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!

New deployment step for Open ID Server, a new multi-tenant platform built with Orchard Core and a very interesting demo about a custom admin tree module with taxonomy terms menu are waiting for you among other exciting news in this year's last This week in Orchard post! On Orchard Core Allow replacing a Liquid filter Orchard Core has several built-in Liquid filters. You can make your own Liquid filter if you implement the ILiquidFilter interface. However, it could be a valid use case if you would like to change the behavior of one of the predefined built-in filters and replace it with your own one. When registering a Liquid Filter to the service container, you have to do it in the ConfigureServices method of your Startup.cs file: public override void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){ services.AddLiquidFilter<BuildDisplayFilter>("shape_build_display"); services.AddLiquidFilter<ContentItemFilter>("content_item_id");} Here you can see how to register the shape_build_display and content_item_id filters. But let's have a closer look at that AddLiquidFilter extension method! public static IServiceCollection AddLiquidFilter<T>(this IServiceCollection services, string name) where T : class, ILiquidFilter{ services.Configure<LiquidOptions>(options => options.FilterRegistrations.Add(name, typeof(T))); services.AddScoped<T>(); return services;} You could see that every time when you call AddLiquidFilter it adds your filter to the FilterRegistrations Dictionary. To be able to override an existing Liquid filter with your own, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian had to change this extension method a little bit and instead of adding the new filter to this Dictionary, just overwrite an existing one. public static IServiceCollection AddLiquidFilter<T>(this IServiceCollection services, string name) where T : class, ILiquidFilter{ services.Configure<LiquidOptions>(options => options.FilterRegistrations[name] = typeof(T)); services.AddScoped<T>(); return services;} Delete role should warn the user if the role has associated users Let's create a custom role and let's name it Blogger. Now let's create a new user and add the Blogger role to it. Now go back to the Roles page and delete the Blogger role. If you hit the Delete button you will see a warning message, that says this role is associated to existing user(s). Prefix resource manager definitions for sample themes When you would like to register your resource using the ResourceManifest, you have to do something similar: manifest .DefineScript("vendor-bootstrap") .SetDependencies("vendor-jQuery") .SetUrl("~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js", "~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdn("https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js", "https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdnIntegrity("sha384-JjSmVgy...", "sha384-rkSXwmdF/9eRLkw/gNZG+1...") .SetVersion("4.3.1"); But what if you want to register Bootstrap again in your custom theme? You can do that of course, but when there are multiple resources with the same name, the resource manager takes the one with the highest version. // Use the highest version of all matchesif (resource == null || (resourceDefinition.Version != null && new Version(resource.Version) < version)){ resource = resourceDefinition;} To make things easier every predefined resource in the themes available in Orchard Core now has prefixes, which is the name of the theme. As you can see in the following code snippet, we registered the script for Bootstrap in the Blog theme with the name: TheBlogTheme-vendor-bootstrap. manifest .DefineScript("TheBlogTheme-vendor-bootstrap") .SetDependencies("TheBlogTheme-vendor-jQuery") .SetUrl("~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js", "~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdn("https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js", "https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdnIntegrity("sha384-JjSmV6OrQ6VrjIEaF...", "sha384-rkSGcqMuXXwmdF/9eRLkw/gNZG+1zYut...") .SetVersion("4.3.1"); Deployment step for Open ID Server Head to Configuration -> Features and enable the OpenID Authorization Server module. Then you will get a new OpenID Connect option under the Security menu, where you can set up the authorization server, application, and scopes. If you set up the server in a way (the way how it's not important right now) you can import the settings of your server if you create a new deployment plan under Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans. If you select the OpenID Server step, that will export all the Open ID Server settings. Just execute the deployment plan locally. After if you open the Recipe.json file in the zip you will find a section called OpenIdServer in the steps section. "steps": [ { "name": "OpenIdServer", "OpenIdServer": { "AccessTokenFormat": 0, "Authority": null, "CertificateStoreLocation": null, "CertificateStoreName": null, "CertificateThumbprint": null, "AuthorizationEndpointPath": "/connect/authorize", "LogoutEndpointPath": "/connect/logout", "TokenEndpointPath": "/connect/token", "UserinfoEndpointPath": "/connect/userinfo", "GrantTypes": [ "authorization_code", "refresh_token" ], "UseRollingTokens": false } }] In the specific content type list only allow the creation of the new content item of the selected type In the admin page, you have a Content Types submenu under the Content menu, where you can list all of the content items. If you click on one of those (for example the Article) there was a green New button where you can create any type of content item that is creatable. Now with a new improvement, the UI responds to the type of the selected content type and (if the Content Type is marked as creatable) you can create only a new content item of the selected type. Here you could see the green button has a text: New Article. New multi-tenant Orchard Core platform GovBuilt has over 30 years of government software experience. They worked with government employees, contractors, and citizens to build a best-in-class online solution that streamlines the permitting and licensing process. They offer a GovBuilt Platform built for Government. And they are using Orchard Core to build their solution! They have several tenants, and https://pottcounty.govbuilt.com/ is one of that! Demos Custom Admin Tree module with taxonomy terms menu You can find a new module in this repository called ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.AdminTree and a new theme here, called ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.Themes. If you clone these repositories and add them to your Orchard Core solution you will see a new module under Configuration -> Fetaures called ThisNetWorks Admin Tree Menus. ThisNetWorks Admin Tree module displays content items based on a URL tree or taxonomy structure. This module presents a taxonomy and it's associated terms in a tree menu. The primary purpose of this menu is intended to provide a way to manage complex taxonomies, in combination with a navigation system that makes manages those terms, and content items easier. Let's enable this feature! Now go Design -> Themes and make the ThisNetWorks Admin Theme as the current theme. This adapts the default admin theme to support the menu's on the left sidebar to include clickable entries on tree nodes (i.e. nodes that contain child items can also contain a link to an entry). To be able to test the current capabilities of this solution quickly, you can use a recipe (Configuration -> Recipes) called Categories, that contains sample content items and taxonomy for a taxonomy menu tree. After you run this recipe you should see the following admin menu structure. Here you can see a Categories option with several sub-items. Categories is a taxonomy with the Category term content type and this admin menu shows you the structure of the Categories taxonomy in a clickable way. For example, if you select Motorbike, the site lists you all the content items that have this taxonomy and the category of that is Motorbike. If you click on the blue Create Leaf Article button you can create a content item that has a permalink and the Categories taxonomy will be set to Motorbike by default. Let's see what will happen if you click on the View button near the Articles content item, that is the root term content item of the Categories taxonomy. As you can see, users in the front-end can navigate between the different levels of terms and when navigating between the different content items, you can use different kinds of badges to show the terms and of course, the URL reflects this change as well. This feature is under development and we hope that this will be part of Orchard Core soon! If you are interested in this demo don't forget to check this video on YouTube! On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 108 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!

Custom parameters support in recipes, new Retrieve Content task, improved Roles UI, a new post about Orchard Core, demos about the Open Tags and the headless recipe for Orchard Core! Should I continue? Many news is waiting for you in our current post and for closing, we would like to show you some nice pics about our Christmas event! On Orchard Core Custom parameters support in recipes From now you can set custom parameters in the appsettings.json file that can be passed and used in a recipe. As you can see in the documentation, you can access a parameter value like [js: configuration('CustomParameterKey')]. For this, there is a new ConfigurationMethodProvider that receives the ShellSettings and retrieve the value to replace by ShellSettings.ShellConfiguration["CustomPropertyKey"]. Add version and target framework variables in .props Hisham Bin Ateya refactored the Dependencies.AspNetCore.props file and created a new variable named AspNetCoreTargetFramework, which contains netcoreapp3.0. Now when there will be updates on ASP.NET Core we just only need to pick this up more easily. This will simplify the process when we need to update the AspNetCore version. Here is a snippet from the Dependencies.AspNetCore.props file: <Project> <PropertyGroup> <AspNetCoreVersion>3.0.0</AspNetCoreVersion> <AspNetCoreTargetFramework>netcoreapp3.0</AspNetCoreTargetFramework> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.AzureAD.UI" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Facebook" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Google" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> ... </ItemGroup></Project> And here is a snippet from one of the modules where we use the AspNetCoreTargetFramework variable: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Razor"> <PropertyGroup> <TargetFramework>$(AspNetCoreTargetFramework)</TargetFramework> <AddRazorSupportForMvc>true</AddRazorSupportForMvc> </PropertyGroup> ...</Project> New Retrieve Content workflow task There is a new task called Retrieve Content that tries and evaluates a content item ID from a JavaScript expression if provided. Let's see a sample workflow that has this new task in it. Here we have an HTTP Request Event as a start activity that creates a blog post that has a DisplayText: My blog post using the Create Content Task when someone invokes the URL with a GET method. The Create Content Task sets the WorkflowExecutionContext.CorrelationId (the correlation ID can be used to resume workflows that are associated with specific objects, such as content items) with the newly created content item's ID. As we mentioned, the Retrieve Content Task accepts a JavaScript expression, so here we used the correlationId() method to get the ID. The Retrieve Content Task returns the content item by it's ID and sets the WorkflowExecutionContext.LastResult with the retrieved content item. Now by adding a Notify Task, we can use a Liquid expression to display the DisplayText property of the newly created blog post content item. Finally, make a redirect to the admin page using an HTTP Redirect Task to see the displayed notification. Using custom admin URLs There is a new AdminOptions defined in the OrchardCore.Admin.Abstractions module. It tries to configure the prefix of the admin URL from the configuration and then it's creating a property called AdminUrlPrefix that is by default admin. You can change the prefix for all the admin pages. All you need to do is to add the following section to appsettings.json inside the section called OrchardCore: "OrchardCore.Admin": { "AdminUrlPrefix": "dashboard"} When you are creating a route to your AdminController, don't forget to change the route template of your controller to use this prefix like in the following snippet, which code can be found in the OrchardCore.AdminMenu module. public override void Configure(IApplicationBuilder builder, IEndpointRouteBuilder routes, IServiceProvider serviceProvider){ // Menu var menuControllerName = typeof(MenuController).ControllerName(); routes.MapAreaControllerRoute( name: "AdminMenuList", areaName: "OrchardCore.AdminMenu", pattern: _adminOptions.AdminUrlPrefix + "/AdminMenu/List", defaults: new { controller = menuControllerName, action = nameof(MenuController.List) } ); ...} Roles UI and default description We have role descriptions, but the default roles don't have any descriptions. This opens a great opportunity to improve the UI of the index and the edit pages of the Roles. In the index page, you can find the description of every role under its name and the Search box with a new UI. When you add a new role you can set its name and description. And when you edit an existing one, you can also edit its description. Here you can also find some hints about what is the difference between the Allow and Effective permissions. New post: Lucene, GraphQL and Orchard Core Sipke Schoorstra has published a nice article again in medium.com to guide people on how to implement Search using Orchard Core, Lucene and GraphQL. Read his interesting and easy to follow article about how to enable Lucene, set up a Lucene Query and consume the available APIs from Postman using Lucene and GraphQL, allowing us to use a consistent API from our applications. Demos Orchard Core headless recipe The idea of the headless recipe is to provide a recipe that sets up GraphQL, queries, and everything that has an API interface and restrict the interface down a little bit. The recipe has no home page, so when you set up your site using the recipe, you will see the login page first. And in the admin page, you will see only those options in the menu, that are related to the API interfaces. You can also watch a great detailed demo on YouTube about what will you get if you install your site using the headless recipe! Orchard Core Open Tags Last month you could see a great demo about how to work with tags using taxonomies in Orchard Core. Here we mentioned that when you add a taxonomy field to a content type with a Tags editor type and you type something in the field, you can't create a new tag that should be added to the list of tags, because that feature was under development that time. Now thanks to Dean Marcussen this is not an issue anymore. Let's see how he solved this problem! We have a site with the Blog recipe installed. Add a taxonomy field called Tags to the Blog Post content type using a Tags taxonomy with a Tag content type that has just a simple Title Part. Here use the Tags editor type with the Tags display mode. And here you could notice a new checkbox, called Open. As the hint says, if you put a tick here, you can create tags inline when editing or creating blog posts. Put a tick here and let's edit the predefined blog post! When typing something in the Tags editor and hit enter (or just click on it), you can add new tags to the Tags taxonomy and to this blog post as well. If you edit the Tags taxonomy using the dashboard you will see that the new tag has been created and the title of that tag is the value that we have just entered when editing the given blog post. If you checked the editor of the blog post well you could see that there is a section called Category with two radio buttons. But what are these for? The Category is also a taxonomy field added to the blog post with the standard editor and display mode. It uses the Categories taxonomy with the Category content type as the term. But this time the content type that is used as a term is not just about having a Title Part, but it also has a Text Field with an Icon picker editor. This means when you add Category term content types to the Categories taxonomy you can also set an icon for this term. And if you override this shape using a Liquid template or a Razor view, you can display the Font Awesome icon near the name of the term! You can also watch a nice demo on YouTube about the Open Tags for Orchard Core! On Lombiq Orchard Nuggets: How to use the same version of Orchard Core NuGet packages in every project across my solution? You have your own ASP.NET Core project that using Orchard Core NuGet packages, but every time when you update them you have to do it one-by-one across the whole solution? In our second Orchard Nuggets post, we show you a way how to update the packages easily! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Christmas in Lombiq Sometimes we do stuff. Together. Not (just) in front of computer screens. These are some usual events in Lombiq that are all announced and arranged in advance. We periodically have an event called RnDay: this is a few hours long event where we share with each other what we recently worked on and what we plan to do. E.g. if we recently finished a project then the project's team members demo what they've done. Last week we had our last RnDay for this year in the Loffice Budapest, which is a coworking office with an event space where we held this event. And at the end of the day, we visited a nearby restaurant to have dinner together. We would like to thank you all for reading our posts and making the Orchard community stronger together with us! We hope that we could give you valuable news and demos about the happenings around Orchard and Orchard Core from time to time by reading our posts and of course the This week in Orchard newsletter. We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas with some photos of our latest event! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 109 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!