Let's say you have a site set up with the Agency recipe. The first thing that you need to do is to navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the Flows Helpful Extensions - Lombiq Helpful Extensions feature. Now, it's time to edit a content item that has a FlowPart attached. The Page will be great for us now. Let's say we add a new Html widget to the FlowPart of our new page. If you click on the new cog icon, you can add custom classes to this widget and remove the grid extension classes that will be added to your widget by default. OK, but what does it mean? What's the difference? The right side of the screen below shows you the original HTML and the one on the left shows you the modified one. As you can see, the my-custom-class CSS class is there and the widget-size-* and widget-align-* classes were removed because we put a tick on the Remove grid extension classes checkbox. Removing these classes is a good idea if you are using a CSS framework that adds CSS properties to these classes but you don't want to add styling to these elements based on these classes. In this case, you don't need to overwrite these properties. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 205 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 can write about several nice improvements this week! Adding missing deployment steps, new lines about Shortcodes in the documentation, updating the content type editor, and a demo about the search filters improvements to the contents list! Orchard Core updates Deployment steps We have several cases where we have the recipe steps but not the deployment steps. For example, now you can export the Facebook login settings but without secrets (like passwords) because we don't handle that in the recipes right now. The newly added import/export deployment steps are: FacebookLogin GoogleAnalytics Microsoft Azure AD OpenIdValidationSettings Technical name of Content Type and Display Name of Content Parts in Edit Content Type page This feature is about to show a read-only input with the technical name of the content type when you would like to edit the content type definition. With this feature, you can easily see the difference between the display name and the technical name. Of course, you can guess the display name by the technical name, but not everyone knows that. You can check it out easily. Let's just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and go to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types. Edit one of the content types, and you will see the technical name and the display name of the content type. Shortcodes docs and rename Razor helper We have the HtmlToShortcodesAsync Razor helper that you can use to render Shortcodes. This one is now renamed to ShortcodesToHtmlAsync, and the old one is marked as obsolete. And you can also find some new lines in the documentation about how to render Shortcodes via a Liquid filter or Razor helper. Check allowed file extensions when importing media You can have a list in Orchard Core that contains the file extensions that can be uploaded to the media library. If you would like to upload a PDF file to the media library and the PDF extension is not allowed, you won't be able to upload that. However, if you want to import a PDF file via recipes, you could do that because the file extension checking was missing from there. It could be a security issue but if you have rights to execute recipes, that means you have already logged in as a user who has Security Critical permissions. And one more note here: if you do _logger.LogWarning, don't forget to check is the LogLeveL.Debug enabled _logger.IsEnabled(LogLevel.Debug), otherwise, don't write a warning to the log files. Remove deprecated SHA256CryptoServiceProvider usage While running a benchmark, it started failing, the SDK throwing some warning that the CryptographyAlgorithms.CreateSHA256() is deprecated and cannot be used in .NET 6. The documentation says that now we can do SHA256.Create(), and it works for all the versions that we are targeting. Someone else from Microsoft related to benchmarking and performance mentioned this issue because they are using Orchard Core as a source for the PGO. PGO means Performance Guided Optimizations which is a way to analyze what's happening in an app to optimize the IL generated by the JIT. Demos Improving search filters to the contents list A few weeks ago, you could see a demo regarding search filters and parsers for the contents list. This demo is just about showing you the final version of the search filters that you can also try out right now if you are using the preview packages of Orchard Core! Let's see how you can use this feature that makes browsing your content items much easier! We have a site set up with the Blog recipe. The blog recipe creates an Article content type and one Article content item by default. If you want to list all of the article content items, you just need to navigate to Content -> Content Items and select Article from the filter by content type dropdown menu. As you can see, this means that the Search textbox will be populated with the type:Article expression. It means if you write, type: and the name of the content type, you can list all of the content items from the given type. If you also want to sort the items by the created date (select Recently created from the Sort dropdown menu), the sort:Created text will also appear in the Search textbox. If you click on the funnel icon before the search box and select the Filter Syntax one, you will see a modal window that shows you the available filters. This modal describes all the registered filters that you can use with the given properties. It also shows you the current values of the given filters and a little bit of information about the syntax. And then down the bottom, you just get the current filter and the normalized version of it which describes how it's being constructed. And the same applies to the Users list too (Security -> Users). Here we filtered for the Enabled users where the name contains admin, and where the Administrator role applies. Finally, we sort them by their email address. If you would like to know more about this feature don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Lombiq Utility Scripts: create a trusted certificate Our Utility Scripts project is open source from last year! Many scripts for Orchard Core, Orchard CMS, Azure, SqlServer development. E.g., quick Orchard Core solution init, reset/reinstall. In the following lines, we would like to show you a nice and useful script that could be a very handful one during your Orchard Core development. The CreateTrustedCertificate script creates all necessary files and imports them into the local Certificate Store so that it can be used to access localhost sites via HTTPS. If you open up that file in GitHub, you will find several comments in the script that help you to see what are the steps that are script is actually doing! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 204 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 start this week by showing the ability to export templates as files, the negative role condition evaluator, and the brand new alternates for widget parts and for dynamic parts with great examples in the documentation. After, we will see a great demo about using templated GraphQL queries with Liquid. Check out our post for more! Orchard Core updates Add ability to export templates as files The idea here is in the exported ZIP file, the templates are now files instead of being embedded in the JSON recipe. Let's check it out quickly! Let's say you have the Templates module enabled (the Templates module provides a way to write custom shape templates from the admin) and have a defined template. If you set up your site using the Agency recipe, you will have one template, called Content__LandingPage, which is a template for the Landing Page content type, and the homepage of that installation is a Landing Page content item. Now, head to Configuration -> Import/Export and create a new Deployment Plan under the Deployment Plans option. Let's name the plan as Templates and add one Deployment Step to it, the All Templates one. Here you will see a new option: Export templates as files. Let's just put a tick in this checkbox to see what will happen. Now we have only one thing left to do, to execute the deployment plan. Let's just download the deployment plan locally and check the content of the Templates.zip file. Here you will see a Recipe.json file and a Templates folder. The Recipe.json file contains the Templates step with our only one Content__LandingPage template, and the content of that template can be found in the Content-LandingPage.liquid file in the Templates folder. Negative Role Condition Evaluator The way a role condition with a negative operator is evaluated right now doesn't take multiple roles into account. If we have 2 users: -- roleA roleB UserA X UserB X X The evaluator uses .Any() when evaluating the value against every role of the user. If we pick the operator "Equals" with the value "roleB", it will only be true for UserB, which has roleB. If we were now to just change the operator to "NotEquals" logically, it should be the opposite result of "Equals" but since the value gets compare against every role and roleA != roleB it will return true as well. .Any() (Current) Operator Value UserA UserB Equals roleB false true Not Equals roleB true true Contains roleB false true Not Contains roleB true true Using .All() with the negative operators which would give opposite results as intended. .All() Operator Value UserA UserB Equals roleB false true Not Equals roleB true false Contains roleB false true Not Contains roleB true false We have many negate operators, like StringNotContainsOperator, StringNotEndsWithOperator, StringNotStartsWithOperator, StringNotStartsWithOperator. Now, if you use them, the code execution will return with using the .All() instead of using the .Any(). If you don't know what are the rules and how to use them, check out the demo about the Rules module in this post! Validate content type and part names There was an unhandled exception during content item creation if you have a part named like property on ContentItem. The reason was that we have some reserved names that you cannot use when you are naming your content parts or content types. The _reservedNames HashSet here contains the names, that you cannot use. Use ZStringWriter ZString is a library that provides StringBuilder and StringWriter with zero allocation, meaning it's allocating an array on the stack for small buffers, instead of creating new StringBuilders and StringWriters every time. All ZString methods only allocate the final string. Also, ZString has enabled to access the inner buffer, so if the output target has stringless API, you can achieve completely zero allocation. Now we can use the new ZStringWriter instead of the existing StringWriter one. Alternates for Widget Parts This change contains several new alternates for widget parts and dynamic parts. And the documentation has also been updated with the new alternates. And when we are saying that the documentation has been updated, we mean that it's really got a huge update with many examples, like Display mode with Part Type and Shape without Display type Examples, Display mode with Part Type and Shape with Display type Examples, Display mode with Part Name and Custom Shape with Display type Examples and many more. Demos GraphQL Queries queries Let's meet with the new GraphQL Query type that basically allows you to use a GraphQL query in the admin interface and Liquid. It's using the same principle as the SQL query or the Lucene query. For example, let's say we have a GraphQL query created called ContactRequests, which is just about getting the Contact Request content items from the site. This query returns the contentItemID, the createdUtc, and the display text values of the Contact Request content items. But by using this experimental feature, you have the availability to use a templated GraphQL with Liquid. What do we mean? Well, first let's find the new Run GraphQL Query under Search -> Queries. Here let's add a template that contains Liquid code. By using Liquid, you can add output parameters to your query. In this case, we would like to get the email and the message fields too of the Content Request content items by using parameters. As you can see, we used the contactRequestEmail parameter to get the email and the contactRequestMessage parameter to get the message. If you open up the StatCan Orchard Core repository, you will find a collection of custom Orchard Core resources, modules, and themes that support various web applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. One of the modules here is the VueForms module, which provides a form ContentType that simplifies using VueJs forms in the frontend. We had a demo about that one too, way back in 2020. If you don't remember about that, you can check out that in this post! And as always, if you want to know more about this feature, don't forget to check out the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 203 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!

A new demo about Admin Layers, several performance improvements, and a new AdminBranding shape is waiting for you in our upcoming post! Oh, and have we mentioned that Lombiq is now more than 8 years old? :) Orchard Core updates Move admin branding to a distinct shape Now you will find a brand new AdminBranding shape in the default admin theme of Orchard Core that is about containing the favicon, and the default, clickable Orchard Core logo that redirects the user to the home page of the admin UI (the admin dashboard). And now, because this whole stuff is a new shape, you can easily customize this one too! Check out the updated documentation to read some words about it! Fix drop widget to empty zone Someone reported an issue that it's not possible to drag and drop widgets to an empty zone. Now, this has been fixed. Remove some async-await It's not a recommendation anymore to remove async/await when it can be removed. In this case here the Task from _session.Query can be returned directly, it doesn't have to be awaited. There is a benefit in terms of allocations but at the same time if there is an exception you lose where it's coming from. And the impact in terms of perf is minimal. So, it's not a recommendation to do it every time. Adding spatial features to content (Lucene indexed) You could see a demo a few weeks ago about adding spatial features to content. This module provides a GeoPointField, which can be used to give a geographic position to content. And this has been merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core with nice detailed documentation also! Don't forget to check out the docs to read about Terms specifications, Geo Bounding Box, Geo Distance, and many more! Reduce string allocations in MediaTokenService and use pooled StringBuilder instances with StringWriter Now the code is using StringBuilder from the StringBuilderPool instead of using String.Concat(), which is about allocating one buffer. There are other improvements with the queryStringTokenKey, which is not recreating a new string every time, just using the existing one. StringWriter will create a StringBuilder by using the StringBuilderPool and passing that to the StringWriter. It's not creating a new one, it's just reusing the existing one. Demos Admin Layers People want to change shapes or styles for various things on the admin UI without having a custom admin theme. For example, currently, it is not possible to change the admin panel's logo and icon without a custom theme (set the base theme to Admin). The new Admin Layers feature is very similar to the Admin Templates one. This new one is about working with the layers of the admin theme, which means you can put different kinds of widgets to the zones of the admin theme using different kinds of layers rules. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that's the goal of this one! Let's say you set up your site using the Blog recipe. After go to the Configuration -> Settings -> Features and find the Admin Layers one which enables admin users to render widgets across pages of the admin based on conditions. Now, the first thing to do is to set up the available zones for widgets as you would do that in the case of the front-end widgets as well. You can do that under Design -> Settings -> Admin Zones. Let's say we would like to work with the HeadMeta, Footer, Header, and NavbarTop zones for now. And let's add some layers too! If you navigate to Design -> Admin Widgets, you could see a very-very familiar UI to manage zones and layers. Here we have just added a simple layer called Always that has one boolean condition rule, which is True. Meaning the widgets on this layer will always be rendered. Now, let's do some testing! Let's say we add a simple Raw Html widget to the NavbarTop zone that is just about containing some bold text. After we will create a new Liquid Widget and render it in the HeadMeta zone. The Liquid Widget is just about containing some styling for the theme: {% styleblock at:"Head"%} body { background-color: gray !important; }{% endstyleblock %} Now we have created two widgets that we have displayed on the Always layer of the admin theme. Let's see how our theme looks like! First, notice the Some text in the NavbarTop zone near the moon icon. This is the Raw HTML widget in the NavbarTop zone. And the new background color is coming from our Liquid Widget. If you would like to know more about this feature, don't forget to check out the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Lombiq is 8 years old! May 21, 2021, is the 8th anniversary of founding Lombiq! On this special occasion, we have gathered 8 important factors of our company's life. We are glad that we took these steps at that time otherwise we might not be able to celebrate with our strong community here today. Check out our post to see which important factors we gathered together! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 202 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!