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

Mastering Lucene Query Syntax in Orchard Core, How to quickly spin off your Orchard Core site? - This week in Orchard (12/06/2026)

Have you heard that we rebuilt DotNest.com using reusable landing page sections, Tailwind 4 without Node.js, and AI-assisted workflows?

Nick Jackson demos an Electron desktop app that lets you spin up Orchard sites fast! Choose your modules and themes, manage recipes, all without touching an IDE.

Sébastien Ros introduced support for async JS evaluation using Jint's new async method, enabling workflows and other JS-dependent features to run without blocking.

We're excited to open registration for Orchard Harvest 2026! Secure your spot today for the early bird pricing and get ready to level up your skills!

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Support Mail Proxy, open-source Lombiq projects published on NuGet - This week in Orchard (10/03/2022)

Topics for the week are the new mail proxy support, documentation about how to use a local copy of Orchard Core source code as NuGet packages, and the published Lombiq projects on NuGet! Do you want to know more? Then check out our post now! Orchard Core updates Support Mail Proxy Let's say that your web hosting provider doesn't allow outbound connections by default (IONOS Windows Shared). In this case, all outbound connections should be sent through a proxy on this platform. You can configure it for HTTP(S) by adding this in the Startup.cs of the Orchard Core web app: HttpClient.DefaultProxy = new WebProxy("http://winproxy.server.lan:3128"); However, there was no way to configure this for SMTP connections. So there was an issue about not being able to send a mail with Orchard on this hosting provider. But from now you can configure the proxy server and the proxy port number by enabling the OrchardCore.Email module and using the SMTP Settings. The documentation is also updated with these new settings. Using a local copy of Orchard Core source code as NuGet packages There is a new page in the Orchard Core Documentation about how to use a local copy of Orchard Core source code as NuGet packages. In this new article, you can see how to create your own local NuGet feed from your local source code, how to publish to your NuGet feed, and how to update your project to use the newly created feed. News from the community Configure portable object localization in ASP.NET Core There was an ASP.NET Community Standup about localizing the .NET website. There was a topic on how the .NET websites have been localized using the Orchard Core localization package with PO files. Sébastien Ros did a demo about the package, explained how the localizer works, how to inject it, how to use the module, how to create a PO file, how to use pluralization, etc. If you would like to know more about localization and haven't seen that demo yet, check out the recording of that standup meeting here! And in the meantime, now there is a new article on the Microsoft Technical Documentation where you can read more about what is a PO file, how to configure PO file support in ASP.NET Core, or how to create a PO file with several useful examples. Open-source Lombiq projects now published on NuGet We have more than 160 open-source repositories under our GitHub organization, out of which more than 140 are somehow related to Orchard (including Orchard Core and 1.x). Up until now, if you wanted to utilize our projects in your own ones, you could only reference them as Git submodules or copy over the source files. Now, however, all the Orchard Core-related projects of ours, as well as several others, are available as NuGet packages! Check out our blog post to know more about our NuGet packages! Do you want to easily publish your projects to NuGet as well? You can build on what we've created for that: Take a look at our new GitHub Actions project that we developed with the help of Orchard community member Dean Marcussen. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 238 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Monaco editor supports preview, Vue.js Single File Components in Lombiq Vue.js module - This week in Orchard (25/02/2022)

This week you can read about updating the Monaco editor to support preview, improving the documentation of Orchard Core, search form improvements, and a demo about using Vue.js Single File Components in Lombiq Vue.js module for Orchard Core! Are you interested in the details? Check out this post for more! Orchard Core updates Make the Monaco editor Field support preview Now the Monaco editor Field correctly supports the content preview feature on every change. To test this out, you just need to have a content type with a Text Field attached. Don't forget to set the editor type to Monaco editor for that field. Documentation improvements The documentation of Orchard Core has been improved. Documentation for the Audit Trail, SEO Meta, Deployment, Remote Deployment, Redis modules have been added, and there were some missing Orchard Core Demo YouTube videos that are now embedded into the corresponding page of the documentation. Search Form: allow to override Index used Let's say you have a content type, called Blog. Inside that, there are a lot of blog posts, and there is a need to search inside of that content type of Blog. The question is, how can you limit the full-text search based on that content type? Well, from now there is a new feature that allows passing a QueryString param in the search form page to override the current default Index used for displaying results. This can also be set as a hidden form input fixed value if used from a different form. These Indices are protected by permissions, so it should be fine to allow to do this, instead of needing to create a different controller per index required to be searched from. You can use this in the following way: /search?Terms=moon&Index=BlogIndex Demos Vue.js Single File Components in Lombiq Vue.js module for Orchard Core The Lombiq Vue.js module for Orchard Core is an Orchard Core module, that contains Vue.js and commonly used Vue.js components to be used in other Vue.js apps as dependencies. Provides extensibility to create Vue.js component templates as Orchard Core shapes making them able to override in themes or modules. And from now, you have the option to use Vue.js Single File Components! The module identifies Single File Components in the Assets/Scripts/VueComponents directory and harvests them as shapes. They have a custom .vue file renderer that displays the content of the <template> element after applying localization for the custom [[ ... ]] expression that calls IStringLocalizer. Besides that, it's pure Vue, yet you can still make use of shape overriding if needed. You can read more about it in the module's readme file. Now it's time to see it in action! You will find a Lombiq.VueJs.Samples project in the repository that contains some Vue files. The module now supports these special files (where you can put the template and the script in the same file) and harvest these as shapes. If you open up the demo-sfc.vue file, you can see one unique solution for localization. As we mentioned, by using the [[ ... ]] syntax, you can perform localization via IStringLocalizer at runtime. Let's run the Vue.js Single File Component sample in the Lombiq.VueJs.Samples module! As you can see, this sample is about providing a table with some data and a pager that you can use to navigate between the pages of the table with the help of the Single File Components. And we are just scratching the surface here! If you would like to know more about using Vue.js Single File Components with the help of the Lombiq Vue.js module, check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 237 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!

Fix route ChangePasswordConfirmation, Fluid 2.2.14 - This week in Orchard (09/02/2022)

New custom path for the ChangePasswordConfirmation, Fluid 2.2.14 with several fixes and improvements, Orchard Core on the ASP.NET Community Standup are the topics of this week. Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Fix route ChangePasswordConfirmation The idea is that now there is a custom route for the ChangePasswordConfirmation instead of using the generic one. So, the action OrchardCore.Users.Controllers.ChangePasswordConfirmation() is now mapped to /ChangePasswordConfirmation, because that action was mapped to /OrchardCore.Users/ChangePasswordConfirmation. And the documentation of Orchard Core has been also updated with this new custom path. Fluid 2.2.14 Fluid 2.2.14 has been released with several fixes and improvements. Let's see some of the changes here! The first one is about displaying the source of an error message. Now, if there is a parser error, it will tell you the location of the error (line and column) but it will also show the line with the error. And this way it's easier to understand where the issue is. And if you have multiple templates, for instance, then you don't have to guess what template contains the error because you can see the error directly. Now FluidParserOptions can be configured by using Fluid.MvcViewEngine. This introduces a small set of further changes to support the recent work allowing for FunctionValues. Update to FluidViewParser constructor to pass FluidParserOptions argument. Update to sample projects to use the new constructor. The next improvement is to fix some keyword conflicts. Someone finds an issue in Orchard is that if you have a variable that is named emptyThing, the parser would find that you mean the empty keyword and will fail saying what is this Thing after the empty? And it's the same for blank, true and false. So, if you have variable names starting with empty, you can have them now, this is what this PR is fixing. And another one is to implement offset continue. Now you can assign a range directly to a variable with this version. Before you could not. The second thing is that you can do offset with the keyword continue. So, in this case, continue is a keyword and what happens is that it will do another loop starting from where the previous loop stopped. So here, if you say limit: 2, it will start from the 4th item. And you can also pass another limit if you want. So, here the idea is that we loop for three items in the array, and then we loop again for the rest and display all the items. News from the community ASP.NET Community Standup - PO (portable object) localization with Orchard Core There was an ASP.NET Community Standup about localizing the .NET website. The topics were how the .NET websites have been localized using the Orchard Core localization package with PO files. Sébastien Ros did a demo about the package, explained how the localizer works, how to inject it, how to use the module, how to create a PO file, how to use pluralization, etc. If you would like to know more about localization, check out the recording of that standup meeting here! DotNest Core is on Orchard Core 1.2.2 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. And now the DotNest Core sites run on Orchard Core 1.2.2! Do you want to have a hassle-free Orchard site running in the cloud? Then sign up for the beta here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 239 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!

Orchard Core 1.2.2 release, Media search indexing - This week in Orchard (26/01/2022)

Orchard Core 1.2.2 is now available that addresses some other security issues. Check out this post to know the content of this release of Orchard Core and to see the latest features of the framework! Orchard Core updates Media search indexing The idea here was to allow to search for content in files. Last summer, you could see a demo in this This week in Orchard post that shows a feature that provides a simple implementation to index media for search. More precisely, it indexes media files related to content items, so said content items will turn up in search when one of their media files matches the search query. And now this feature is merged to the main branch of Orchard Core! Check out the updated documentation to know more! Remove multiple compilation paths on MediaTokenService From the next minor version, Orchard Core will only build with .NET 6.0, so we can remove all the things from the code that do not target .NET 6.0 specifically. This time the ParseQuery method of the MediaTokenService got simpler because now we don't need to use the slower version, we can use the fast version with structs now. Add response to SmtpResult When you send an SMTP request, the response can be read, and now you can do whatever you want with the response. We already know if it failed or not from the SmtpResult, but now there is even more information in the Response. News from the community Orchard Core 1.2.2 release Orchard Core 1.2.1 has been released a few days after the 1.2.0 one, and here comes 1.2.2 to address some other security issues. If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Don't forget that 1.2.x is the latest minor version of Orchard Core that can be built by .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5. If you take the main branch, it will only build with .NET 6.0, and the upcoming versions will be only shipped with .NET 6.0. .NET 6.0 is an LTS and shipped for many months now with some security updates already. It will also make the local builds with Visual Studio faster, the CI is faster because it doesn't have to build everything three times and run the tests three times. Now let's see the fix that is in this release! If you have a Link Field, you can provide a URL to that field, and the URL is now sanitized. Before this change, you could pass some JavaScript in the URL. With that what we are doing is checking the link that we are generating is sanitized. This issue was also in the Menu Item Link Field and also in the HTML Menu Item Link Field, so everywhere where we pass a link. Another fix was in the AuditTrailContentController.cs to be consistent with the other fixes. Error messages can't contain HTML and the issue that the _notifier.WarningAsync is asking for a LocalizedHtmlString. Why is it asking for a LocalizedHtmlString? It's because WarningAsync expects a LocalizedString using H[""]. In this case, the goal was to render an error message as a notification. But the error message is a string. So the developer decided to wrap the error message into a LocalizedHtmlString and pass it. And by doing that we say this is a safe string, this is already encoded, so it can be used in a view. This is what the H[""] does. So, everything here is safe. So, it can be passed as a LocalizedHtmlString. We are lucky that the error message is safe because internally it's a static string. But we don't do that, because it could be like some other developers will copy this code without understanding that this is safe or not. So, let's assume that it's not safe, and you shouldn't pass it as a LocalizedHtmlString, because that will prevent the notifier from encoding the result. The fix here is to pass the error message as an argument and because it's passed as an argument it will be encoded. So, this is how we pass a LocalizedHtmlString to a notifier from an unknown string safely. We can just pass it as an argument. And if you would like to know more about the fixed security issues, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! Looking for some useful Orchard Core extensions that can help improve your Orchard Core 1.2.2 application faster and easier? 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 1.2.2! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 240 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!

Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - Orchard Core Features tests, disable File Content Definition feature by default - This week in Orchard (10/12/2021)

The HTTP Response Task now supports the text/html content type, disables the File Content Definition feature by default, prevents confusing usage of IRunningShellTable.Match(HttpContext) and demo about the Orchard Core Features tests in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox. Do you want to know more? Then don't forget to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates HTTP Response Task supports "text/html" content type If you are using Workflows in your solution, you have the option to use the HTTP Response task, which writes an HTTP response (to use that task, you need to enable the HTTP Workflows Activities feature). If you are in the editor of your Workflow, you just need to click on the Add Task button and select the HTTP Response from the HTTP category. From now, you will see a new text/html content-type option of the response body, which allows workflow submissions to return web content directly. Don't enable the File Content Definition feature by default in the built-in themes From now the File Content Definition feature will not be enabled by default. This feature is replacing the default behavior to store content type definitions in the database with one that stores the content type definitions in a file in the App_Data folder. Most users prefer to store the content type definitions in the database by default. You can still enable this feature if you prefer your content definitions to be file-based, for instance, if you want them in your source control management. But by default, they will be in the database from now. If you have a distributed theme or site, then you might want it to be in the database by default. And the change is just to remove the feature from the recipes. The corresponding page on the Orchard Core documentation is also updated to inform everybody about the changes. Prevent confusing usage of IRunningShellTable.Match(HttpContext) You could use this extension method with an HttpContext, but it didn't actually work anywhere where you can do it from a module. So, from now this RunningShellTableExtensions is an internal class, because as you can see from the comment there: not public because it wouldn't match tenants with an URL prefix later in the request pipeline. Mostly to be used from ModularTenantContainerMiddleware. Demos Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - Orchard Core Features tests The Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox is a web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. UI Testing here is an automation that clicks through the web application in a browser. One of the most popular frameworks for that is Selenium, which does exactly that. You get an API to instruct a browser, and every major browser is supported. This UI Testing Toolbox provides a lot of features on top of Selenium for Orchard Core. Basically, allowing you to UI test an Orchard Core application in a safe and parallelized way providing a lot of helpers, a lot of higher-level APIs allowing you to test your application with SQLite, with SQL Server with local media storage, or with Azure Blob Storage. And you can have a test e-mail sending with a local SMTP server too. Everything just works. Check out the highlights of the Readme.md file of this repository to see all of the features and this older This week in Orchard post where you could see a demo about the Toolbox. This time we will focus on the Orchard Core Features tests. The idea here is that you have an Orchard Core application, and you want to do some basic smoke testing, like trial the application whether it works at its very basics. Now, for that, we have created a TestBasicOrchardFeatures extension method, which will run through a couple of tests that you can run individually. For example, testing whether the setup works, testing whether the registration works, testing whether the login works, and so on. All of these are features of Orchard Core itself, so not your custom application, but these are also all things that you can break from your custom code. So, we figured that it's useful to check whether these basic Orchard features work all the time. And for example, if you manage to break set up with your recipe or if you manage to break the login or the registration features from your code like even implementing an event handler that throws an exception, well then these tests should catch them. Do you want to see these tests in action? Well, in that case, you just have to click on the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 235 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!

Fix Liquid QueryCollection access, renaming page route parameter - This week in Orchard (04/12/2021)

Fixed Liquid QueryCollection access, an interesting bug when using the page route in Razor Pages, and updated libraries used in Orchard Core. Check out our current post to read about the details! Orchard Core updates Pager used the reserved "page" route parameter The bug only happens if you are using Razor Pages at least one razor @page. In that case when you list the items of a given content type e.g. /Admin/Contents/ContentItems/Article?admin=674211458, the Pager links, in place of using our custom pattern /Admin/Contents/ContentItems/Article?admin=674211458&page=2, they use the default pattern where the content type is a query string parameter /Admin/OC.Contents/Admin/List?contentTypeId=Article&admin=...&page=2. At this point, you can still go to a given Pager page. But then if you select a new filter option it removes the above query string contentTypeId parameter e.g. /Admin/Contents/ContentItems?q=status%3APublished. So in place of still listing the items of a specific content type, you go to the list of all content types in place of staying in the list of a specific type. Removing the contentTypeId parameter is another issue filtering should preserve the existing parameters, but here we're only talking about the fact that the Pager links don't use the right custom pattern if at least a Razor @page is defined. This is because the Pager uses a page route parameter to generate link URLs, but this is a reserved ASP .NET Core routing name. The solution is to remove this route value in the ActionLink shape before generating an URL and then explicitly add it as a query string parameter. Currently, as a workaround, there is a custom IShapeTableProvider. So in one sentence, you are not allowed to use page in routes because it's a reserved word because of Razor Pages. And now it has been changed to pagenum everywhere. Fixed Liquid QueryCollection access Let's set up your site using the Agency recipe. That recipe contains a template for the Landing Page content type where we can test the Request.Query Liquid filter easily. If you check out line 19 of this template, you can see that we are using the Request.Query Liquid filter to say, give me the value of the test field from the query string. But how can you use this one? The helper is just about to print the value of the query string by the given field. So, if we open up the predefined Landing Page content item and put something in the query string using the test, you will see the printed value on the page. It's an IQueryCollection whose underlying type is a QueryCollectionInternal, but we only allow access to QueryCollection. Jean-Thierry Kéchichian fixed it by creating a QueryCollection. Updated libraries We have this Libraries page in the Orchard Core documentation that lists the different .NET libraries, the different Client-side libraries, and the different Tests libraries used in Orchard Core. In Orchard Core, the community always tries to use the latest versions of these libraries to make sure you will always get the latest bug fixes and the latest features provided by these libraries. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 233 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!

Lombiq Privacy for Orchard Core, Target .NET 6 by default - This week in Orchard (19/11/2021)

New guide to the document, new asset_url Shortcode, targeting .NET 6 by default, and demo about the Lombiq Privacy module for Orchard Core. Do you want to know more? Then don't forget to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates Add [asset_url] shortcode The new asset_url Shortcode can be used to render the image URL only. Let's see a short example for this one. We have a site set up with the Blog recipe, and we decided to create a new blog post. The blog post content type has a MarkDownPart attached that supports using Shortcodes. You can type the [asset_url][/asset_url] by yourself, or just easily click on the Insert Shortcode icon and find the asset_url one in the Media category. Make sure you have some content in your Media Library and enter the file name of the asset. We have an Orchard Core logo at the root of the Media Library with the file name orchard-core-symbol-logo-color.png, so let's use that one.As you can see, if we provide the file name, the asset_url returns the relative URL from the site's media library. You can see we have a tenant here with the name blog1 and the file is in the root folder of the media library. If you would like to know more, head to this page of the Orchard Core documentation, where you can read about the parameters that you can use with this Shortcode. New how-to guide: creating the pieces needed to query content based on assigned taxonomies If you head to this page on the Orchard Core documentation, you will find a new guide for creating a query that allows searching across multiple assigned taxonomies. At the end of the guide, you will have the pieces needed to search through blogs to find only the ones with specific tags assigned. Target .NET 6 by default .NET 6 was released on the 8th of November and the community already updated Orchard Core to use .NET 6 by default. So, the main branch targets .NET 6 by default which means if you clone that branch, you will need to have the .NET 6 SDK. If you go to dotnet.microsoft.com, you can easily download the latest SDK. Orchard Core now also builds and runs the tests using .NET 6. The targets are defined in the CommonTargetFrameworks of the Dependencies.AspNetCore.props file, where you will see .NET 6, .NET 5 and .NET Core 3.1. By default, if you open Visual Studio, it will target .NET 6, but when you build on the command line, you can define which target you want. So, if you want to publish a self-contained, you can do --framework and provide the framework you want or change the value of the DefaultTargetFramework property. The same applies to the Docker deployments. And one reminder: if you are using Visual Studio and want to use .NET 6, you will need to download Visual Studio 2022 because Visual Studio 2019 has no support for .NET 6. Demos Lombiq Privacy for Orchard Core The Lombiq Privacy for Orchard Core is an Orchard Core module containing features related to data protection/privacy and the EU law on it, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In this demo, we will go with the quicker way and use our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution that contains that module. 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 -> Features, enable the following features: Lombiq Privacy - Consent banner that adds the ability to show a privacy consent banner. Lombiq Privacy - Form consent that provides the Privacy Consent Checkbox widget that can be used on any form. Lombiq Privacy - Registration consent that adds a privacy consent checkbox to the registration form. Now, if you navigate to Configuration -> Settings, you will find three new options there: Privacy Consent Banner Settings, Privacy Consent Checkbox Settings, and Privacy Registration Consent Settings. If you click on the Privacy Consent Banner Settings, you will find a simple editor with Liquid support, where you can set the content of the consent banner. By using the consent banner feature, users can accept the privacy policy. If the user is unauthenticated, they can use the banner to accept or reject the privacy statement, their decision will be stored in a cookie by the browser. If the user is authenticated, their only option is to accept the privacy policy via the banner. This is so because it is assumed that during registration, they already accepted a suitable privacy policy, it's just that the Lombiq Privacy module or something similar wasn't used at the time. Another new option here is the Privacy Registration Consent Checkbox Settings. The Registration Consent Feature shows a privacy consent checkbox on the registration form that needs to be checked by the users to be able to register. After registration, the user's consent is stored in the PrivacyConsent section of the user's properties. Here you can define the label of the checkbox. And the last one is the Form Consent Feature which adds a new Privacy Consent Checkbox widget content type that can be added to forms with the Forms module. In this case, users must accept the privacy policy before they can post content to the site. You can validate the consent with the Validate Privacy Consent Checkbox workflow activity. The way of how to do it can be seen in this Contact Form submitted workflow. When we get an incoming POST request, we check the validity of the Privacy Consent Checkbox, and based on the result, we redirect the user to different URLs. And if you check out the editor of the Page content type which has a Flow Part attached, you can see we added a Form widget there, and inside the Form, we placed our Privacy Consent Checkbox widget. And as usual, if you would like to know more about this new module, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 231 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!

Orchard Core 1.1 release, Dynamic style Content Field - This week in Orchard (28/10/2021)

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 1.1 is now available! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core and see a demo about a great third-party Orchard Core module that provides a dynamic styling content field for Orchard Core! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Add Media background checkerboard pattern for transparent images Let's say that you have a site set up with the Blog recipe and you want to change the Banner Image of the predefined blog post. It's a possible scenario that you upload a PNG or a GIF file that has transparency. But the transparency of the selected image couldn't be easily seen because the admin theme has no support to show that the given image has a transparent background. To fix this issue, now you will have a background checkerboard to easily see the transparent parts of the image, that works in dark mode too. Here you can see that we uploaded and selected an Orchard Core logo that has a transparent background. Add Total support for Lucene API queries The change is just to return whatever the query object is returned from the query API, and it might contain more than what the interface exposes, which is just the items. For instance, Lucene can return the number, the total items. SQL won't do that because that's too costly. Demos Dynamic style Content Field The ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.Styles module provides a dynamic styling Content Field for Orchard Core. The repository contains a sample project which includes custom configurations for the CKEditor toolbar. In this demo, we will clone the mentioned repository and run the solution inside. Set up your site using the Styles sample recipe that allows you to set up your site with additional pre-configured options, features, and settings out of the box. First of all, let's navigate to Design -> Style Schemas. A style schema defines how the Styles field will be edited, and which components will be available. Open up the one called H2 Color. As you can see here, we defined a component schema. At its most basic a schema entry must contain a reference to a Vuejs component and the description of how to render its entry as CSS. The renderer can be either a renderer name, e.g., "renderer": "CssSizeEntry" or a LiquidJS template for more complex schemas. Here the template says that set the color of the h2 tags to the #8bc34a hex value. Before moving forward, let's check out the content definition of the Style Guide content type that comes from the Styles sample recipe as well (Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types -> Style Guide). As you may notice, this content type has three Style fields attached. Now let's focus on the one with the display name Heading 2. Every Style field can have a selected style schema (H2 Color in this case), or you can select the Custom schema option from the drop-down to say I don't want to use a given style schema, I would like to define the schema here for this Style field. Now check out the predefined Style Guide content item. As you can see here, we have an h2 tag with the heading 2 text. And because we attached the H2 Color style schema with the Heading 2 Style field, when we render the content of this content item, the color of the text inside the h2 tag will be using the #8bc34a hex value. You can find other style schemas on the site, like the Css Variables one. Here you can see a range of CSS vars for the site. The BorderRadius adds rounded corners to the given elements. Here you can see we defined the value of the radius using rem. If you scroll back to the Style Guide content item, you will see that here we defined a my-sites-button class with a border value. The border-radius: var(--border-radius); means to use the defined BorderRadius value from a style schema. And here, you can see the usage of other variables from the style schemas like the button-background-color-hex, where you can easily say button-background-color-rgb as well if you defined the rgb value too. Here button is the name of the component, background-color is the name of the schema with a predefined hex and rgb colors. Now, if you open up the Style Guide content item, you will see something like this. Here you can see the color of heading 2, the border-radius of the buttons, and every other style that we defined using style schemas and attached them to our content type by using content fields. If you check out the README.md file of the repository, you will find nice, detailed documentation about the properties that you can use inside the schemas. And as always, you can find a recording about this module on YouTube to see this feature in action! News from the community Orchard Core 1.1 Orchard Core 1.1 is released! If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Upgrade your solution to 1.1 now! Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat or use the Discussions on GitHub and ask questions! Reusable tests in Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox The Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox is a web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. UI Testing here is an automation that clicks through the web application in a browser. One of the most popular frameworks for that is Selenium, which does exactly that. You get an API to instruct a browser, and every major browser is supported. This UI Testing Toolbox provides a lot of features on top of Selenium for Orchard Core. Basically allowing you to UI test an Orchard Core application in a safe and parallelized way providing a lot of helpers, a lot of higher-level APIs allowing you to test your application with SQLite, with SQL Server with local media storage, or with Azure Blob Storage. And you can have a test e-mail sent with a local SMTP server too. Everything just works. Check out the highlights of the Readme.md file of this repository to see all of the features! We had a demo about the UI Testing Toolbox a few weeks ago. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this This week in Orchard post! And the UI Testing Toolbox just got something very useful: Reusable tests to check that basic Orchard Core features work, like login, registration, and content management. Make sure your Orchard app's basics work! Check out the sample here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 231 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!

Fixing rendering of helper and block tag helper, Bynder for Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (21/10/2021)

Fixing rendering of helper and block tag helper, documentation for the Feature Profiles, OpenID improvements, and demo about a module that integrates Bynder for Orchard Core! Don't forget to check out our current post to know more! Orchard Core updates Documentation for Feature Profiles Last week we had a demo about the new Feature Profiles feature. If you haven't seen the demo video about that feature or you haven't read about it yet, you should check out our previous post! In the meantime, the Tenants page of the Orchard Core documentation has a new section that describes everything you need to know to use the Feature Profiles feature. Fixing rendering of helper and block tag helper We had an issue in Orchard Core when using Tag Helpers in Liquid. You can write a tag like a block that will implicitly invoke ASP.NET Tag Helpers and try to map the provided name and properties to the given Tag Helper. In this case, we say to invoke the anchor Tag Helper and with the provided action, class, and route_todoid properties. Here you can see a nice example in the OrchardCore.Demo module to see how you can call an ASP.NET Tag Helper using Liquid. OpenID Recipes: use step model instead of the view model, support update Orchard Core got several updates related to the OpenID feature. The changes in this addition are: Add unit tests for OpenID scopes. Add unit tests for OpenID apps. Replace OpenIdScopeStepViewModel with OpenIdScopeStepModel in recipe. Replace CreateOpenIdApplicationViewModel with OpenIdApplicationStepModel in recipe. Adjust OpenIdScopeStep to support update. Adjust OpenIdApplicationStep to support update. Adjust OpenIdApplicationStep to include importing scopes, which were not imported before. If you check out the code of the OpenIdApplicationStep, (which is a recipe step that adds an OpenID Connect app), you will see that now it's using a new OpenIdApplicationStepModel instead of the CreateOpenIdApplicationViewModel to serialize the data coming from a recipe file. Refactor IQueryResult usage This addition contains several changes: Moving LuceneQueryResults to OrchardCore.Lucene.Abstractions. Moving SqlQueryResult to OrchardCore.Data.Abstractions. Adding OrchardCore.Queries.Abstractions to both these projects to use the IQueryResults interface. This means now, if you would like to use the LuceneQueryResults in your solution, you will find that class in the OrchardCore.Lucene.Abstractions project, under the OrchardCore.Lucene namespace. The old LuceneQueryResults class is marked as obsolete to do not break your code when you will update your solution to the upcoming Orchard Core 1.1. Demos Bynder for Orchard Core This demo is about an Orchard Core module for integrating with the digital asset management platform Bynder. Foremost, it provides the Bynder Field content field that can be added to content parts so Bynder resources can be browsed and attached. But what is Bynder? Bynder’s digital asset management platform enables teams to collaborate in the cloud, get content to market faster, and maximize the impact of marketing assets. It's pretty much a media gallery for bigger companies or for governments used mostly by marketing people. You can upload images and else into Bynder and then everybody from marking will access and use them when publishing materials. If you are interested, you can easily create your 30-day trial here. This module adds a media picker field for Bynder into the Orchard admin. Let's see it in action! In this demo, we will go with a quicker way and use our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution. We just clone the repository of the Bynder module too and add it to this solution. You have to do one thing before using the module. You need to configure your Bynder Portal's URL to be used in all Bynder Fields via the BynderOptions see its definition. It means that you need to add the PortalUrl to the appsettings.json file. Now, let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. After, we need to enable the module. To do that, head to Configuration -> Features and find the one called CSM.Bynder. Let's say that we want to extend the content definition of the Blog Post by adding the Bynder Field to it (Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types -> Blog Post -> Add Field). Now we have the Bynder Field added to the Blog Post content type, let's see what will happen if we would like to edit the predefined blog post! You will find a new button called Browse Bynder. And if you click on that button, you have the ability to browse some images. Here you can see the dialog provided by the Bynder SDK where you can see all of the assets under the specific collection of the given company. The field is currently configured for allowing multiple of these pictures so we will be able to select more than one. And that's not all of it! If you would like to know more about this module developed by Lombiq Technologies, just head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 229 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!

JSON Recipe Deployment Step, Tenant Feature Profiles - This week in Orchard (14/10/2021)

A new extension method to encode redirect URLs, documentation for the image Shortcode, a new JSON Recipe deployment step, and a nice demo about the Tenant Feature Profiles feature! Don't forget to check out our current post to know more! Orchard Core updates JSON Recipe Deployment Step The only way before being able to execute a custom JSON recipe step was to create a file with the recipe inside and execute the recipe. Now it's much easier, you can just paste JSON, and then you have the Monaco IntelliSense inside the editor. To try this out, set up your site using any recipe and make sure you have the Deployment feature enabled (Configuration -> Features). Now head to Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans and add a new deployment plan. Hit the Add Step button to add a new step to it and find the one called JSON Recipe that exports a JSON Recipe. Here we would like to disable the OrchardCore.Templates feature when someone imports this deployment package. If you execute your deployment plan, you will see that the recipe contains one step with the JSON content that we have just provided in the JSON Recipe deployment plan. Document Encode redirect URLs If you publish a content item (a blog post for example) with a permalink that contains non-English characters, the redirect goes to a URL where the non-English characters are encoded. Like /Admin/Contents/ContentItems/Ελληνας-ϰαὶ-δὴ-ϰαὶ-γράμματα and of course we are getting a page not found message. The fix was for that to encode the redirect URLs. It has been merged but after a while, it had to be changed because the EscapeUriString method has been deprecated in .NET 6. and it was not building anymore. It was removed because it was not used correctly by users, and it was apparently buggy. The solution is there is a new custom method in Orchard Core called EscapeLocationHeader because it's a custom escape for the location headers. It's using GetComponents with custom parameters to do that. The idea is that anytime you do a redirect, the server will not accept custom characters because it contains non escaped characters, and it needs to be escaped. But not all of them need to be escaped, just the query strings, the parts that are not like slashes and equals. So, if you are using the this.LocalRedirect(returnUrl, true) or the this.Redirect(returnUrl, true) extension methods, it will use the EscapeLocationHeader method to correctly escape the URL. Demos Tenant Feature Profiles We had a demo a few weeks ago about a feature that 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. This time we will see the final, merged version of this feature that you can check out any time if you clone the main branch of Orchard Core! First of all, set up your site and enable the Tenants and the Tenant Feature Profiles features, which provides a way to manage available features for each tenant. Now head to the new option under Configuration called Tenant Feature Profiles where you can add feature profiles. Here you can set the rules that you want to use. By default, you can have an Include and an Exclude rule. By using these you can easily say that I don't want to allow the given feature for the assigned tenants or I want to allow my custom feature to the given tenants. The Expression contains the name of the feature but it can include stars like OrchardCore.*Templates that will match the OrchardCore.Templates, OrchardCore.AdminTemplates and OrchardCore.ShortCodes.Templates feature as well. Let's say that we don't want to allow the TheAgencyTheme and the features with names to start with OrchardCore. and end with .Templates. Now let's create a tenant with these rules. To do that, navigate to Configuration -> Tenants and hit the Add Tenant button. The first thing that you may notice here is the new Feature Profile dropdown where you can optionally specify which feature profile should be applied to this tenant (as you can read the hint). We have one, called restricted profile, let's select that one. And it's time to set up our tenant to see what are the available features there. If you search for the text templates, you will see that the search returned no results. If you navigate to Design -> Themes and try to find the TheAgency theme, you will see that the theme is not there in the list. Note that the Tenant Feature Profiles feature is only available for the default tenant naturally. And that's not all of that! If you would like to see more, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community .NET Community Standup - What's new in Orchard Core The .NET Community Standups are weekly live shows, hosted by the .NET team, are casual sessions full of community content, demos, Q&A, and discussions around what's happening in .NET. Last week you could see Sébastien Ros showing you the latest improvements and features of Orchard Core. If you are new to Orchard Core or you if are a developer who hasn't worked with Orchard Core in a long time or just wants to see a nice overview about what Orchard Core can provides you with version 1.0, head to YouTube now for the recording! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 228 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!