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Drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7, All users and Custom User Settings deployment steps - This week in Orchard (24/11/2023)

SMTP should send the email if the SSL certificate is invalid, new All users and Custom user settings deployment steps, and drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7 are the topics for this week. Let's check them out in detail! Orchard Core updates SMTP should send the email if the SSL certificate is invalid Mailkit supports sending emails when the server's SMTP certificate is invalid. Now this function is integrated into Orchard Core. You have the choice (with a check box from the mail server settings in the admin area) to be able to bypass the invalid or self-signed certificate. So, there is a new property called IgnoreInvalidSslCertificate that you can set to true in the settings, such that if the SMTP server certificate is not valid, then you might not care and just send the email anyway. To find this setting, don't forget to enable the Email feature. After that, you can navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Email, where you can find the Ignore Invalid SSL Certificate checkbox. All Users and Custom User Settings deployment steps Now, we have two new deployment steps to export every user and to export all, or specified custom user settings. These steps contain the user's name, user ID, email of the user, password hash, security stamp, phone number, and all the important things and the custom settings of the users. And it's safe because it's a password hash, and the data protection key that created this hash is secure. If you navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans, you can create a new deployment plan. If you click the Manage Steps button, you will find the Add Step button, which helps you to add deployment steps to your plan. If you filter on the user keyword, you will find these new steps. Drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7 The latest LTS version of one of the world's leading development platforms was released on November 14, 2023. And Orchard Core now supports .NET 8! It also means that the upcoming version of Orchard will not support .NET 6 and .NET 7. Our practice has always been to support the latest LTS version of .NET, and additionally, the latest version if it's different. Dropping older versions allows us to use new features from .NET 8, and drop packages that are not required anymore (like NewtonSoft.Json). It should be as easy as updating the target framework in the websites that decide to upgrade to the next Orchard Core version. If you head to the documentation of the upcoming Orchard Core release, you will notice this breaking change there as well. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 486 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!

Introduce a new Navbar shape, Stimata Hotel is using Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (10/11/2023)

Introducing a new Navbar shape, centrally defining media resources, and the brand-new Orchard Core site of Stimata Hotel! Let's get right into the news! Orchard Core updates Introduce a new Navbar shape In the Admin theme, multiple shapes were injected in the Navbar space. We had a zone, that was called NavbarTop, we were injecting the user menu, and then we were injecting a shape for the links. We were creating three shapes, and instead, we now have a Navbar shape, which you can utilize in the Admin theme, in the Theme, and in your own theme. It allows you to utilize drivers to be able to add line items inside that Navbar shape. That makes things more dynamic. Like injecting a theme toggler, the icon that navigates you to the front-end site, the culture picker, etc., can be done by using the driver. You can read more about it by visiting the docs, and the change logs of the upcoming Orchard Core version are also updated to tell you some more details about it, for example, how you can add the Navbar shape into your own front-end theme and back-end theme. Centrally define media resources This change is about centrally defining media resources to avoid scattered file references. The script and the CSS files needed for the Media-related fields and parts (Html Body Part, Html Field, Markdown Body Part) were always injected in a way where we defined the source and the dependencies of the required resources. By adding these resources to the ResourceDefinition, we can easily inject them just by using their name. News from the community A new website using Orchard Core: Stimata Hotel Stimata Hotel is nestled in Flampouria, a charming coastal nook on the western side of Kythnos, captivating with its sandy beach and the mesmerizing sunset over the deep blue sea. Check out their 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. Ryan Drew Burnett started it, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier, it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Oh, and in case you haven't read our previous post yet, Show Orchard is now running on Orchard Core! Here's the case study about how we migrated it from Orchard 1! 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! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 484 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 to Bootstrap 5.3.2, periodic Orchard Core Workshops - This week in Orchard (27/10/2023)

Upgrading the Admin theme to use Bootstrap 5.3.2, displaying the Orchard Core logo in the HTML head in Admin branding, and a discussion about having Orchard Core Workshops again! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Upgrade to Bootstrap 5.3.2 Orchard Core is now using Bootstrap 5.3.2, which is a major upgrade because the previously used version of Bootstrap was Bootstrap 4. Most of the assets of the Admin theme were reinvented to make them compliant with Bootstrap for many reasons. One of them is the maintainability because we don't have a lot of overrides so we tried to code along instead of going against Bootstrap. If the next version of Bootstrap is released, it will be easy to update Orchard Core to use that version. This version of Bootstrap supports themes. There is support for dark and light themes; you can also add any other theme you might want. If you want to add a blue theme, you can achieve that using Bootstrap 5.3.2. Previously we used to have our own dark mode and default theme. So, those now are supported by Bootstrap. Because of this reason, one of the breaking changes is we no longer use the phrases: theme, dark theme (from the Bootstrap perspective). It is now called dark and light. And by default, we use auto. What auto does, is it automatically honors your preferences. This means that if you are using a dark theme on your phone, your Orchard Core website will load dark by default. Another improvement is separating Bootstrap from the Admin theme assets. Before the admin.scss used to include Bootstrap within it. And also, admin.js used to include Bootstrap within it. It means we complied them together, and we shipped them that way. With the new layout, we separated the two. The admin.scss or the admin.js are much lighter files but they are loaded after we load Bootstrap. The benefit of that is our code is completely independent of Bootstrap. If you open up the source code of Orchard Core and check the files inside the TheAdmin theme, you will notice one main file under the Assets/scss folder, called index.scss. Here we import some main stuff and the necessary components. At the end of the file, you can see that we are including the light and the dark themes. If you need to add your custom theme, you can include it as we included the dark theme for example. If you check out the _index.scss file of the dark theme (under the scss/themes/dark folder,) you can see how we utilize the color-mode function to create a scope for the dark theme. And only do these overrides and make these changes when it's dark. You can do the same thing for your theme. Displaying the Orchard Core logo in the HTML head in Admin branding By default, the Orchard Core logo and site name are displayed in the top navbar in the admin theme. In this change, the favicon is surrounded by zone "HeadMeta" to put it in the HTML head. The documentation is also updated to reflect this change. News from the community Periodic Orchard Core Workshops As you may remember we had a couple of workshops before in 2020. They were about various aspects of Orchard Core, including the built-in modules or the most important part of the built-in modules and how to use them, theme development, module development, deploying to Azure, etc. We think that those workshops were very useful for the community and we should do that often or at least periodically, like twice a year. Just have this as an easily accessible way of getting a bit of personalized Orchard Core training. Because we have tutorials and videos, so, currently if you want to learn on your own, you can do that from those or the code. If you want personalized training, you can get in touch with any community member or Lombiq and get one. But kind of in between, there is nothing, there are no open courses, classroom-kind courses that you can just sign up and be there with multiple people. If you are interested, jump into this GitHub discussion and tell us your opinion about this idea! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 489 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!

Full-Text Search for Admin UI, Orchard Harvest recordings - This week in Orchard (04/08/2023)

Adding an option to allow the user to change the full-text search behavior in the admin UI, new Helpful Shell Extensions, and announcing that the recordings of the Orchard Harvest Conference 2023 are available on YouTube! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Full-Text Search for Admin UI Currently, when searching for content we search the DisplayText property. It can happen that we want to search content items for other fields like a stock number or serial number. Currently, the only way to do this is by adding any info we want to search for to the title. This may be acceptable in some cases, but not all cases. From now on, additional options have been introduced to enable control over the behavior of the full-text search in the administration user interface for content items. Check out this documentation for details about how you can do that by implementing the IContentsAdminListFilterProvider interface and registering the custom default term name as a search option by adding it to the ContentsAdminListFilterOptions. Helpful Shell Extensions The goal of this change is to introduce various extensions related to tenant management that the contributors can utilize in the future to improve the code quality of Orchard Core instead of doing the same checks repeatedly. And of course, you can use these extensions in the future in your own custom code as well! We have three new classes (ShellContextExtensions, ShellSettingsExtensions, and ShellStringExtensions) with extension methods that tell you whether the tenant is running or not, whether or not the tenant has one of the provided URL hosts, whether or not the tenant is in use in at least one active scope, and so on. News from the community Orchard Harvest Online Recordings We had the first online Orchard Harvest, and it was great to see that we had 188 sign-ups for the conference! It was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, talk about development plans and ideas, and foremost, meet the rest of the worldwide community. And of course, we recorded every session, which means they are now available on YouTube! Click the link to rewatch all the inspiring talks and discussions! That was a blast! Thank you again, everyone, for taking part, and thanks to the presenters for their great presentations! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 497 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!

How to migrate an Orchard 1 application to Orchard Core, support login via username or email address for OpenID - This week in Orchard (28/07/2023)

Support login via username or email address for OpenID, Liquid themes shouldn't need Razor support for MVC, and don't forget to take a look at our blog post about how to migrate an Orchard 1 application to Orchard Core! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Support login via username or email address for OpenID When using the built-in OpenID feature of Orchard Core, you can get an access token by making a POST request to /connect/token endpoint. In the request, you can specify the grant_type, scope, username, password, and client_id. You can use the username in the username parameter, but if you try to use the email address of the user, it won't work. According to this discussion thread, there is a change to not allow the username = email. However, there should be a fallback to authenticate by username or email. So, the goal of this change is to be able to use a username or email to log in. As you can see, now the code utilizes the updated GetUserAsync method, which gets the user by a specified username or email address. Liquid themes shouldn't need Razor support for MVC When developing a theme, you can decide to use Razor or Liquid files. But of course, you can mix Razor and Liquid files if you want. Originally the Blog Theme was only composed of Razor files that the community migrated step by step to Liquid. And we are only using Liquid files for the Agency Theme and the Coming Soon Theme as well. So, these are themes that currently only use Liquid files. And because of that, we can remove the AddRazorSupportForMvc tags from these themes. News from the community How to migrate an Orchard 1 application to Orchard Core You may have heard about the news that we migrated from our old Orchard 1 website to Orchard Core and modernized our site's look. Our new site turned out great, and we are very happy with it. It represents who we are and what we do as a company. We hope you like it too! For our case study on building the renewed Lombiq.com, including migrating it from Orchard 1, check out How We Renewed and Migrated lombiq.com from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core in the Lombiq blog, and check out this announcement in this video. If you are also planning to migrate your Orchard 1 website to Orchard Core, and want to read more details about how you could start to migrate your website and content, search no more, we have published a detailed article on Orchard Dojo with some samples as well about how you could start and enjoy the numerous remarkable benefits by migrating to Orchard Core. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 491 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 stereotype as a filter for the contents UI, Updated Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions - This week in Orchard (30/06/2023)

Add stereotype as a filter for the contents UI, fix OpenID Configuration initialization and our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution is updated to Orchard Core 1.6! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add stereotype as a filter for the contents UI In some cases, we want to create a menu item that would allow the user to manage content items of a specific stereotype. Currently, we only support single content the type but not the stereotype. The goal of this change was to add a query parameter stereotype that would allow us to manage only content items that share the same given stereotype. To try this out, we have to have some content where the stereotype is defined. We will go the lazy way and edit the existing content definitions of the built-in content types defined by the Blog recipe. We can do that under Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types. We edited the definition of the Blog and the Article content type and set the stereotype value to Test. Now to be able to filter all the content items with the Test stereotype, let's navigate to Content -> Content Items and add the following query string to the URL: stereotype=Test, so the full URL in our case will be the following https://localhost:44300/Admin/Contents/ContentItems?stereotype=Test&admin=-327987887 And as you can see, Orchard Core shows us the content items of the content types where we set the stereotype to "Test". You can read more about this feature in the release notes of the 1.7 release of Orchard Core. Fix OpenId Configuration initialization When using the OpenId Server feature along with OpenId Validation and using a custom Authority value, the following exception was thrown: InvalidOperationException: The issuer attached to the static configuration must be the same as the one configured in the validation options. You can reproduce the issue by following these steps: Enable the OpenId Server and the Validation features. Set a new value in the Authority settings in server settings. The site becomes useless, and you'll get the above exception. And as you can see, the fix for this issue is quite interesting. But why would it work by applying these changes? Well, it's due to the fact the issuer comes from potentially multiple places: - The issuer configured in the validation options (options.Issuer).- The issuer attached to a static configuration (options.Configuration.Issuer).- The issuer attached to a dynamic configuration, retrieved using OIDC discovery (accessed via options.ConfigurationManager). Recent versions of OpenIddict use options.Issuer as the source of truth and now require that the issuer attached to a static configuration - which is the case when you target a "local" server - match the global value, options.Issuer. News from the community Updated Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions This is an Orchard Core Visual Studio solution that contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries. Please keep in mind that only those extensions included that use the latest released version of Orchard (i.e., the very cutting-edge ones depending on a nightly build are not yet here). And now, this solution has been updated to the latest and greatest 1.6 Orchard Core version. Check them out here, and install them from NuGet or from the source! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 468 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core is in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, Top-level Multi-Tenancy menu - This week in Orchard (09/06/2023)

New top-level Multi-Tenancy menu; adding docs about Common Part; and Orchard Core is now listed in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add top-level Multi-Tenancy menu Let's say you have an Orchard Core site where you already enabled the Tenants and the Tenant Feature Profiles features. By doing that you will have a set of functionalities that provides you with a way to manage tenants and their available features from the admin. These features are all related to multi-tenancy, related to tenants, and not to the other settings of the site where you can execute recipes, manage features or admin menus, and so on. So, this addition is about adding a new top-level menu called Multi-Tenancy and moving Tenants and Feature Profiles under the Multi-Tenancy menu. Add Common Part docs If you are not a newcomer to Orchard Core, you may know that the Common Part gives you the basics, like the owner and date-created fields. But in the past few days, someone asked a question on Twitter about how to do something, and the solution for the problem is to use the Common Part, which has some options that you can set to display the owner and the creation time, and so on. From now on, the Orchard Core Documentation site will contain a few lines about the Common Part. Orchard Core is in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog The Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog was built on Red Hat platforms and technologies with certified, enterprise-grade products you need to achieve your business outcomes. The developers of this catalog make it easy for you to explore and find certified products from this ample and robust ecosystem of enterprise hardware, software, and cloud and service providers. So, this is a catalog of software that is placed along their platforms. If you go there, you will find a lot of stuff here, but for .NET developers, there isn't much familiar here. These are like lower-level hosting/cloud/server-management applications mostly. There are some blogs and CMS systems, and the goal was to include Orchard Core in this catalog. Orchard should be compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux at least, and well, if we have it here, that's one more channel people can find Orchard. And that was the purpose of this GitHub issue, to improve Orchard's visibility in a circle where it's probably unknown, outside of the .NET community. And now we have Orchard Core listed in this catalog! And we also have a new page on the Orchard Core Documentation site about how you can manage the Orchard Core Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog certification! And if you would like to know more about this topic, check out this part of the community meeting! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 465 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 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!

Admin Dashboard improvements, Two-factor Authentication - This week in Orchard (26/05/2023)

Check out our current post to read about the latest Admin Dashboard improvements and to see a demo about supporting two-factor authentication in Orchard Core! And don't forget that Orchard Harvest is just right around the corner! Orchard Core updates Show Admin Dashboard shape when Access Admin Dashboard permission is not granted Currently, when the Admin Dashboard feature is enabled, the /admin route is handled by the Index action in the DashboardController controller. This works great when the user has the Access Admin Dashboard permission. However, when they don't, they get the generic forbid error message. In some cases, we don't want to give the user access to the admin widgets but want them to still access the admin dashboard. In this case, they will not be able to see the dashboard unless they type the exact path they want to access in the browser. The solution here was the following: If the user does not have Access Admin Dashboard permission, instead of showing 401, we now render the AdminDashboard shape. When a Dashboard Widget is secured, we check the permission to ensure the user is able to view it before rendering it. This will give us the ability to control who gets to see which widget. To test this out, first of all, we need to enable the Admin Dashboard feature. After that, we modify the permissions of the Editor role by saying users with this role have no permission to access the Admin Dashboard. After that, we added an Html Dashboard Widget to be able to see something instead of the empty dashboard. On the left side of the screen, you can see what the admin user can see. They have the Access Admin Dashboard permission, and the previously created Html Dashboard Widget is visible to them. However, on the right side of the screen, we logged in with a user who has the Editor role. As you can see, Orchard renders the "Welcome to Orchard Core" alert to them, but they can't see the Dashboard Widget or the Dashboard itself. Do not auto-create a dummy content item when the Admin Dashboard feature is enabled When the Admin Dashboard feature is enabled for the first time, for some reason, we create a dummy dashboard item. There is no way to avoid this for new tenants currently. Maybe adding a content item by default is not a good idea because the admin will almost always have to remove it. This change is about removing the sample Orchard Core Admin Widget from the recipe. But if you are curious about this sample widget, you can still use it. If you navigate to Configuration -> Recipes you will find a recipe called Admin Dashboard Widget Sample. And if you execute this recipe, you will be able to see the sample widget in the dashboard again. And this change was also added to the change logs of the next upcoming release to notify everyone about this change. Demos Two-factor Authentication Now you can have new settings that allow you to enable two-factor authentication. To see how this works, navigate to Security -> Settings -> User Login, where you can see a new tab, called Two-factor Authentication. If you put a tick into the Enable two-factor authentication checkbox, you will see the related settings. You can enable 2FA for everyone, you can enable 2FA for users with specific roles, or you can say to remember the client, so you don't have to keep typing the code every single time on the same computer. The Show email address in the authenticator app allows you to display the email address on the authentication app, otherwise, we will show your username. And the Require two-factor authentication option allows you to force authentication. If you log in, you will be forced to use 2FA. Right now, let's enable 2FA just for the users with the Administrator role. This means you will have a new option in the dropdown menu if you click on the user icon in the top-right corner called Security. Here, you can set up your authenticator app by clicking on the Add authenticator app button. Here you can set up your authenticator app by following the steps mentioned. Pull up your phone, open up the authenticator app, scan the QR code, and provide the verification code. On the next screen, you can see your recovery codes which you can use to log in in case you lose your device. But of course, you can reset your recovery codes and also the authenticator app itself under the Security dropdown menu. Now if we log out and log back in, Orchard Core will ask us to provide that code after we typed the correct username and password. And as always, if you would like to know more about this feature (which you can try out right now if you are using the nightly builds of Orchard Core) head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Harvest Online Program As many of you know, we have been working hard over the past months to organize the next Orchard Harvest in Las Vegas after the last Harvest in 2017. Unfortunately, based on the current economic situation and personal feedback, Las Vegas won’t work this year. Not to mention that unfortunately Microsoft Build, announced after we decided on our dates, also falls in line with the original dates we chose. So, a date change was also necessary. However, we did not want to let go of this opportunity to meet completely. Therefore, we are pleased to inform you that we will be holding our first online Orchard Harvest starting on the 31st of May at 13:00 UTC. Start your registration for the event right now. You can find the program of the conference on the official site of Orchard Core. See you next week! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 462 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 Program, Tenant Clusters - This week in Orchard (19/05/2023)

Allow displaying an icon for Custom Settings, add Admin Culture Picker docs, demo about Tenant Clusters, and most importantly, the program of the Orchard Harvest is now available! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Allow displaying an icon for Custom Settings You can create a setting using Custom Settings and set the item icon in the menu that came with it. It wasn't really possible before this change because the .Id(type.Name.HtmlClassify()) and .AddClass(type.Name.HtmlClassify()) weren't applied in the AdminMenu of the CustomSettings module meaning it was not possible to override this menu item with a shape named NavigationItemText-NAME_OF_SETTINGS.Id. From now on, the CustomSettings module allows us to set the icon of the newly added menu item. Add Admin Culture Picker docs A few weeks ago, we mentioned that you have the option to add an admin culture picker for the admin site and have a dropdown in the admin panel header to switch languages. And of course, when adding new features to Orchard Core, we always keep in mind the flexibility and the reusability that Orchard Core can provide to the developers. Meaning, you can override and customize the shapes which are responsible to display the admin culture picker. Now we have some lines in the documentation about the two shapes that are responsible for displaying the admin culture. Demos Tenant Clusters This demo is about a work-in-progress feature for Orchard Core that distributes requests across tenant clusters using Microsoft Yarp.ReverseProxy. If you check out the following recording, you can easily get up to speed with the current state of this upcoming feature. Here we want to highlight some of the more exciting parts of this addition: We first use the Yarp Configuration to define Routes and Clusters with many options. Each Route is tied to a Cluster composed of Destination(s) on which load balancing can be applied. We only need one catch-all RouteTemplate and multiple Clusters on which we can configure a custom SlotRange[min, max] property (up to 16384 slots). Each tenant has a unique slot hash, so a unique Slot then belongs to the Cluster having the slot in its SlotRange. The Cluster can have multiple Destination(s). We could have used a Cluster having Nodes, but we follow the Yarp Config having a Clusters list of Cluster type. The same application can run as a proxy or behind it (we check the headers), the advantage with our distributed services is when as a proxy we are still aware of all tenant's data. So, on a request, we can use the same RunningShellTable to know the tenant, then select the right Cluster based on the tenant slot hash (in a custom middleware), and let Yarp selects one of its Destination(s). To compute a tenant slot hash, we use the CRC-16/XMODEM algorithm (same as Redis uses for clustering keys) applied on the new TenantId property, which allows us to automatically spread out new tenants on the slots and then on the configured Clusters. This knowing that the CRC-16 is fast to compute and always returns the same number for the same TenantId, so a tenant stays on the same Cluster. News from the community Orchard Harvest Online Program As many of you know, we have been working hard over the past months to organize the next Orchard Harvest in Las Vegas after the last Harvest in 2017. Unfortunately, based on the current economic situation and personal feedback, Las Vegas won’t work this year. Not to mention that unfortunately Microsoft Build, announced after we decided on our dates, also falls in line with the original dates we chose. So, a date change was also necessary. However, we did not want to let go of this opportunity to meet completely. Therefore, we are pleased to inform you that we will be holding our first online Orchard Harvest starting on the 31st of May at 13:00 UTC. You can start your registration for the event right now. And in the meantime, the program of the conference is available on the official site of Orchard Core! Please welcome the below selection of awesome talks by community members! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 458 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core goes to Oxford, fake video capture source in Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - This week in Orchard (28/04/2023)

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