This time we will do a little deep dive and check out some important changes in the code base of Orchard Core. But don't be scared, we promise you will like these changes, especially the demo about the new User Picker Field! Orchard Core updates Allow media width and height values without a token You could see a demo a few weeks ago in this post about the new options for Media Field where you can set the alt text of your image and you can also crop your images using a nice media crop picker. The way it was working is it's putting different kinds of options to the query string that allows you to manipulate your image. Let's see the following URL for an example: https://localhost:44300/media/post-bg.jpg?width=1&height=600&rmode=crop&rxy=0.2,0.5. Here you can see we set the width and height of the image from the media library. We also set the resize mode for the processed image with other parameters as well. A few days later the community introduced a new bool option added to the MediaOptions called UseTokenizedQueryString to encrypt the image processing query string to prevent disc filling, that is true by default. And now here comes another great stuff that allows values for width and height to be provided via the query string even when tokens are enabled. What does it mean? Let's see an example of it! Set up your site using the Blog recipe then open the default banner image URL of the predefined blog post with the following query string parameters: https://localhost:44300/media/post-bg.jpg?width=1024&height=600. Note that the tokens are enabled by default, but you can still set the width and the height of the image now. Don't forget that this will only work if the height and width values match the supported sizes array values. Introduce Culture Scope There is a new CultureScope class that you can use if you want to locally set the current culture (the current user interface culture and the culture used by the current thread). You can find several unit tests to see how you can use it, but check out this one for now. Here you can see that the culture is set to French, but that setting only applies inside the using statement. Implement UserId All the user profiles that you have locally, now have a new property called UserId, which is unique. We used to use a name, the user name as the way to identify a user. But now the community decided to use a unique ID such that you can't guess user ID or you can't recover another set or permission or ownership by mistake, because an account has been deleted and someone created a new account using the old name and somehow the logical references are still kept based on this name and you would inherit something from that. So, to prevent that, Orchard Core is using now a user ID. If you take the latest version of the dev branch and just run your code there will be a migration that copies the user names of the existing users as the user ID. This way you don't have any change in your content, it will still work the same and be careful that your user ID equals a string like 4gq8jagmrtxrwvg21csa0b6y4y, which is safe, because the next time someone creates a new user, they can't impersonate anyone else like recovering an old account, because it will be a newly generated unique identifier that can't match something like that. And how can you find the currently logged in user? Check out the code in the DefaultContentsAdminListFilter where you can see that now, instead of using the user.Identity.Name, you can use the FindFirstValue extension method from ASP.NET Core to return the value of the first instance of the specified claim type, or null if the claim is not present. And then you can set that value as the Owner of the content item. Demos User Picker Field Let's say you would like to create a blog where multiple users can create blog posts and you want to connect the user account of the author user with the given blog post by showing the name of the user somewhere in the detail view of the post. It's easy because the users can log in to the admin UI of Orchard Core and publish their own posts. In this case, they will be the authors of the given content items. But let's say we don't want to give them access to the site. We just want them to send the content of the blog post to a given email address and the site editors will edit and publish the posts. Is there an easy way to connect content with user accounts in Orchard Core? Set up your site using the Blog recipe. This recipe comes with a predefined blog where you can create new blog posts. The posts can have several properties: the title, the banner image, tags, the category, and so on. We will modify the content definition of the Blog Post to do some tricks. Navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and head to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and edit the Blog Post one. Click on the Add Field button and find the recently added one, called User Picker Field. This field allows you to connect users with a content item. Here you can say that you want to allow multiple users to be selected, allow the picker to display users from all roles, and many more. If you put a tick on the Display All Users checkbox, every user will be in the list that you can choose from, if you remove the tick, the available roles in the system will be listed and you can choose from them. Now if you edit the predefined blog post, you will see the User Picker Field in action. In this case, we have two users in the system named admin and editor. The admin is the superuser with the Administrator role and the editor user has the Editor role. We can see both of them because we said we would like to allow the picker to display users from all roles. If you save your content item, the field will show you the user names of the selected users seperated by a comma (if you selected multiple ones). And you will see a No users. message is you haven't selected any users. You can find some lines about the User Picker Field in the documentation of Orchard Core and a nice presentation of this feature on YouTube! News from the community Our full Orchard Core tutorial series, the Dojo Course 3 is here! After a long wait, the new Orchard Core version of our legendary Dojo Course tutorial series is here, the Dojo Course 3! Are you a newcomer and want to learn Orchard Core from the ground up, both from a user's and a developer's perspective? Are you somewhat familiar with Orchard Core but would like to get up to speed and become an Orchard pro? Look no further, check out Dojo Course 3! Dojo Course 3 guides you from the very basics of Orchard Core all up to be able to write your own themes and modules, utilizing various APIs of Orchard. We're publishing a tutorial video every day for 40 days starting on 1 December. So, this is your 40 days of Orchard :). In the first few videos, we gave you an introduction to Orchard Core and showed you a way about how to set up your first Orchard Core website. After we started to talk about the content model of Orchard Core, checking out the basics of content management. We will stay in the admin UI for a little in the upcoming days and check out the other basic features of the CMS like how to add widgets with layers, managing the menus, and the media files. After we will see how can you search and index content items, and build forms using the Forms and Workflows feature. But we will not spoil the topics of the upcoming videos. :) If you're looking for our previous Orchard 1.x tutorial series check out Dojo Course 2. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 172 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 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!

Now it's easier to extend the user setting than ever thanks to the new custom user settings feature! Create advanced Markdown with the new extensions, use the new isInRole layer rule, and many other great things in Orchard Core! Check out our current post for more! Orchard Core updates Use Advanced Markdown extensions Set up your site using the Blog recipe and navigate to the admin UI to edit the predefined blog post. You can use a Markdown editor to edit the body of your blog post. To convert the Markdown string to HTML, Orchard Core using Markdig, which is a fast, powerful, CommonMark compliant, extensible Markdown processor for .NET. This processor has a great extensible architecture with more than 20 built-in extensions to allow footnotes, support emojis, and smileys, adding figures, enable Bootstrap classes, and so on. You can check out the features section of the readme.md file to know more about these extensions. And the good news is now you can select which extension you want to enable by just setting different configuration values in your appsettings.json file. The default option is to turn on the nohtml extension (that disables HTML support) and the one called advanced, which enables advanced Markdown extensions. By turning on the advanced extension, Markdig will use every extension except the BootStrap, Emoji, SmartyPants and soft-line as hard-line breaks extensions. On the screen above you can see we also turn on the emoji extension. Let's try this out quickly! Here you can see we added some Emoji shortcodes and smileys to the blog post and they are converted to their respective Unicode characters. And we also added a task list at the end of the blog post that comes from the TaskLists extension that is enabled by default because the TaskList extension will be enabled if you say you want to use the Advanced Markdown extension. You can read more about Markdown configuration in the Orchard Core documentation too! Add isInRole layer rule Let's say we would like to create a layer that contains widgets that are only available for users who are in the Editor role. We cannot do that easily until now, so let's try out the newly added isInRole layer rule! Set up your site using the Blog recipe then head to Design -> Widgets in the admin UI. Here you can see the two predefined layers: Always and Homepage. Click on the Add button to create a new layer. The only thing we have to do here is to set the Rule to isInRole("editor"). Now put a widget to this layer and create a new user with the editor role. If you log in with that user you can see the widget in the Content zone of the theme. Add CloneContent Permission as Content Type dynamic permission Navigate to the admin UI of your site then head to Security -> Roles and hit the Edit button near an arbitrary role. Now type the clone word in the search box that will list the new clone content permissions. This means now you can set the clone content permission for every securable content type (a content type that can have custom permissions). Improves Document Options and Compression MessagePack for C# is an extremely fast MessagePack serializer for C#. It is 10x faster than MsgPack-Cli and outperforms other C# serializers. MessagePack for C# also ships with built-in support for LZ4 compression - an extremely fast compression algorithm. Performance is important, particularly in applications like games, distributed computing, microservices, or data caches. And now this package is part of Orchard Core. Orchard Core using MessagePack to GZIP content, because there is an option in MessagePack to also compress it. There is a new IDocumentSerialiser to say how to serialize into a sequence of bytes or deserialize from a byte array. JSON.NET can serialize anything, but if there is an issue with a custom document, we can use MessagePack to customize the way how to serialize content from the distributed cache. Demos Custom User Settings Set up your site using the Blog recipe. Now navigate to the admin UI and head to Configuration -> Features to enable the new Custom User Settings feature that allows content types to become custom user settings. After we can create a new content type that will be responsible to store the custom user settings. To do that, head to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and create a new content type. The most important thing to do here is to make the stereotype CustomUserSettings and remove the ticks from the Creatable, Listable, Draftable, etc, checkboxes. We named our content type as User Profile and attached three fields to it: a media field to store the avatar of the user and two text fields to store the first name and the last name of the user. We haven't added any content parts to this content type. Let's navigate to Security -> Users and edit one of the users in the system. Here you will notice a new tab near the Content one with the name User Profile. That's because we named our content type User Profile. Here we specified the first and the last name of the user and attached an image to it. If you hit Save, you can persist your changes for this given user. Now it's time to use our custom user settings from code. The Orchard Core documentation has a great detailed page about how you can get the custom user settings using Liquid, how to adjust the placement, and many more. Notice the brand new users_by_id Liquid Filter that you can use to get the User object from the database by a user ID. But how can you get your custom user settings in C#? Well, that's also quite simple! The User class in Orchard Core implements the Entity class, which has a JObject property called Properties. And inside the Properties, you can find the whole UserProfile content type with it's attached content parts and fields. { "Email": "[email protected]", "EmailConfirmed": true, "Id": 18, "IsEnabled": true, "LoginInfos": [], "NormalizedEmail": "[email protected]", "NormalizedUserName": "ADMIN", "PasswordHash": "AQAAAAEAACcQAAAAECfRTVdPZm1meRWrxja3vzbJlslet72QzrqSsPKxOeeGKQs7bcMVeTYRSNrhc2yjpw==", "Properties": { "UserProfile": { "Author": "admin", "ContentItemId": "4k7hmhyywz1ettg2hkv5xpcfxz", "ContentItemVersionId": null, "ContentType": "UserProfile", "CreatedUtc": null, "DisplayText": null, "Latest": false, "ModifiedUtc": "2020-11-24T14:36:36.8629171Z", "Owner": null, "Published": false, "PublishedUtc": null, "UserProfile": { "Firstname": { "Text": "Admin" }, "Image": { "MediaTexts": [ "" ], "Paths": [ "c827782e12851cd2cf4c5161c4f5445a.jpg" ] }, "Lastname": { "Text": "Orchard" } } } }, "ResetToken": null, "RoleNames": [ "Administrator" ], "SecurityStamp": "FAALQXTJCDTD5EOVTLCW6N75CW3BOVYU", "UserClaims": [], "UserId": "4gq8jagmrtxrwvg21csa0b6y4y", "UserName": "admin", "UserTokens": []} Navigate to the CustomUserSettingsDisplayDriver and check out the GetUserSettingsAsync private method. Here you can see the way about getting the custom user settings content item from the Properties array. And after you can easily work with the properties of your content item. And that's not all of it! Check out this recording on YouTube to know more about this great, useful feature! News from the community Introducing 40 days of Orchard Core: Dojo Course 3 is here! We've been hard at work to bring you the updated, Orchard Core version of our legendary Dojo Course tutorial series, Dojo Course 3! If you want to become an Orchard Core developer, Dojo Course 3 is for you! Starting with the 1st of December we'll publish a new Orchard Core tutorial every day for 40 days on our YouTube channel. Be sure to set a reminder for the premiere video and subscribe if you want to see them just as they come out! If you're looking for our previous Orchard 1.x tutorial series check out Dojo Course 2. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 169 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 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!

Media profiles feature to Orchard Core that allows you to defined preset image resizing and formatting commands! Renamed SummaryAdmin shapes, and new routes to avoid features URL blocking by IIS, and a lot more in our current post! Orchard Core updates Prevent disabling or removing administrator role Let's say you set up your Orchard Core site using the admin as the user name and for some reason, you navigate to Security -> Users to disable your own account. The problem here is that in this case, you are the only user with an Administrator role in the system. From now you can't do that, you will get a warning message saying you cannot disable the only administrator. Go back and edit your own user again and try to edit the user name too. This also triggers a new validation error, because you cannot modify the user name of the currently logged-in user. The last thing here is about removing the Administrator role from your user account. You could do that, but if your user is the only user with the Administrator role assigned, you will get a warning message about you cannot remove the Administrator role from the only administrator. Avoid features URL blocking by IIS IIS has some default filters for security like you can't have specific words in the URL. There are a few words used by us too like .sitemap. IIS also blocks any request ending in .resources by default. The list of blocked extensions includes a bunch of other terms that could conceivably be used in feature IDs such as .master, .browser, .config, .skin, etc. It's possible to override this behavior in the web.config file but this would have to be done on a per-application basis and carries unwanted security implications. The solution is just to put these parts in a different segment. If you want to enable a feature the URL to do that was:https://localhost:5501/Admin/Features/Enable/OrchardCore.Sitemaps Now the new URL is:https://localhost:44300/Admin/Features/OrchardCore.Sitemaps/Enable So the goal of this fix is to use the pattern Admin/Features/{id}/Enable in place of Admin/Features/Enable/{id}. The same goes for when you want to disable a feature. Renamed SummaryAdmin shapes of ContentsDriver These shape names are not compatible when defining custom placement, so they have been renamed. They are admin shapes, so the impact is quite low. If you have your own custom theme and redefined these ones you have to change them. So, the ContentsDriver creates four shapes with different shape types. Shape("Contents_SummaryAdmin__Tags", new ContentItemViewModel(model)).Location("SummaryAdmin", "Tags:10"), Shape("Contents_SummaryAdmin__Meta", new ContentItemViewModel(model)).Location("SummaryAdmin", "Meta:20"), Shape("Contents_SummaryAdmin__Button__Edit", new ContentItemViewModel(model)).Location("SummaryAdmin", "Actions:10"), Shape("Contents_SummaryAdmin__Button__Actions", new ContentItemViewModel(model)).Location("SummaryAdmin", "ActionsMenu:10") However, the actual shape type is considered before __ i.e. all the above shapes are resolved to the same shape type Contents_SummaryAdmin. Renamed these shapes as following to apply a unique placement record for each shape. Contents_SummaryAdmin__Tags renamed to ContentsTags_SummaryAdminContents_SummaryAdmin__Meta renamed to ContentsMeta_SummaryAdminContents_SummaryAdmin__Button__Edit renamed to ContentsButtonEdit_SummaryAdminContents_SummaryAdmin__Button__Actions renamed to ContentsButtonActions_SummaryAdmin So that placement will target a single shape type. { "ContentsButtonActions_SummaryAdmin": [ { "shape":"ContentsButtonEditNoView_SummaryAdmin" } ] } Demos New ImageSharp.Web Features ImageSharp is a new, fully-featured, fully managed, cross-platform, 2D graphics library. Designed to simplify image processing, ImageSharp brings you an incredibly powerful yet beautifully simple API. With the v1.0., ImageSharp has got a bunch of new features and it's now a lot faster. And Orchard Core is also using ImageSharp to work with images. New features included: Format support to the Tag Helpers/Liquid Filters: The slight weirdness with adding this is the file extension on the URL will remain .png, but the image will be returned with the correct mime/type. Quality support to jpg encoding and Tag Helpers/Liquid Filters: The Quality support allows you to specify a quality % to jpg encoding. Note: only jpg encoding is supported, but the Format support allows you to convert an image from saying png to jpg, and then reduce the quality. CurrentCulture/InvariantCulture for query string parameters: Supported through custom ImageSharp configuration, but not integrated into Orchard Core. Basing this decision primarily on the idea that most of our resizing/processing query string building, is done through templates, which are culture invariant. And that's not all of it! There is now a new Media profiles feature in Orchard Core that allowing you to specify resizing options and much other stuff. A profile can then be called with the profile name resize_url: profile: 'banner' rather than having to specify all the resizing options that may apply. But that's enough talk for now, let's see them in action, after all, we are in the Demos section of This week in Orchard, right? Use the latest nightly build of Orchard Core and set up your site using the Agency recipe. Then navigate to the admin UI where you will see a new option in the menu (make sure to enable the Media profiles feature): Configuration -> Media -> Media Profiles. Media Profiles are quite simple, they just have the standard resizing options that we have in ImageSharp. Notice that here you can set the width and the height values only from the supported ones. We add the name md to this media profile, let's note it, we will need it right away. Now navigate to Design -> Templates and edit the predefined Content__LandingPage Liquid template. We will use the newly created image profile when displaying the portfolio images. Just a note here: the home page in this agency is a LandingPage content type that has several Bag Parts attached. The one with the display name Portfolio is about to add Project content types to your LandingPage content type. And the Project content type has a Media Field attached, called Image. In this Liquid template, we will use our newly created md media profile. Here we say use the md media profile when displaying these images and in this particular case we would like to override the resize mode for the processed image. Instead of crop, we would like to stretch these images, but just in this case. When you define a media profile, you can say I don't want to specify the width, the height or the resize mode. In that case, you can set them in your Liquid helper, just as you could do that before. Now, let's just check out how does the home page of our site looks like. Remember that we set a lot of values when setting up our md media profile and we also set the quality percentage for the processed image and we set it as 10. We also change the width and height values and override the resize mode to stretch the images. This result is low quality stretched images in the Portfolio section. Now let's see the source code of this page and check out the img tags using the DevTools of Chrome. As you can see it's not tied to ImageSharp, the logic just converts the media profile into a good query string. This means we can do the override easier and if we change the values the URL will change, and it breaks the cache. When you would like to show the kittens.jpg with 100 width and 100 height, by using the crop resize mode (that resizes the image using the same functionality as max then removes any image area falling outside the bounds of its container) and use only 50% as the quality when compressing the image you would write a Liquid filter like this: {{ 'animals/kittens.jpg' | asset_url | resize_url: width:100, height:240, mode:'crop', quality: 50, format:'jpg' }} The documentation is also updated to help you how to use these new arguments. Don't forget to head to YouTube and watch the recording of this awesome feature! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 162 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 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!

Get ready for the upcoming additions of Orchard Core! This week you can see demos about adding distributed cache to Orchard Core and the latest improvements of YesSql! Orchard Core updates Restrict Content Types Admin Node to only create the specified content type Let's say you have a site set up with the Blog recipe and your goal is to add a new admin menu that is about to list all the existing Article content items. To do that you have to navigate to Configuration -> Admin Menu and click on the Add Node button. Here you will need to select the Content Types Admin Node because you would like to add a link for each one of the selected content types from the list. And yes, you will only select the Article content type in the next screen. And that's it, you have created a new admin menu that lists all of the Article content items from the system. If you click on that you will see the list of the Article content items. Note that from now you will not see a filter here to filter by content types because that really doesn't make much sense. You created this Content Types Admin Node to list only the Article content items. If you would like to filter by content type, use the filter in the Content -> Content Items page as you would do it before. Remove ManageOwnMedia permission The ManageOwnMedia permission isn't handled today and we can replace it with the ManageMedia permission. So, now there is no separate permission to manage their own media or manage the media. It will be added back to the system again if the authorization logic is to be able to separate the user's media and the media uploaded by others. Right now, if you head to Security -> Roles and hit the Edit button near one of the Roles, you will see the missing Manage Own Media permission. Use a dropdown menu on the admin top navbar for the user menu The user menu on the admin theme is just about listing the user name of the currently logged-in user with a little icon near it. And there was a Log off link at the right side of the user name. It was just a piece of HTML code in the Layout.cshtml file of the default admin theme. From now the whole user menu gets its own shape, called UserMenu.cshtml. If you would like to override the user menu, you don't need to create a Layout.cshtml file in your admin theme, you just need to override the UserMenu.cshtml file. And if you check out this GIF, you will see that now the content of the user menu is placed in a dropdown instead of having it's content inline. Document release procedure Orchard Core is open-source that means you can check out and request changes to the source code, tell your opinion about it, and update the relevant documentation for that piece of code. Now there is a new page in the Orchard Core Documentation about how to publish a new Orchard Core release. These notes are primarily for Orchard's core contributors to guide them on how to prepare a new release, but if you just take a look at these you can now see what are the steps that need to be done to be able to ship a new release of Orchard Core. Add option to allow Lucene query syntax in the search There is a setting in the Lucene module that you can turn on and whatever you type in the search box won't be parsed as 'these are the words that I need to search on', but parsed as this is a Lucene query. You can use the Lucene query syntax in search forms, like the quotes, plus signs and things like this. But by default, it will still be like today, which is type words and it looks for these words. If you type stuff that has weird characters, they would be ignored. But how can I turn on that feature? Just navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core, then find the settings in Search -> Settings -> Search (make sure you have enabled the Lucene module). Demos YesSql: Adding support for multi filters on the same table index There is a new method on .IQuery called .Or(), which starts a filter on a distinct table. This can be used for instance when the same index needs to be queried for multiple sets. It will actually add many filters on the same record of the index. With .Or() you can do now filters on different inner joins of the same index. Which means it will do unions of result with the filters. Let's check out the following unit test. [Fact]public async Task ShouldQueryMultipleIndexes(){ // We should be able to query documents on multiple rows in an index. // This mean the same Index table needs to be JOINed. _store.RegisterIndexes<PersonIdentitiesIndexProvider>(); using (var session = _store.CreateSession()) { var hanselman = new Person { Firstname = "Scott", Lastname = "Hanselman" }; var guthrie = new Person { Firstname = "Scott", Lastname = "Guthrie" }; session.Save(hanselman); session.Save(guthrie); } using (var session = _store.CreateSession()) { Assert.Equal(2, await session.Query<Person>() .With<PersonIdentity>(x => x.Identity == "Hanselman") .Or() .With<PersonIdentity>(x => x.Identity == "Guthrie")) .CountAsync()); }} This PersonIdentitiesIndexProvider will just map the first name and the last name of each person. We created two persons here that means the provider will be creating four PersonIdentity records. Two to store the first name and last name for Scott Hanselman and two to store the first name and the last name of Scott Guthrie. If without using the .Or() it will issue a query where the Identity == "Hanselman" AND Identity == "Guthrie", which will return nothing. With the .Or(), it will do an inner join on PersonIdentity with a filter on Identity == "Hanselman" and another inner join on PersonIdentity with a filter on Identity == "Guthrie". In this case, we will get both the two persons. It's like give me any person who's PersonIdentity has a record like Hanselman OR where the PersonIdentity equals Guthrie. Let's see another example! // Creating articles.using (var session = store.CreateSession()){ session.Save(new Article { Content = "This is a green fox" }); session.Save(new Article { Content = "This is a yellow cat" }); session.Save(new Article { Content = "This is a pink elephant" }); session.Save(new Article { Content = "This is a green tiger" });}using (var session = store.CreateSession()){ Console.WriteLine("Boolean query: 'pink or tiger'"); var boolQuery = await session.Query<Article>() .Where(x => x.Word.IsIn(new[] { "pink" })) .Or() .Where(x => x.Word.IsIn(new[] { "tiger" })) .ListAsync();} This is a full-text sample where in this case we can query documents by their content, by their words. If we have the documents as you could see in the code, we are creating an index for all the words pointing to the document, like green and fox points to the first Article. Now the query is about to give me all the documents that have pink in it OR all the documents that have tiger in it. The goal is to get the last two articles in this case. Let's check out this query: var boolQuery = await session.Query<Article, ArticleByWord>().Where(a => a.Word.IsIn(new[] { "white", "fox", "pink" })).ListAsync(); This query will return all the articles that have white AND fox AND pink in it and there is none in this case. You can find the recording of this improvement on YouTube! But wait a minute! Could this syntax be better? When you have a query, you can say .Any() and every predicate will be done in a different table. .Any() being an OR, and .All() being an AND. In this case, we're querying on the same index (ArticleByWord) but each of the calls on .With() will be a different projection, a different inner join in this case. Here we are looking for an article that has the word pink OR the words green AND fox. await session.Query<Article>() .Any( x => x.With<ArticleByWord>(a => a.Word == "pink"), x => x.All( x => x.With<ArticleByWord>(a => a.Word == "green"), x => x.With<ArticleByWord>(a => a.Word == "fox"))).ListAsync(); SELECT DISTINCT Document.* FROM DocumentINNER JOIN ArticleByWord_Document AS [ArticleByWord_Document_a1] ON ArticleByWord_Document_a1.DocumentId = Document.IdINNER JOIN ArticleByWord AS [ArticleByWord_a1] ON [ArticleByWord_a1].Id = ArticleByWord_Document_a1.ArticleByWordIdINNER JOIN ArticleByWord_Document AS [ArticleByWord_Document_a2] ON ArticleByWord_Document_a2.DocumentId = Document.IdINNER JOIN ArticleByWord AS [ArticleByWord_a2] ON [ArticleByWord_a2].Id = ArticleByWord_Document_a2.ArticleByWordIdINNER JOIN ArticleByWord_Document AS [ArticleByWord_Document_a3] ON ArticleByWord_Document_a3.DocumentId = Document.IdINNER JOIN ArticleByWord AS [ArticleByWord_a3] ON [ArticleByWord_a3].Id = ArticleByWord_Document_a3.ArticleByWordIdWHERE ArticleByWord_a1.Word = 'pink' OR ( ArticleByWord_a2.Word = 'green' AND ArticleByWord_a3.Word = 'fox') Here you can also see how does the query look like. That's the current syntax right now. And it's not breaking change because if you had .query.With().With(), it will still behave the same as before. It will be a single projection with two .With(). If you project on the same table it will be an AND on the same table, the same projection.If you would like to know more about the current syntax and the latest features, this is the YouTube video that you are looking for! Distributed Redis Cache There is a huge PR with a great addition to Orchard Core about having Distributed Cache in Orchard Core. In fact, this PR is related to all modules services using cached data that need to be in sync with a shared database, e.g. site settings and other admin settings, templates, queries, layers, and so on. Currently, in the dev branch, this is already the case for most of them but by using local memory cache entries that are invalidated through a distributed signal. This PR has changed this pattern by using a multi-level cache including a distributed cache. And Jean-Thierry Kéchichian made more services to be distributed aware, there are remaining things but could be done in other PRs. And recently he added the ability through a separate feature to also keep in sync tenant states, when you enable/disable/create/setup a tenant. To summarize: All services that were using the memory cache are now using a multi-level cache including a distributed cache, this cache is kept in sync with the database without using a message bus but document identifiers. We have concrete implementations of distributed services based on Redis, Redis cache, Redis data protection, Redis message bus, and Redis lock. In the current code, we never use a message bus/distributed lock. When enabling a concrete distributed cache in the default tenant, we automatically keep all tenants in sync through a hosted service, here also without using a message bus but identifiers. Here a stateless configuration is needed. There is a separate feature (DefaultTenantOnly) to keep tenants in sync. Don't forget to head to YouTube and watch the recording of this upcoming feature! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 160 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 published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

We prepared with an interesting topic for this week about how could you use shapes like reusable Angular components? But before that, we checked the latest updates of Orchard Core, like the new updates around Tag Helpers. Orchard Core updates Add UI permissions based on the user role This is about hiding some buttons based on the permissions, instead of returning the 401 page when clicking on those. What do we mean? Well, let's say we have a permission that doesn't contain a role to publish or unpublish pages. That means users with that permission can't see the Publish button at the bottom of the editor in a case of a Page content item. Meeting information in the documentation When you open the Orchard Core documentation page and navigate to Resources, you will find a new link in the Resources column at the left called Meeting. If you click on that you will see a brand new page where you can find every relevant information about the steering committee and the triage meetings. Support for dropping a password from a password manager during setup Some password managers let you drag and drop a password to a textbox. During setup, if we do this rather than focus then type or paste, the tick appears in the input, but the strength indicator doesn't update and clicking Finish setup just does nothing with no indication. The fix was to update the strength.js file to check for the drop event. Add missing Tag Helper references The root of this issue was the Tag Helpers are found during development because of the runtime compilation. But when you change the environment from development to production, it stops working if you don't have a direct reference on the ResourceManagement project. The compilation doesn't find the issue, because it's a runtime resolution. Yes, you can use the a tag it will compile, but in runtime, it has a different behavior based on the projects you reference and you don't get the behavior you expect. The only thing you can do is to have a functional test to be sure that it would work. Tag Helper for the anchor tag with asset-href attribute Added an HtmlTargetElement to the Anchor Tag Helper to also address anchor tags with asset-href attributes. Added needed const and property and changed the Process logic to require non-null asset-href for anchor tags. So, if you use the asset-href in the anchor tag, it will convert the URL of a media URL to a public URL. Demos Shape Components What makes it hard to build a new site using Orchard Core? The ultimate solution would be to remove the templating in Orchard and just use decoupled. So, you don't have to know about shapes at all. And then you just write your pages, your controllers, you have lot's of APIs to get your content, you can reuse ASP.NET caching and do your decoupled site like this. It would be a decoupled site. Let's just forget about shapes and rendering everything from modules. Just let people render their own things and provide tools to render the site. It might be slower at first to build the site, but they will never be blocked by 'I don't know what a shape is.' or 'I don't understand how shapes work.', 'What is placement?' and so on. We have themes and recipes today that build some predefined solutions, like a blog or an agency site and they can be extended to anything. For that, you still have to understand all the shape- and display mechanisms to build these elements. A new solution would be to still create recipes, but recipes that would contain Razor Pages and controllers and anything that would build a blog even if we didn't have shapes and placement and everything. Like build a decoupled site that is a blog and this is the recipe. When you install it you have the same blog, the same theme working and if you want to change it, you don't have to learn shapes. You just look at the page that renders the blog, the blog post and you just change it. Or you create a new one and change the code directly. This would be just ASP.NET, there is nothing new to learn out of ASP.NET. That would be a solution to have. But let's say the issue is not about the shapes, because shapes are great. The issue is zones and placement. And these are harder to learn. Shapes in the end, if you just take shapes by themself, they are just dynamic ViewModels that have alternates and that can be rendered using templates. It's like a view component in ASP.NET. But it's like a view component with more features like it can have an ID, CSS classes, attributes, it can have dynamic behavior, it can have a caching, it has alternates. So, it has a dynamic resolution of templates, which the view component doesn't have. Let's think about a shape like a reusable component, like a view component in ASP.NET, but like an Orchard shape component, that can be reused. Were we able to pique your curiosity? Then just navigate to YouTube and see this exciting demo about shape components! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 160 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 guides in the Orchard Core documentation to learn how to build a blog that allows users to login with their AzureAD account and gets assigned roles based on the Security Groups they belong to, and how to create a Deployment Plan to migrate from the File Content Definition feature. After we will show you our new Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions feature! Orchard Core updates Content definition stores guide Now you can find a new small guide in the Orchard Core documentation that explains what the File Content Definition feature is, and how to create a Deployment Plan to migrate from the File Content Definition feature. Implement class and alt attributes for ImageShortCode Shortcodes are small pieces of code wrapped into [brackets] that can add some behavior to content editors, like embedding media files. The Image Shortcode can be used to display an image from the media library in your WYSIWYG editors. The simplest way to use that Shortcode is the following: You can also provide several attributes, like the width, height, and mode. And now you can also pass the alt attribute that specifies an alternate text for an image if the image cannot be displayed. And you can pass your custom classes too! In the following line we used the Image Shortcode with multiple parameters: Users with Manage Users permission can't delete themselves or change their roles If you try to delete the admin account and you are currently the admin what you could do is actually block everyone from being able to edit the site if the admin is the only user. The idea here is that you can't delete yourself. If you navigate to Security -> Users and edit the admin user, you will see that the editor of the roles and the Is enabled? checkbox are disabled. Don't Detach a document already loaded for update This is about how documents are loaded from cache stores. If you use the ASP.NET caching abstractions you can store in the IMemoryCache or in the IDistributedCache. The main difference between these two is that in the IDistributedCache you would put stuff that has to be and can be serialized. In IMemoryCache you can put stuff that is not serialized. It's a live object that can be changed and updated. There is a new method for documents in the ISessionHelper called GetForCachingAsync that gets a single document (or create a new one) for caching and that should not be updated, and a bool indicating if it can be cached, not if it has been already loaded for an update. Note that for full isolation, it needs to be used in pairs with the LoadForUpdateAsync method that loads a single document (or create a new one) for updating and that should not be cached. When you call the GetForCachingAsync method you say that the object that you want to load from the database will be cached, which means you should not change it. You should not be able to update it, it's for caching. When you get a document from the database from this layer it will tell you if you are allowed to change it or not. This way you know you can put it in a durable cache or a live cache. Use Azure AD as an external identity provider guide In order to authenticate users with AzureAD, you must enable and configure the OrchardCore.MicrosoftAuthentication.AzureAD (you can learn more about here) and the OrchardCore.Users.Registration features. There is a new guide in the documentation where you will learn to build a blog that allows users to login with their AzureAD account and gets assigned roles based on the Security Groups they belong to. Demos Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions Lombiq Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions adds a dump of metadata to the output about every shape. This will help you understand how a shape is displayed and how you can override it. But let' see how you can use it in your solution! Imagine you have a NuGet-based Orchard Core solution and you would like to use the Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions. For that, you have to clone or download the orchard-core-preview branch of the Helpful Extensions repository that is targeting a recent nightly build of Orchard Core and you will only find the Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions in that branch. Now head to the GitHub repository of the Helpful Libraries module (same branch) and clone or download that too. You will need this library to use the Helpful Extensions. Now add these as an existing project to your solution and don't forget to check the project reference between these two! Reference the Lombiq.HelpfulExtensions module in your Web project and now you are ready to go! Set up a site using the Blog recipe then navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the word helpful. Here you can find all of the following independent extensions of the module. If you are interested in the other ones too, check out the Readme.MD file of the repository for more! Now we will enable the Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions - Lombiq Helpful Extension feature. After you will get a dump about shapes in the HTML output. Just view the page source where you will see several comments in the code. These are generated when the shape is displayed that gives you some basic debug data. You can use these to actually override the shape. If you navigate to the detail view of the built-in blog post, you will see every relevant data that could be important for you to override the given shape, check the display type, the position, the differentiator, the wrappers of the shape and many more! But that's not all about Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions! If you would like to see more, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Nuggets: How to debug a NuGet-based Orchard Core solution? How can you debug Orchard Core code when you're working with a solution that loads Orchard packages from NuGet? Easily! In our newest Orchard Nuggets post, we give you the answer! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 160 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 are gonna show you three brand new features that are recently added to Orchard Core: the Add Content To Deployment Plan, the Export Content To Deployment Target, and View Or Download Content As JSON features. After we see a demo about user impersonation and finally we solve the mystery about what is GitHub Arctic Code Vault? Orchard Core updates Add Content To Deployment Plan, Export Content To Deployment Target, and View Or Download Content As JSON features Set up your site using the Blog recipe. Now you can head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Add Content To Deployment Plan, Export Content To Deployment Target, and View Or Download Content As JSON features. This will bring you several new stuff that you can use when you are managing the content items. If you click on the Actions button you can see that the context menu is now getting a lot more items. The Export to Deployment Target is about to automatically create a custom recipe file that can be downloaded locally or send it to a remote instance. You can use the Available Targets modal to select the destination. The Add to Deployment Plan is about to add a new content item step using this content item to an existing deployment plan. In this case, a new modal window will open again that lets you choose from the available deployment plans. The Download as JSON is about to directly download the recipe to your computer locally and the View as JSON is a very helpful feature because as you could see in the screen below it shows you the JSON representation of the content item. The same JSON will go to the content step of the recipe when you are hitting the Download as JSON button. Here you have the availability to copy the JSON structure by clicking on the copy icon at the top-right corner of the page. And don't forget that you can find two demos on YouTube about this feature. Click here for the Click to deploy demo and here to see the second part of the demo! Add authentication checks to some ISite drivers We had some drivers in Orchard Core where we hadn't check that the user has the appropriate permissions to modify the changes of given settings because the controllers won't do that for us. For example, if the user would like to change the settings of the reCAPTCHA, then we have to make sure that the user has the ManageReCaptchaSettings permission to do that. Now, these missings checks are added to the code. Fixing Linux setup by making sure a directory created before creating a file Let's say you would like to host your Orchard Core site in a Linux environment. But unfortunately, the setup failed on installation from Docker-Linux container. The strange issue was a directory needed to be created before file creation. Navigate to the SaveContentDefinitionAsync method of the FileContentDefinitionStore to see the check for the directory. Document HTML Sanitizer and Markdown Pipeline Options An HTML Sanitizer is available as part of the Orchard Core Infrastructure. The Sanitizer cleans user input that could lead to XSS attacks. From now you will find a new page in the Orchard Core Documentation about how to use the Sanitizer in your Razor view, how to configure the Sanitizer in the Startup classes, and much more. Markdown output is also sanitized during the rendering of content with Display Management. This page contains new sections about how to enable/disable or configure the Markdown Sanitization using the MarkdownPipelineOptions. Demos User impersonation Open GitHub in your browser and navigate to the OrchardCoreContrib.Modules repository. This repository contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS driven by the community members who love Orchard Core. Here we will focus on the one called Impersonation. That feature allows administrators to sign in with other user identities. To try this out, let's clone or download this repository then set up your site using a chosen recipe. After, navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the Impersonation feature. To try out the impersonation, we need to have multiple users in the system. Go to Security -> Users and click on the Add User button to add a new one. In this case, we created a new user with the Author role with the author user name. In the users list, you will find a new green button called Impersonate. Here the Impersonate button is disabled for the admin user because we have already signed in with that user. So, click on that button near the user named author and see what will happen! You could notice a slightly changed admin UI in this case. The reason for that is quite simple: users with the Author role have access to the admin UI with some content and media library-related permissions. So in that case you can do and you can see what this exact user can see and can do in that site. It's a good way to for example test the permissions and the rights for that user. If you would like to end the impersonation and return your work using your account, you can just simply have to navigate to Security -> End Impersonation, that will do the trick for you. If you are interested in the full demo, head to YouTube for the recording! News from the community Orchard Core on GitHub Arctic Code Vault The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a data repository preserved in the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. The archive is located in a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago, closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle. GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository on 02/02/2020 and preserved that data in the Arctic Code Vault. And why it is important? Because Orchard Core also sits in this Code Vault! If you have contributed a repository that is in the Code Vault you will see that in your GitHub profile! Check out this exciting video about the GitHub Arctic Code Vault! Lombiq Offline event Sometimes it's not just about work but doing something just for fun. These events are specifically for this: we get together, do something cool like breaking out of an escape room, going for a go-kart ride, or playing paintball. A few days ago we went hiking then we went back to Budapest in a boat. Check out this new picture of our team, shot at our Lombiq Offline event! While here in Hungary there are no restrictions on events like this anymore, we played it safe with a fully outdoor program. You can find this new picture on our About us page too! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 156 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 prepared with two new demos: the Taxonomy Localization and the Orchard Core OpenAPI Code Generation Tools based on NSwag! But before doing that, let's see the latest changes that will be added to the RC2 release of Orchard Core that is now really just a few days ahead! Orchard Core updates Refactor Blog recipe to have fewer required fields You may found that creating blog posts in Orchard Core using the Blog recipe could be not very user friendly. When you create a new blog post, you have to provide tags and select the category for the posts, however, you will also need to add a banner image for it. These are all required fields, without these, you cannot publish your post. But from now these fields are optional and the Markdown editor is just below the Title and the Permalink, so you don't need to scroll down to start typing your new exciting post! Add ConfirmationEmailSubject to RegisterUserTask When you are dealing with workflows you can find a task called Register User. This is about register a user from a form field, meaning that the activity is getting the request body as a form to get an IFormCollection and try to get the UserName and Email values from that. If everything goes fine, the task will register the user and if you edit the activity, you will find some more stuff to set up! Here you can say to send a confirmation email to the user with a given subject and you can also use a template for the confirmation email if you want! How to contribute to the Orchard Core documentation? Have you ever thought about contributing to the Orchard Core documentation, but you cannot find a line about how to do that? Well, here comes the good news! From now, you will find a new guide in the documentation that tells you everything that you need to know to add your great getting started guides, tutorials, and everything to the documentation! Thank you for doing that! Change content API permissions You want anonymous users to be able to view your site, view your page/content item and it would just show what the layout is or the view is. But you might not want anonymous users to retrieve the full content item JSON payload, because it might shows some properties and metadata that you don't want to expose. For that, you could use the custom permission called GetApiContent that you can assign to specific roles and this is not assigned to anonymous users by default. Now, this permission was renamed to AccessContentApi and protects all /api/content methods. If you don't want a user to see all the fields, just don't grant access to the APIs at all, hence the GetApiContent permission is not required as a separate one. This will also protect POST that currently returns the full content. And one more thing: the GetApiContent was already added to the Authenticated role. Now it's removed from that role as being authenticated should not grant access to all fields. Prevent array duplication when merging existing content When you do Merge using JSON.Net it will just merge the different arrays. In some cases, it's not what you want. If you want an array to be replaced (for example an array of tags) then it will just add a new tag to that array and not replacing the array with a new array. On the POST operation of the API, you just want to replace the value and the PATCH operation should be the one that merges different arrays in this case. So, the Content ApiController needs to use ArrayHandling.Replace when updating existing content, or array values are duplicated. Here you can see the changed code and here comes the UpdateJsonMergeSettings: private static readonly JsonMergeSettings UpdateJsonMergeSettings = new JsonMergeSettings { MergeArrayHandling = MergeArrayHandling.Replace }; Demos Taxonomy Localization Have you ever wondered how to localize your taxonomy terms in Orchard Core? Well, it could be hard to do it for the first time, but if you are watching the following recording you can get some tips and tricks to reach your goal faster! Orchard Core OpenAPI Code Generation Tools based on NSwag Head to GitHub and clone the master branch of the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi repository. Make sure that the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.Sample project is your starting project then just simply build and run the solution. When setting up your site don't forget to use the Open API Sample recipe to enable the needed modules and theme. If you navigate to https://localhost:44300/swagger, you will see the endpoints that are available in Orchard Core and a sample controller named Foo that comes from the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.SampleModule module. Here you can make queries on them and now we will also get schemas that are generated using the NSwag toolchain! Let's check for example the BlogPostItemDto! Now we can use those! The samples folder contains a console client that you can use to try the endpoints. You can simply open the solution with Visual Studio (ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.ConsoleClient.sln) and fire up the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.ConsoleClient project. This is about calling the endpoints by using a static HttpClient. Open the Program.cs file and check the first few lines of the Main method here. You could see that we are getting a content item by the 4qnhdhv3z54xk4fg4tdfke76c9 and we get the content of the content item in the FooTextItemDto object. The content item with the mentioned ID is a content item of the Foo text content type, which has got one Text Field attached, named Foo Field. Our client modifies the text of this field and making a POST request to send the updated data to Orchard Core. Now if you read back from the API you will get the updated content item with the new text in the Foo Field. But there is a lot more than that! You can see that you can get the RecentBlogPosts Lucene query and use the response data, or do other Lucene queries (like give me all the blog posts) and so on. If you are interested in it, there is also a TypeScript client (tsClient.ts) which has the same kind of classes and can be used directly from TypeScript. Of course, before doing that, you have to do the authentication, get the token, and so on. For that, you have to enable the OpenID module and configure it. It also comes with the recipe by default. The back-end, the Swagger is using Authorization Code Flow, and the console client is using Client Credentials Flow. The client app has a specific API role because it's relevant to just give very limited and specific access to the system. And that's not all of it! If you need more details about the project, don't forget to check the recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Nuggets: How to access services from another tenant in Orchard Core? Do you run a multi-tenant Orchard Core site? Have you ever wondered how you can cross tenant boundaries? We show you the code! Check out our latest Orchard Nugget post for more! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Updated Dojo library We've updated the famous Dojo Library to Orchard Core! Orchard Dojo is a portable package of coding and training guidelines, development utilities. Check out our updated library and start learning today! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 146 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!

Are you tired of the existing built-in themes in Orchard Core? Do you want to try new ones? Well, let us show you a brand new theme called The Medium Theme! The scheduled publish feature now can be used with the nightly build packages! And if you want to expand your knowledge you can read about the security-critical permissions, the new methods in the IContentHandler interface, and many more! Orchard Core updates Make FormPart generic Now you can customize a FormPart attached to any content type and define the enctype to use when submitting the form using POST method or you can enable the Antiforgery Token if you want. You can also customize the wrapper around your form. Just enable the Forms module and attach the FormPart to your type. Then you will find the following screen when editing your content type. Render BagPart items with Summary display type If you have widgets inside a BagPart, they would be displayed with the Detail display type and shows unnecessary stuffs. But the whole thing is quite weird. Why would you add a widget to a BagPart? For widgets, you can use the FlowPart and add widgets there. BagPart is for content items not for widgets. If they are in BagPart it will break your themes if you have provided custom templates for widgets using the Detail display type instead of the Summary one. You can still change the display type for the items in the BagPart to another display type if you want to customize the rendering. Here you could see a widget Summary template (Widget.Summary.cshtml) that would be used in case if you render a widget inside a BagPart because it will use the Summary display type. So, in a nutshell: BagPart will render content items as Summary display type. If any content type template was customized for Detail (Content-Foo.cshtml) in BagParts, it will need to be changed to the Summary display type (Content-Foo.Summary.cshtml). Make content recipe step idempotent If you check the IContentHandler interface you will find some new endpoints: ImportingAsync ImportedAsync ValidatingAsync ValidatedAsync The goal of these new methods is that any import or API call to query content have to be idempotent, meaning that the same action will be executed multiple times and that will result in the same effect, like if you say create a content item with the ID = 1, the first time it will create it, the second time it will tell you it's nothing to do because it's already done. Or if you call delete something 10 times, it will do it for the first time and don't do anything for the next one, don't break anything, just tell you that the call is already done. But if you say create new items 10 times, it will create them 10 times, depends on the parameters you pass. Let's see an example in the AliasPartHandler. If you try to import a content item with an alias that already exists, the result will be a fail with an error Your alias is already in use. Update configuration docs There is a section in the documentation that now shows you how to create a tenant just from the configuration. Add Scheduled Publish functionality Some weeks ago we showed you an upcoming feature to Orchard Core that is about to publish a content item in a given time in the future. Now, this feature is merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core, so if you are using the nightly builds of Orchard Core, update to the latest and try out this feature now! If you haven't heard about this module yet, check out the demo about how to use it on YouTube! Make Import Data a security-critical permission As a reminder, security-critical permission is a permission that could enable you to elevate your permissions and abuse a feature to become a super admin. There are some critical features in Orchard Core like running a recipe. If you run a recipe you can enable any feature, a feature that might give you access to anything or change some content that might give you access to anything. The Import Data Permission should be listed as security-critical because with it you can import any data to the site, including changes to roles, which could elevate permissions. The way how you can create security permissions can be seen for example in the Permissions class of the Deployment module. Demos New Orchard Core theme: The Medium Theme The Medium Theme is a free, open-source theme that you can find in the following repository. Sipke Schoorstra decided to create an Orchard Core theme based on The Medium Theme and make it open-source. This repository not just containing the theme itself, but you can find there some useful features too. Later, the theme will get its own repository. The comments are not supported yet, but that's on the roadmap that you can also find in the Readme.md file of the repository. The blog posts are associated with owners, for that the User extended with a couple of settings. Blog posts can have tags and you have many other features to use in your theme. If you are interested in everything about the new theme, don't forget to check the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Stability updates for our Orchard Visual Studio Extension Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension is a Visual Studio extension with many features and templates frequently used by Lombiq developers. It contains Orchard-related (including Orchard Core) as well as generic goodies. This extension has an Orchard Log Watcher feature, that alerts you when you have any new entry in the log file. When you install this extension, you will see a new button on the Orchard Log Watcher toolbar. The button of this toolbar will be enabled when you have unread entries in the error log files. If you click on this button, the log file will be opened with the editor assigned to open .log files. And that's not all of the features of this extension! This week we released a new version that contains stability updates that fixing some potential embarrassing UI freezes. If you have it installed, the update will arrive automatically, otherwise check out here the open-source extension. In GitHub, you can find the extension's Readme with release notes too. Also, if you encountered bugs or have a feature request please add it on the GitHub page as well. Lombiq and open-source Open-source software is something we live and breathe. Check out how we contribute to the very foundation of the IT world by reading the Lombiq and open-source post on our website! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 145 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!

Get ready for a deep dive! In our post, we will introduce the IScopedDitributedCache service and show how to use it in the RoleStore. And we are going to solve the mystery about do you need the Model prefix to access different kinds of properties of a model in Liquid and in Razor too? Orchard Core updates Document recipes new Lucene settings There is new documentation on the updated Lucene index settings. Now to create an index from a recipe, it's not just about passing the name of the analyzer. You have to provide the following: AnalyzerName: the name of the analyzer, that you want to use. IndexLatest: a boolean value that indicates that if you want to index the latest or just the published versions. IndexedContentTypes: the list of types you want to index. Re-use in some places the ContentItem Liquid property There was a change in the Liquid TemplateContext, that broke some properties, that are available in the templates. If your AliasPart, AutoroutePart or Workflows patterns don't work anymore, it's because of the previous change. Now, this issue has been fixed. For example in an Autoroute pattern that used to render the custom URL of the content type you could do something like: {{ ContentItem.DisplayText | slugify }} That will generate a nice text for your routes. But in some cases, you have to write {{ Model.ContentItem.DisplayText | slugify }}. Maybe using the Model prefix is collateral damage, but maybe it has a purpose. Anytime we have a Liquid template for a shape we do Model.ContentItem to get the ContentItem. In Razor everything is Model.Something. It has to be because in Razor we are doing C# and the current context is the page and the page is a class that doesn't have our properties like @ContentItem. So the only thing we could get is the @Model that is typed to the generic type of the RazorPage and Model will provide all the properties like the ContentItem. Because we do too much Razor, it could be possible that we reused this approach into some Liquid patterns. In Liquid it's not necessary to have the Model prefix. But it appears that there is already a way in Fluid to use a first-level model without a custom prefix (so we don't need a Model prefix), by setting the TemplateContext.Model property. In conclusion: in Liquid that is easier to write {{ ContentItem.DisplayText }}, you don't need the Model prefix. But in Razor, you have to use the Model prefix. Constraint admin controllers to mapped routes Since we can change the prefix of the admin route, we have to ensure that every admin controller's actions have the correct prefix to use. There is an implementation of the IActionConstraint, called AdminActionConstraint, that checks if we are in the admin and the route doesn't start with the admin URL prefix (_adminUrlPrefix), then it will create a warning log entry. So, the AdminActionConstraint applies a convention that restraints all AdminControllers or [Admin] controllers to use the mapped route only, and not the default route applied by MVC. Fix the recipes not found bug in the documentation We have a guide about how to create a new decoupled CMS Website using Orchard Core. It told you to add the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet package to your new ASP.NET Core project, because this package won't contain the themes. And when you do a decoupled CMS site you will don't need the themes, because you want to create your own front end. The issue is with this package on the master branch is that the setup doesn't contain any recipe in the RC1 version. The community fixed that bug for now, but it's just in the dev branch yet. So, if you follow the guide and you using the RC1 version of that package, when you arrive at the setup screen you will not be able to set up the site because there will be no recipe to choose from. Mitigation is to use the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, that contains all the themes and recipes. Of course, in this case, you will get several unwanted themes, but you will not be blocked to continue following the guide. So, it's not the perfect solution, but when there will be a new version of Orchard Core, we can rewrite this back to use the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet. There is also a hint about if you are using the nightly builds of Orchard Core then you should use the Core package instead. Creating IScopedDitributedCache The main goal is to increase the performance of Orchard Core and try to make it faster from time to time. To measure that, check the blog posts Liquid template page and start to remove everything from there. Just to see how fast could be the performance if we didn't render anything. Then start to remove stuff from the controller that displays content. For example, let's take a look at the ItemController. This is the controller, that renders content items by default. Take a closer look at the Display method of this controller! It first loads the content item. If it's not there, we return a 404. Then we check the ViewContent permission for this content item for the current user. We return Forbid if they authenticated but don't have the proper permission, or return Challange if the user is anonymous. Now let's build the display! That will build a shape containing all the part shapes and everything for this content item. So, it will render the display of this content item and we send this shape to a view that will just call Display of the shape. That's what we do in this method. The thing that made it slow actually is that one which checks the permissions, the _authorizationService.AuthorizeAsync. The user is anonymous and checking that the anonymous users could see something was the bottleneck of the performance. For each display of the site, there would be a database query just to authorize the anonymous user to be able to see something. This is actually a regression. Once you remove this code the controller will be much faster. An authenticated user would have added Claims cached in the User object. But in the case of an anonymous user, nothing was cached. Each request for an anonymous user would ask the permission for the anonymous user from the RoleStore. The RoleStore would do a query all the time. There is a new service, called ScopedDistributedCache. The idea is to use a distributed cache, such that we would store the Roles document in memory if we have a single node or in a store that is shared across every node if you have multiple nodes. Scoped means if you do multiple queries on the same cache entry for the same request, then we will load it from the DistributedCache only once. That will be much faster if you have multiple queries. You can see the usage of the ScopedDistributedCache in the RoleStore. Instead of injecting the IMemoryCache (that puts everything in the memory that shared by all the request) here comes the IScopedDitributedCache. The code is much simpler with that: you just pass it an object. Check the GetRolesAsync and the UpdateRolesAsync methods of the RoleStore. Demos Make lists sortable with ordering setting Let's say you have a site that you set up using the Blog recipe. In that recipe you can find a Blog content type, that is used as a container of the Blog Post content items. To behave the Blog content type this way, you need to add the ListPart to it, which will add the list behavior. Here you could see a new option before the Contained Content Types list, called Enable Ordering. If you check this option you will enable the manual ordering of the items. Let's put a tick here! Now head to the Content -> Content Items page and select the one named Blog (or just simply hit Blog from the menu). Here you can see the list of the blog posts contained in this blog content item. Let's add more posts to it to see the power of this new feature! By using a simple drag and drop, you can set the order of the different items and save it on the fly. Check out the following GIF to see how the reordering works! This feature is under development, but you can find the code in this pull request. And don't forget to watch the recording about this demo, where you can also hear an informative discussion about some interesting questions to solve, for example, what about reordering content items that have a published and a draft version too? News from the community New Orchard Core site: Buzz Interactive Buzz believes that great digital products are built on intelligent strategy and outstanding technical abilities. They partner with vibrant clients and help them create future-proof platforms for web, app, and VR. And they use Orchard Core for their site! 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. 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 113 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!