Fix Bag Part when the content type is deleted, add .webp as a default image extension in MediaOptions, Fluid 2.3.1, and updates about the upcoming Orchard Harvest! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Fix Bag Part when the content type is deleted When you set up your site using the built-in Agency recipe, you will get a content type with a display name Landing Page. This content type has several Bag Parts attached, and by using these Bag Parts you can add several projects, services, team members, etc., to this page which you can use to customize the landing page of your agency. For example, to be able to add services, we have a predefined Service content type. But what will happen if we delete the content definition of the Service content type under Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types? Our Landing Page has a Bag Part that contains Service content items, but now we removed the content definition of that content type. So, if you try to edit the built-in Landing Page content item, you will see the following warnings in the editor (and warning entries in the log file). It means we added three Service content items, but now they have no matching content type definition. Add .webp as a default image extension in MediaOptions Until now, you can't upload .webp images by default. WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters, and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster. So, .webp should be an extension that is allowed by default, like the rest of the allowed image extensions. If you navigate to the MediaOptionsConfiguration class, you will find the .webp extension here as an allowed file extension by default. Fluid 2.3.1 The latest version of Fluid is 2.3.1, which contains a fix for the TimeZone parsing. Meaning when you use a DateTime with a TimeZone, the DateTime that will be created will also parse the TimeZone. If the TimeZone is not defined, then it will assume it's a local time zone based on the configuration. News from the community Orchard Harvest updates In our previous post, we shared the results of the Orchard Harvest survey, and recently we have just posted it to GitHub too. As you can see from this post, the shortlisted locations in Europe are Lisbon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Barcelona. We have also received offers from Las Vegas and possibly Chicago in the USA. The goal of this post is to emphasize that we are not looking for a venue in the first instance, but for an organizer who can manage the venue and help run the whole thing. If you have any contacts in any of these cities who are specifically organizing events, please let us know! Any help is very much appreciated! If you can offer us a contact or location, we will be happy to arrange further details. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 397 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Fixing that FlowPart's widgets are not indexed in Lucene, migrating the OpenID module to OpenIddict 4.0, demo about the new Media Theme, and announcing the results of the Orchard Harvest survey! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Fix FlowPart's widgets were not indexed in Lucene FlowPart's widgets were not indexed with Lucene (even with all the necessary settings on the Parts and Indexes). Marco Serralheiro added a FlowPartIndexHandler that is basically a clone of the BagPartIndexHandler to solve this issue. Migrate the OpenID module to OpenIddict 4.0 This is about updating the OpenID module to use OpenIddict 4.0 RTM, which shipped in December. The previous versions - including OpenIddict 3.x - are no longer supported. While OpenIddict 4.x itself has many internal improvements, the "public" API hasn't changed much so the changes here are mostly cosmetic. If you want to know more about the latest version of OpenIddict, check out this great post from Kévin Chalet! Demos Lombiq Hosting - Media Theme for Orchard Core The Lombiq Hosting - Media Theme for Orchard Core repository contains an open-source project which will allow developers to host their themes in the Orchard Core Media Library, including templates and assets. The inspiration came from our public Orchard (Core) SaaS called DotNest. If you don't know it, you can use this site to sign up and get an Orchard (Core) site with two clicks for everyone. We don't vet who is signing up, so it should be safe, and it should be limited. But still, we want people to be able to have their sites as flexible as possible. And of course, there are a lot of built-in features in Orchard for that, you can do a lot from the admin. Part of the things you can do from the admin as well in a limited fashion is theming. There is the Templates module, if the developer or the operator of the application allows it then you can also upload CSS files and do all kinds of tricks. In the end, you can adjust the styling of your website. But we wanted to have something closer to the usual developer experience. And that is pretty much creating a theme for your DotNest site with the help of Media Theme for a tenant in a Saas, and that's what media theming is about. We have documentation about that here which contains a link to the DotNest Core SDK. This is what we will use in this demo! We also have automatic deployments either from the command line or from a GitHub Actions action if you will. You can fork the SDK or can work with an Orchard Core-based solution and create a theme (it needs to use Liquid). When you are satisfied, you can either create an import package by using the .NET Command line tool or, you can use Orchard Core's remote deployment feature to import the package on your production site. Or you can also use our GitHub Actions to deploy your theme. If you would like to try it out in your own SaaS, feel free, and if you have questions, please let us know! If you would like to have a DotNest site and use this feature, just sign up here! And of course, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube to see the usage of the Media Theme in a site runs in DotNest! News from the community New websites using Orchard Core: the site of Capri Exclusive Homeware and the site of BagPortr Capri's purpose is to provide high-quality homeware to everyone, and BagPortr collects your baggage from your doorstep and checks it onto your flight. Both sites were developed by Gert Smith. If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier, it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Orchard Harvest 2023 survey results For those too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference. The point is that we should really think about organizing the next one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. We created a survey, and now we have the results! Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received a significant number of responses so far which has helped us to get a better idea of the right place and time. We have created a Discussion in GitHub where we described the possible dates and locations of the upcoming conference. Mike Alhayek also reached us saying he may have the right contact needed to facilitate the event in Las Vegas. Thanks, Mike! As we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter too! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 392 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!

Proposal for new extension method ContentElement.OfType, improved documentation of Orchard Core, UI changes and a demo about how to use Pulumi to programmatically create cloud resources and deploy your Orchard Core application! And finally, let's see the breaking news about the next Harvest! Orchard Core updates Make alerts dismissable in TheAdmin theme Now you can click on a little x at the right-top corner of the alert to close it. Note that this improvement is for the TheAdmin theme. Proposal for new extension method ContentElement.OfType You can iterate over all the properties (let's say parts) of a content item and if this part matches the type you want, then it will let you know. This is a little helper to find the part in the content item or a field in a content part if you know the type that you want. And if there are many of them you will get all of them. For this, you can use the OfType extension method in the ContentExtensions.cs file of the OrchardCore.ContentManagement.Abstractions library. Let's say you would like to get all of the attached PricePart of a content item. In this case, you could do something like this: foreach (var pricePart in contentItem.OfType<PricePart>()){ // } Upgrade blob storage library Upgrading blob storage to use the Azure.Storage.Blobs REST API Client v12 because the v11 client has been identified as not thread-safe, and advice from the Azure team is to upgrade to the v12 library. DataProtection continues to use the old library as it has not been upgraded yet but references it transitively, so we don't need to keep a reference to it. Behavior with regard to directories changes with the REST API Client, so to find directories we now need to enumerate the IAsyncEnumerable with a prefix to see if files exist in the hierarchy. Add create a custom admin theme guide Orchard Core documentation has a new guide explaining how you can add and enable a custom admin theme that uses the TheAdmin as a base theme. Rename ContentField display driver files to resemble class names and conform to conventions Notice that the naming of the DisplayDriver files in OrchardCore.ContentFields was inconsistent and in most cases did not reflect the name of the class within. For example, the HtmlFieldDriver is renamed to HtmlFieldDisplayDriver and the TextFieldDriver is renamed to TextFieldDisplayDriver. Rename GetContentItemIdByAliasAsync into GetContentItemIdByHandleAsync There are methods called GetContentItemByAliasAsync and GetContentItemIdByAliasAsync and these expect a string that is an alias. It can be an alias, but it can also be a slug, an ID or whatever you want. It's like get something by a little name. Based on the prefix of the little name we can find the item. Now these methods have a new name called GetContentItemByHandleAsync and GetContentItemIdByHandleAsync. And the previous methods are now marked as obsolete, so, if you are using these methods, next time you will get a warning message when you build the source code. Validate LinkField URL The validator in the LinkField didn't allow you to use anchor links within the URL input. Now it has been fixed and it's accepting a URL with an anchor. Head to the LinkFieldDisplayDriver.cs and check the code of the UpdateAsync method! Add missing Sender SMTP field and add Author expression editor for the EmailTask Based on the specs, we should be able to set the From and the Sender fields. Today we only ask for From and actually copy it to the Sender. We were missing the Sender field for the SMTP message that we want to send. The sender is optional, it is useful when the email author is different than the email submitter. From now you can use this field when sending an email. And if you are using the Email Task when building your workflow, now there is the expression editor for the From and Sender properties on the task. If you haven't provided the value of the author (in the From field), the value of the Sender field will be used. Sort dropdown widgets alphabetically When having to insert widgets in the FlowPart content editor, the list of all widgets is displayed according to creation date which gets quite messy with a lot of widgets. An easy solution, for now, would be to simply sort the name of the widgets alphabetically to give it some easy structure. So, from now when we list the widgets in the Forms and the Widgets List UI, it's alphabetically ordered. BagPart documentation There is new documentation explaining how to use BagPart in Orchard Core. Here you can also find samples about how to do templating both with Razor and Liquid and what are the available alternates that you can use when working with BagPart. Demos Using Pulumi with Orchard Core By using Pulumi you can programmatically create cloud resources in Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or Kubernetes. In this video, you could see that how does it work in the context of an Orchard Core application, but of course, it works for any website that you want to deploy. It supports the notion of infrastructure as code, that allows you to define your infrastructure literally as code. This is very powerful, because that allows you to create for example your Azure App Service or even a Kubernetes cluster programmatically, so you don't have to do it manually. If you are interested in this demo, don't forget to watch the YouTube video about it! News from the community Breaking news about the next Harvest Based on the ongoing events the best would be to cancel Harvest. Right now there are so many unknowns about the evolution and the spread of the virus. Maybe London will be blocked, maybe Washington will be blocked, we don't know. And by asking about 50 people from everywhere around the world to meet in a closed basement for three days could not be the best idea for know in terms of health. So, Harvest will be postponed until things are settling down. This is the safest choice right now and also the most secure in terms of organization. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 121 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

New options for TitlePart and AliasPart, adding CodeMirror support for HtmlBodyPart and HtmlField, the Pager shape and demo about the taxonomy and contained content items routing are waiting for you in our upcoming post with many other cool features! And about the news from the community: there is a new Orchard Core website, news about the upcoming Harvest and welcome a new team member in Lombiq Technologies! Orchard Core updates Disable feature confirmation messages When we disable a feature we will get a warning that says that the feature that you would like to disable has dependent features that are enabled. Let's disable the Widgets feature. In this case, we will get the following warning message, because Flows and Layers are built on the Widgets module. New options for TitlePart and AliasPart There is a new setting, called AliasPartOptions. Using this new option you can define that the alias can be editable when editing a content item from the admin UI or make it disabled, which means it will be generated automatically using the defined pattern. And when using the TitlePart, you will also find a new option there, called EditableRequired. This means admins can edit the title of the content item and it needs to have a value because it's required. Html mode for CodeMirror on HtmlField and HtmlBodyPart standard editors CodeMirror is a versatile text editor implemented in JavaScript for the browser. It is specialized for editing code and comes with a number of language modes and addons that implement more advanced editing functionality. And now if you set up your site using the Blog recipe and create a new article, the editor of the HtmlBodyPart will come with the CodeMirror support! Furthermore, the Standard editor mode of the HtmlField is also got the CodeMirror support. Moreover, Orchard Core using the latest version of CodeMirror, which is 5.52.0. Pager shape At the bottom of the documentation of OrchardCore.Navigation you will find code examples both for C# and Liquid about how to use the Pager shape in Orchard Core. Add a recipe step to create scope for OpenID Now you can set the connect scope of the OpenID using recipe steps, that you can do in the following way, that could be found in the documentation of OrchardCore.OpenId. There is also a possibility to set the Token Validation Settings with recipe steps. Here you have to provide: Name: unique name of the validation settings. Audience: defines the intended recipient of the token that must be checked. Authority: the address of the remote OpenID Connect server that issued the token. Filter deployment steps There is a new search box on the UI for the deployment steps to filter the list of the available steps. To check out this feature create a new deployment plan under Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans then add a new step to it. In this modal window, you will find the textbox with the Filter placeholder text in it. In our case, we typed settings, which means these three steps will be the results of our search. Sitemaps module We wrote about a very cool feature for Orchard Core, which is the Sitemaps support three times now: here, here and here. In every post, we described the features of this module and showed the way how you can use them. And you can also find a recording of this feature on YouTube. The reason why we mentioned that is because this feature is now merged in the dev branch of Orchard Core, thanks to Dean Marcussen! He also added nice documentation about how to create sitemaps, localize sitemaps, cache sitemaps and so on. Setting and Removing HttpContext.Items from Liquid template Now there is a new Liquid filter called httpcontext_add_items, that adds key/value to the HttpContext.Items collection. And you can also remove items from the HttpContext by using the httpcontext_remove_items Liquid filter. You can read more about these two new Liquid filters in the documentation. Do note though that there are possible security implications to this, see the discussion under the pull request. Support most commonly used error pages According to Pingdom research, the top 5 most common errors are 401, 400, 404, 403, 500. So, this is about adding more custom views for error codes that you can change in your themes. Check the content of the DiagnosticsController.cs in the OrchardCore.Diagnostics module. Demos Taxonomy and contained content items routing The main issue is that currently we don't have routing for taxonomies or contained content items. The taxonomy routing is about we would able to route an item inside a taxonomy for a term. The goal is to be able to list all the things that are associated with this term. The issue is that in the case of BagParts or anything that is contained in a content item can't be routed right now, because Autoroute doesn't work on sub-content items. The second thing we looked at was the dynamic routing to be able to define a patterned route in a content item. In this case, multiple URLs would match the same content item and the content item could use these route values to render something differently or do queries. These are two different things, but we are talking about them at the same time. If you are interested in how to do that in Orchard Core check out the following demo on YouTube about this upcoming feature! News from the community A new website using Orchard Core Luxury Card is a global leader in the premium credit card market. From patented metal cards to a 24/7 Concierge service and app, their mission is to shape the industry with innovation, value, and service. With leading airfare and cashback redemption rates along with first-class benefits, they believe your credit card can pay for itself. If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Freshest news about the next Harvest We have a room booked for the dates June 22-24. This is the reserved interval that we will have for sure now. The maximum people can fit in the room is 50 people. The only concern is that it could be not enough, it would be nice to know how many people are interested in coming to the next Harvest. There will be a questionnaire or something to be able to measure somehow the number of people who could be the possible attendees at the next conference. New team member in Lombiq We have a new team member, Gábor! Turned from English studies to competitive gaming to software development and Orchard Core. Check out his bio on our About us page! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 119 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Display mode options to Content Parts, adding search views for themes, import recipe from a JSON file and many other changes and new features come in our current post. After we will see a real-world example about how to use Orchard Core in production. Then check a new website built with Orchard Core and finally let's talk about the latest news about the Harvest! Orchard Core updates Add revision date in the documentation Now each page of the documentation will display the revision date of the current page. Open any page of the documentation and scroll down to the bottom of it. There you will see the date of the last update. Use ControllerModelUpdater on controller instead of implementing IUpdateModel When you want to Build, Update or Validate your model from controllers, you don't have to implement IUpdateModel, because each of them can be resolved by injecting the IUpdateModelAccessor. Here you can see the NodeController, where we need to build the display for the AdminNode using the TreeThumbnail display type (line 74). Instead of passing this, we can pass the _updateModelAccessor.ModelUpdater. Only show fields in Summary and Detail display types In the past, if you added a field (or a few fields) to a blog it's SummaryAdmin view shows in the list of blog posts. That's because the fields are automatically displayed in SummaryAdmin. Now, this feature prevents to display all the fields automatically in the SummaryAdmin. If you check out a driver of a field, you will see that the values of the Location now changed everywhere in the case of the Initialize method. Add display mode option to parts Now we can have custom display modes for Content Parts too! For example, now you could define which tag would you like for the title and the name of the tag could be the display mode of the TitlePart. Fix themes search views fix Changing all the themes to provide a nice view for the search feature. There was a default version of it, but now each theme has it's own and now it looks great in every built-in theme. If you want to change the look of the search form, you would override the SearchForm template, if you would like to override the search results page, the SearchResults template will be the one you are looking for. But of course, you can override the whole look and feel of the search template just by overriding the Search template. Here you could see the Agency theme with the search form and search results. And you could find really great and detailed documentation about how to implement a website full-text search and everything about the new templates. YesSQL: when to call Session.Save? You can call _session.Save(contentItem) as many times as you want, it's free. It's just marking a content item to be saved once the session will be disposed. There will nothing happen when you call _session.Save(contentItem). If you call it multiple times, the first time it will mark it, the second time it will say: It's already in the dictionary of things to be saved. It will be just a dictionary lookup. Call _session.Save(contentItem) when you think the thing should be saved once the session or the request is done. And if multiple things update a content item and you need to tell the session to save it, they can all call _session.Save(contentItem). Import recipe from a JSON file When you are importing a recipe, you have to upload a ZIP file. The logic then extracted that file and found the JSON file in it. From now you can pass a JSON file when importing a deployment package, not just a ZIP. Recipes documentation And if we are talking about that you can import a recipe from a JSON file, we also need to mention that the documentation of Orchard Core has got a great detailed page about the recipes. Here you could see the format of the recipe, the possible steps of the recipe and see samples about each of the steps (Roles Step, Queries Step, Media Step, Layers Step, etc.). RequireUniqueEmail message Now when you would like to register a new user with an email address, that already exists in the system, you will get an error message says that the email is already used. Demos SaaS and OpenID: a real-world example There is a solution called Trivest Connect (an Enterprise Resource Planning application) that currently includes five different companies. One problem that Trivest solves that everybody sends messages to each other and there is no standardization, that is not so optimal. In the use of Trives Connect with many other features there is a standard document format and with that, it is easier to exchange orders, invoices, VIA, etc. Trivest Connect is based on Orchard Core installed with the Software as a Service recipe that is using the built-in Open ID Server. Here you could see that there are really just a few modules enabled in the admin UI. What customers can do is they can send messages to other customers. This is just an administrator portal because, in reality, this is all done behind the scenes in the ERPs. If you would like to see the whole demo of this real-world example just head to YouTube and watch the recording! News from the community A new website using Orchard Core RA Capital Management is a multi-stage investment manager dedicated to evidence-based investing in public and private healthcare and life science companies developing drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics. And they decided to use Orchard Core to implement their website! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Latest news about the Harvest There is a new offer from someone from the UK to host Harvest in their offices. They mention 50 people fit in the office. This office is located in London. The possible date for hold the Harvest is the last full week of June. We have to decide the length of the conference and talk about holding a workshop during Harvest. By the past, we have usually done it at the beginning of the week, because this way you can arrive at the weekend, take your time or get back from jetlag or do some tourism. And then if you want you can extend your stay to the week. So 22-23-24 might be the tentative dates. Usually, 2 days are too short and 3 days are too long, but we will see. What do you think about June 22-23? Feel free to comment on that on Gitter too! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 116 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core has got several new features and fixes this week! With many others, we will see the new user disabled/enabled events, the new IAreaControllerRouteMapper implementation, the way how you can filter the admin menu then show you a demo about how to integrate stripe.js in your Orchard Core application with workflows. And finally, say some words about a new tentative date and location for the upcoming Harvest! Orchard Core updates Reduce the length of indexes for Content Fields Indexing Let's focus on the LinkFieldIndex and check these two columns: the Url and the BigUrl. The Url is the one that is trimmed and indexed, and the BigUrl is the original data that is not indexed. If you are using MySQL, the maximum length that this provider can support in an index under UTF8 collection is 768. Now we set the maximum length of the indexed columns is to not be longer than the supported length. Do not check "Include all content types" in deployment step by default When you create a content type deployment step, the default is to export all types. Now, this is unchecked by default. Adding User Disabled/Enabled Events The IUserCreatedEventHandler is changed to IUserEventHandler and there are two new events: DisabledAsync and EnabledAsync events. These two new events now triggered in the UserDisplayDriver that will trigger the two newly created workflow events to make it work in your workflows. Adding IAreaControllerRouteMapper Now there is an updated way how the admin prefix is applied by using custom convention and constraint that will ensure that the admin URLs start with the admin prefix. And also ensure that it is done correctly for the controllers that are named AdminController, not the ones that start with admin. Before every controller that starts with admin could be an admin controller, but now with this new convention, it has been decided that only controllers named AdminController can be an admin controller. For example, a controller named AdminItemController doesn't fall into this category, so it can't be an admin controller. A concrete implementation being AdminAreaControllerRouteMapper that uses AdminOptions to provide a default route pattern that is used in the OrchardCore.MVC startup. Just as a reminder, if you have admin controllers you have to name them AdminController or have the Admin attribute on that. This will ensure that the URL is strictly using the admin prefix (or whatever you set it), and the user has the admin permission and this will also apply the admin theme to the views from this controller. Filter admin menu Head to Configuration -> Settings -> Admin and put a tick near the Enable Admin Menu filter checkbox. Now you will have a new textbox at the top of the admin menu with a Filter placeholder text inside it. If you type something here you can filter the menu items and could find easier the option you want. And if you hit CTRL+SHIFT+F, this textbox will get the focus and you can type the menu option that you are looking for without needing to click into this textbox. Add menus content listing and create option If you navigate to the Content option of the admin menu you will find a new one, called Menus. This feature is listing all the menus of the system, and if you can see, there is a new button, called New Menu. By clicking on this button you can create a new Menu without needed the Menu content type to be creatable. Make lists sortable with ordering setting A few weeks ago we write about a way how you can make sortable lists using the Enable Ordering setting of the ListPart and you can also find a demo on YouTube about this feature. The good news is this feature is now merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core! Checkout to the latest changeset of the dev branch and try this feature now. Then don't forget to tell your opinion about it in the comments section! Razor Helpers documentation Now there is a new page in the Orchard Core documentation that contains the extension methods that are available in Razor using @Orchard. This documentation also contains the way how to use an extension method in a view and in a controller too. Demos Stripe.js and Workflows You can use Stripe.js’ APIs to tokenize customer information, collect sensitive card data using customizable Stripe Elements, and accept payments with browser payment APIs like Apple Pay and the Payment Request API. And of course, you can add Stripe.js to your Orchard Core site too! Let's create a registration form where users can register and after successful registration, they can pay the fee for a ticket. After the user submits the form, here comes a huge workflow, that will validate all the fields of the form. Here you can see the several validations, and when there is no error, the workflow will send an email, create an Enrollment in Orchard Core and redirect the user to stripe using a Fork. And there will be another workflow that will validate the payment using the response that Orchard Core will get from stripe.js. Now let's take a closer look at the Create Content Task that creates a new Enrollment content type. When you are creating a new content type using this task, you have to write the properties of the content. This is the JSON that is used to construct the given content item. As you can see, here you can use different Liquid expressions as well, for example, we could use the data coming from the form. You can see the website using this registration form under this URL. Here just click on the Register at the top right and select from the listed options. If you would like to see the whole demo just head to YouTube and watch the recording! News from the community A new tentative date and location for the next Harvest We have another tentative date for the next Harvest: the last week of June. In this date, we could do it in Europe and in a location that is easier to go from the USA too. London and Amsterdam have airports that can be reached easily from several other countries as well. What do you think about the new date and locations? Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 114 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

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

This week we would like to show you two demos about the newest features of Orchard Core. First, you can take a look at the brand new content items UI, then we will dive a bit deeper and try out the new Trumbowyg editor for the Text Field and the HtmlBody Part. And of course, the discussion continues about the next Harvest! On Orchard Core Filter Features dependencies When you navigate to Configuration -> Features you have the ability to enable or disable the different features. To find the feature you want easier you can use a filter here and can type the name of the module. This filter only sort by the name of the feature. From now this filter checks for the different dependencies too! For example, if you type localization, you could see the Content Culture Picker in the list, because this module has dependencies with names like Content Localization or Localization. Harvest Core 2020 Sipke Schoorstra has connections in Nice and Miami, so that would be easier to organize the next Harvest one of these cities. Nice is in Europe, but Miami is warmer and easier to travel there from Europe because it's on the East Coast. The two possible dates are February and April, but the weather is not the same in these cities. If we do it in April, Nice would be the better option because of the weather. Miami is warmer in both months, so that wouldn't be an issue. Stay tuned for more information about the next Harvest! Demos New content items UI Now when you enter the admin site and go to Content -> Content Items, you will see a brand new UI. Under the Content Type dropdown, you can filter the items based on the selected or the typed type. You can filter the items by their status using the Show dropdown. And lastly the Sort dropdown is responsible to order the items by title, recently created, recently modified or published. If you select more than 1 item, you will see a new dropdown, called Actions, instead of the dropdowns we mentioned above. By using the Actions, you can publish, unpublish or delete the selected items. Lastly, we would like to mention the Filters dropdown near the textbox that has the Search all content items placeholder text. By using this you can filter the list by showing only the draft items, only the published items or the items owned by the logged-in user. Adding Trumbowyg editor for TextField and HtmlBody Let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. This recipe contains an Article content type. If you edit the definition of the Article under Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types you will see the attached HtmlBody Part. Hit Edit near it and select that you would like to use the Trumbowyg editor type. Under the editor options you can explicitly set the config you want to use, for example, which button you want to add to the toolbar. If you navigate to the OrchardCore.Resources module and check the content of the Assets folder, you will see the files that needed for the Trumbowyg plugins to work. Therefore you can use every existing plugin that is described on this page. Trumbowyg has a lot of plugins that you can use to customize your editor. Now let's add some new buttons to the editor! We will use the emoji, the giphy, and the font family plugin. All you need to do is to extend the btns section of the editor options like this: btns: [ ["viewHTML"], ['emoji', 'giphy', 'fontfamily'], ["undo", "redo"], ["formatting"], ["strong", "em", "del"], ["foreColor", "backColor"], ["superscript", "subscript"], ["link"], ["image"], ["align"], ["unorderedList", "orderedList"], ["horizontalRule"], ["removeformat"], ["fullscreen"]], plugins : { giphy: { apiKey: 'N5OwBrzBjP8nXXaFdv1TvVwZ82DWNUSz' }} Here you can see that the three new buttons will be placed after the View HTML button and will be near each other without a separator. The buttons you define in the same square brackets will be in one group. You could also see that we added a new section here, called plugins. Here you can define the options that needed for the different plugins. For example, to use giphy, you need to have an API key that will communicate with GIPHY. If you navigate to the Dashboard on the GIPHY Developers page you can create a new one by clicking on the Create an App button. Now you have successfully set up the editor options. It's time to create a new Article! Notice the three new dropdown buttons near the View HTML button and use them to create your awesome article! Another nice stuff is the template plugin, that manages a set of HTML templates to insert fast. In these options we only define the templates plugin with two options: { btns: [ ["template"] ], plugins: { templates: [ { name: 'Lorem ipsum', html: '<p>I am a Lorem ipsum template</p>' }, { name: 'Lorem ipsum 2', html: '<p>Another Lorem ipsum template</p>' } ] }} In this case, the editor will look like the following, where if we select the Lorem ipsum 2 option, the following HTML content will be injected to the editor. The same works for HTML Field too. If you add a new HTML Field to your content type and set the editor to Trumbowyg editor, you can define the editor options and you will get a customized Trumbowyg editor. On Lombiq Upload recordings of demos from the weekly meeting in separate videos We have an idea to upload recordings of demos from the weekly meeting in separate videos as well, so they can be found easier. To help us decide please visit our Tweet and choose from the following options: Good, I look for demos! Good, but don't need it. Bad, why more videos? Another idea, see reply! Searching for performance-intensive codes Do you write a performance-intensive code? Then help us build the nerdiest .NET thing! Drop us a line to [email protected] and we'll ask a few questions about the challenges you encounter, and in exchange, we'll show you how to make a chip out of your programs! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 102 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

In our post, we would like to show you some improvement of the content items list and the Markdown editor of Orchard Core. We also mention the Command Line support for Orchard Core. Check out our post for more! On Orchard 1.x Lombiq has an Orchard issue bug fixing hackathon and the goal was to fix as many issues for Orchard 1.x as we can. We made good progress and fixed several bugs. Let's see some of them! NumericField default value merge error fix The Default value of the NumericField was removed by accident after a merge. Now thanks to this PR, the textbox for specifying the Default value to NumericField was readded. Merge DraftFieldIndexService.cs into FieldIndexService.cs In Orchard 1.x, you could use the DraftFieldIndexService to save the draft and the FieldIndexService to save the published FieldIndexRecords. Because of these services do the quite same thing (the only difference is to save the Published or the Draft version of the record), it could be a good idea to remove DraftFieldIndexSerivice and keep only the FieldIndexService and have an enum to set which version you would like to save. You can find the implementation in this PR. Removing IProjectionManagerExtension There was an IProjectionManagerExtension interface to provide additional methods to the IProjectionManager. For example, you can get the content items by providing the ContentPart and a number to skip, which could be a great way to have pagination. Now the methods inside the IProjectionManagerExtension moved to the IProjectionManager and the IProjectionManagerExtension interface has been deleted. See the changes in this PR. Updating Newtonsoft.Json everywhere Orchard 1.x uses an outdated version of the Newtonsoft.Json library. We updated this package everywhere in Orchard to use the latest version. Fixing that stylesheets are not found on Dashboard Resource URLs are not replaced with file virtual path in StylesheetBindingStrategy leaving the URL pointing to TheAdmin theme folder instead of the related module path. Now when you visit the admin page of Orchard and open the Developer Tools in your browser, you will notice the missing 404 errors for the CSS files thanks to this PR. Fixing that Orchard.Workflows requires styles that don't exist We had a quite similar issue here as in the previous one, except there were also some empty CSS files that are included in the csproj files. You can see the fixes here. On Orchard Core Build error if a module with views doesn't use the Razor SDK If you create a module and you have views inside and you didn't correctly use the Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Razor SDK you will get a build error. In the project files, there is an SDK tag at the top and you can define which SDK the project should be built with. When you have Razor views, you need this SDK to be able to get precompiled views and embed them in the assemblies. Now if you have views and you didn't do that, the build will automatically fail to prevent failing in runtime because it could not find specific assets or views. Or maybe you started to implement your module with a standard class library, which didn't have views, then you add a view and don't understand why it doesn't work anymore. Consider Command Line support for Orchard Core There was some Command Line support in Orchard Core, but it was removed because of performance concerns. The code that is currently in for Command Line support for Orchard Core is using the same concept as Orchard 1, where modules can provide custom commands with the Command Line extensibility. The idea would be to have a CLI that is not in process of the Orchard host, but out of a process like a very separate .NET CLI, that will talk using HTTP with the host and the tenants. Therefore we could even use a CLI to remote control some tenants or instances. We don't have to run the CLI on the machine that runs Orchard. Being able to run remotely the CLI would be nice, and to automatically discover the commands from the API. You can find more details about the Command Line support for Orchard Core in this issue. Admin CSS: wrong BS4 version If you create a new pull request and don't update to the dev branch, then you will also submit an old version of Bootstrap and assets and people will have to fix it again. The only way to prevent that is by having a CI task that will ensure that the version is committed and rebuilding the assets doesn't change anything. We can't automate it, but we can fail the build to detect it. That would be an improvement because at least we could show the issue before we commit the issue. Orchard Harvest Based on the progress on Orchard Core, we could totally have something in September or October, like we did last time in a warm location. It would be about Orchard Core of course and a little bit about Orchard 1.11. That would be also a very good way to work on a free public online workshop during the Harvest. Orchard Core will be new for most of the people and they could learn the basics of Orchard Core here. Demos Filter content items on content items list page If you navigate to the admin page of Orchard Core and head to the Content Items page, you can search content items by title. You can also filter them by content types and by version. There was an error when you filter content items and hit the back button in your browser. In this case, you got a Confirm Form Resubmission, now it's fixed by using a GET request. Bulk actions in content items list You can also realize a Select All option here to select all the content items in the page. When using the Bulk Actions button, you can publish, unpublish and delete all the selected content items without needing to do these actions one by one. Markdown editor CSS and toolbar improvements This week the community fixed a bunch of styling issues with the SimpleMDE markdown editor. It used to look like with a dark border around the top and some horrible hovers and now it looks like this. It also couldn't go full screen because the z-index was below the Orchard navbar but it now goes fullscreen. Of course, the side by side preview mode works. It does also work on mobile as well. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 63 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail every time when a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Just as on the first day we're reporting in live from the 2017 Orchard Harvest conference! This blogpost will be updated as we go, so make sure to check back! Bertrand is doing the same thing again, so make sure to check out his blog for updates too. Antoine again as well, so also check out his blog. Theming in Orchard Core CMS by Steve Taylor Steve is from Avastec and works extensively with client-side technologies. He'll live code a new Orchard Core theme based on the Masonic Wordpress theme. A sneak peek into the new Orchard theming, also the casual use of Razor Tag Helpers for including resources, displaying a menu and a zone. The theme makes use of a Gulp pipeline for asset building. A sneak peek into the database storage format of Orchard Core and creating theme settings. Highway to the pager zone. (Sorry. Hate Salute Benedek for the joke.) Topic of the day: Statue of Liberty. We should have a Statue of Orchard. It could be a large monolith. (That, when you look closer, is built of beautifully crafted small, loosely coupled bricks.) Setting up indexing and adding a search box. Quite similar to Orchard 1.x. Taking a look at some of the familiar Orchard concepts from the admin to the extent needed for a theming demo: managing content types, adding menu items, widgets... If you use a lot of stuff the cool kids do like Angular and Knockout there's something for you. Present and future of Localization in Orchard by Benedek Farkas Benedek is from Lombiq, leading the development of Orchard client-projects and contributing bugfixes. He also asked us to take pictures. Lombiq does a lot of things with Orchard, so we'll refrain from listing those 96 things here, you can see for yourself. Benedek does a lot of things with Orchard too, including catering for the translation packages. How is "orchard" in various languages? Turns out probably we're best off with the English one. Word of the day: eltöredezettségmentesítőtlenítetthetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek. You should only drink as long as you can pronounce this. When in doubt, use T-strings: Wrapping your user-facing labels into T() is the bare minimum. But it's easy to defeat the purpose, so here are some tips. Extracting T-strings from code with Vandelay Industries. Unfortunately the module is only compatible with Orchard 1.6, so please personally and repeatedly nudge Bertrand to update it. He'll appreciate the moral support. The module supports 1.10.x. Translating UI strings on Crowdin, for built-in and third-party modules. Klingons are really behind on translating Orchard. Head over to Crowdin and contribute some translation, Orchard needs you! Translating content items on the example of the Atlantis Programs & Pedalheads website. Also including some synchronization features to sync some data from the master item to the localized versions. Similar improvements are coming to Orchard itself too. Localizing Taxonomies and content fields, the new way. Design notes on improving localization. Building Client-side Apps and Components for Orchard by Daniel Stolt Daniel from IDeliverable returns. What's a client-side component? Shifting from the server-side to the client side. When do you want to use a client-side component? Mainly if you want a modern UX without page reloads. Various ways to create such components in Orchard, the simplest being a Layout Snippet. Demo of a component displaying stock market information. You wouldn't want that delay page load. Utilizing Orchard's Gulp pipeline for client-side assets. Do we put output files into source control? It depends, but preferably not. Configuring a client-side asset build pipeline with Gulp. If you don't know Browserify, check it out, it's good for you. Angular routing and how to combine it with Orchard's routing. Ways of runtime module loading. It will be awesome with HTTP 2. YesSql, what's that and why do I like it? by Sebastien Ros An ad-hoc, unplanned session by Sebastien about YesSql. It's a document database layer using SQL as the data store, so you get the best of both worlds: A trusted, tested storage with a fancy flexible data model. YesSql is also the data layer of Orchard Core. The plural of "index" is "indices". Learn this and you can look educated among your peers. Bonus: Do the same for "medium" and "matrix". Demo of the various use-cases you'd expect from such a data access layer by looking at the tests. Interesting clever querying and indexing concepts. What's next for .NET Core and C#? by Bertrand Le Roy Bertrand from Microsoft gives some insights into the future as we know it. It's multi-platform, which is a good thing. You'll need VS 2017 if you're using VS, which is bad thing. Project.json is dead and csproj is back, which is kind of a mixed thing. But this csproj is not the same csproj! One project system across all platforms: Now a bearded guy with a Linux laptop, a hipster with a MacBook and a cool engineer with an awesome Windows laptop can walk into a bar and be one .NET development team, not the start of a joke. We've seen some XML templates, but since it's XML no one will ever want to look at it, so whatevs. There's the One SDK running behind all IDEs, which is awesome. The .NET command line got even better, so you can feel like a Hollywood hacker. Even the Orchard command line could be part of the .NET CLI. The solution file format hasn't changed, which is sad. Introducing .NET Standard: one .NET API to use across all platforms, when writing .NET Framework, .NET Core or Xamarin apps. .NET Standard 2.0 will contain all the APIs .NET Framework has (minus the Windows-specific stuff). See for yourself on https://apisof.net/. What's up with C#? Everybody uses C# and everybody loves C#. No further questions. Bertrand just showed an array initialization that could be the prime exhibit in the Museum of Strange Brace Styles. And remember there's a thing called Pico. What's new in C# 7? Here's a recap. Pattern matching can be familiar from functional languages, but it has always long been a part of hardware description languages (and the wider concept in logic circuit design). And with Hastlayer you can create hardware from .NET! The holy trinity of C# language principles: expressiveness, convenience, performance, safety. Well, this was four. Some exotic things possibly coming up with C# 8. Orchard Core CMS by Sebastien Ros The goals of Orchard Core are like new year's resolutions you actually can keep: be worse at everything. Just kidding. Major changes: Built on ASP.NET Core, document-oriented storage (with YesSql, see above). The admin theme uses Bootstrap and there is no bug. The admin menu is now also a standard menu, so it's extensible in a better way. You can also configure the admin theme as easily as the frontend theme, neat! The basic content editing UI is in principle the same as in Orchard 1.x so you won't be confused. Content parts can be attached to a content type in multiple instances. Various things have changed a bit or a lot (even if not too apparent from the UI): Blogs use the Lists feature (so blogs are just a Lists configuration, not a feature written from scratch), widget layer rules can contain C# (and widgets can be dragged between zones from the UI)... New content type: Flows. These are basically widget pages, plus more. Recipes are now in JSON, not XML, and can use dynamic placeholders evaluated during cook time. The thing is fast, even without caching. >2000 request/s on a dev machine while debugging fast. And uses much less memory too. See the roadmap to get an idea of when Orchard Core will be ready. Panel with Daniel Stolt, Sipke Schoorstra and Zoltán Lehóczky Merging localization-related changes: Will mostly be done on dev, because breaking changes are allowed there. What about the new frontend theme? It's on Ryan Drew Bernett's branch (or maybe in a branch in the official repo). The design goals are mostly satisfied, but theme settings are not implemented. Are there any goals to make Orchard competitive against e.g. Wordpress? More themes and out-of-the-box site solutions would make content editors happy. That's true, but Wordpress is just a blog engine, even a lot of Orchard devs use Wordpress for their blogs. Orchard is mostly targeted at businesses.