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Hosting Orchard Core at Exoscale

It's not all about hyperscalers: You can run your Orchard Core app in the cloud even if not using Azure, AWS, or some other giant like these. Let's see how we can do this with Exoscale! Blog post series overview This post is part of our series about hosting Orchard Core at European cloud providers. Orchard Core has built-in support for a lot of Azure services, including Media storage, secret storage, e-mail delivery and sending SMS, AI search, and even observability with Azure Application Insights with the Lombiq module. AWS also has support for Media storage. For cloud-hosted full-text search we can use Elasticsearch, and Redis to aid with horizontal scaling. How does using a smaller cloud provider, without specific support from Orchard Core, compare? We've looked into hosting a vanilla Orchard Core app as a proof of concept, and are sharing our experiences here. The goal was to run Orchard Core with a minimal hosting environment, but with a stateless web server (so, keeping the database and Media storage separate). This could've been simplified to only use a web server (and keep the database in a local SQLite file, as well as use local Media files), but we wanted to go a bit more realistic than that. To be able to play around with the web server from the GUI too, we've chosen Windows as the OS if available. Additionally, we also checked if the platform helps with any of the other common infrastructure requirements, like sending e-mails or observability. Note that while we usually received some credits from the cloud providers for testing, they are not paying for these reviews, and any endorsement or critique is our own. What's Exoscale? Exoscale is a cloud provider from Switzerland, with hosting locations back at home, as well as in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and since July also in Croatia. As far as services interesting for Orchard Core hosting go, they offer VMs with load balancing, AWS S3-compatible object storage, and databases as a service. Managed Kubernetes is also available, but for the sake of this post, trying to host a simple app, we won't create a cluster. Instead of Redis, you can create Valkey instances (Valkey is an open-source fork of Redis), which, for now, should just work with Orchard Core's Redis support. While OpenSearch is also available, that's incompatible with Orchard's Elasticsearch integration. DNS management is also available, though that's something I'd keep at Cloudflare for a real-life app. I'd also use Cloudflare as a CDN, despite Exoscale offering a CDN layer (with Akamai) on top of their object storage; but since in Orchard Core we don't serve Media files from storage directly, that wouldn't help anyway. If you want to send e-mails, implement observability, or add search and indexing other than with Lucene on the web server, you're on your own. Creating an Orchard Core hosting environment You surely already guessed, but we'll need three Exoscale services: A Compute Instance, i.e. a VM, for the web server. A DBaaS database; we'll use PostgreSQL. We could also create SQL Server instances, but not only would the minimum 2-core VM be an overkill for our purposes, it's also much more expensive, starting at about EUR 247/month (vs a Postgres DBaaS starting at EUR 42/month). Object Storage for Media. Let's start with the server! I went with the Swiss zone, since there's no place like home, and opted with a 2-CPU plan with 2 GB of RAM. For this site, 1 CPU would also be more than enough (while to cater for Windows, I'm more comfortable with 2 GB of RAM instead of 1), but there's no 1-CPU 2 GB RAM instance type. [image alt="Creating an Exoscale Compute Instance"]BlogPost/other-posts/2025/hosting-orchard-core-at-exoscale/creating-a-compute-instance.webp[/image] You may notice two things here: On the right, there's a warning about having to create Security Groups for ingress rules first. (Somewhat confusingly the ADD button below it actually creates the compute instance, not a Security Group.) To be able to actually connect to the VM, we also need to edit the default Security Group (or perhaps more diligently, create a new one), then open up the ingress port 80 with TCP (for HTTP), as well as add a rule for RDP. As a last step, you'll also need to add 0.0.0.0/0 (i.e. all IPs) under External Sources, allowing anyone to connect to our web server. Those ENABLE buttons for instances Mega and up mean that you need to ask Exoscale support to allow them "after a manual screening process". This I find a bit strange. Until the server started, so in the meantime, I created an Object Storage bucket in the same zone (to minimize latency, these resources should all be in the same zone): [image alt="Creating an Object Storage bucket"]BlogPost/other-posts/2025/hosting-orchard-core-at-exoscale/adding-bucket.webp?2[/image] It seems that unlike with other cloud providers where you create a storage account, then a bucket under it, here everyone shares the same storage account. Thus, bucket names should be globally unique. This doesn't seem appealing at a first glance, but apart from the naming issue, I didn't find any practical problem with it. Somewhat counterintuitively, the storage access and secret keys are API keys. You can create these following the docs; for the sake of simplicity, I created a key for the Owner role, but for a production app, you should follow the docs' recommendations and create a restricted role just to access this bucket. Finally, we also need a single-node Postgres database server: [image alt="Creating a managed database"]BlogPost/other-posts/2025/hosting-orchard-core-at-exoscale/adding-postgresql-dbaas.webp[/image] Note that this runs on its own VM. The IP filter is necessary for the web server to access the DB server; the provided CIDR matches the exact IP of it. This is everything we need, so now we can continue with setting up Orchard Core in this environment. Deploying Orchard Core to the web server You can deploy an ASP.NET Core app, including an Orchard Core-using one, with Web Deploy to IIS, using automated deployment from a GitHub Actions workflow, or just by copying its publish outputs to the server. Here, I opted with the simplest option: I published the web app to a folder from Visual Studio (but running dotnet publish from the CLI would be equally suitable), and copied the resulting files to the server via Remote Desktop. Then I could simply run the web app: [image alt="The Orchard Core app running under Windows Server"]BlogPost/other-posts/2025/hosting-orchard-core-at-exoscale/app-running.webp[/image] The app listens to port 80 because I added an appsettings.Production.json file configuring it: { "Kestrel": { "Endpoints": { "HttpEndpoint": { "Url": "http://*:80" } } } } This allows you to simply open the IP of the server in a browser, or point a DNS A record to it. Our site is now available on the internet! ...after we allowed the exe of our web app through the Windows Firewall, that is. You may notice that this is a really barebones approach: There's no IIS, no HTTPS, no proper deployment. And you're right! This is a focused example of getting Orchard Core running, but we'll return to the missing pieces later. Setting up Orchard Core Running the Orchard Core setup is standard: Just fill out the usual settings on the setup screen, and point the app to the Postgres DB. For the latter, you can copy the Postgres connection string from the Exoscale Console, take the password of the default user from the DB's Users menu, and ask your favorite AI tool to turn them into an Npgsql connection string that .NET uses. Once setup finishes, you can configure Media storage too. I've elaborated above how to set up a bucket; the service URL for it will be in the format https://sos-{zone}.exo.io, with our Switzerland zone being ch-dk-2. Now it's time to configure the connection for the app. Again, you can use the appsettings.Production.json file to add something like below, resulting in the following full file: { "Kestrel": { "Endpoints": { "HttpEndpoint": { "Url": "http://*:80" } } }, "OrchardCore": { "OrchardCore_Media_AmazonS3": { "ServiceURL": "https://sos-ch-dk-2.exo.io", "Credentials": { "SecretKey": "add the secret of the user you created", "AccessKey": "add the access key of the user you created" }, "CreateBucket": true, "RemoveBucket": true, "BucketName": "oc-media" } } } Be sure to change the ServiceURL value to that of your instance, as indicated on its Overview page (under "S3 endpoint"). That's actually an undocumented configuration key that comes very handy when, as we do here, you connect to an S3 account outside of AWS. Now restart the app (so it reads the updated configuration file) and enable the Amazon Media Storage feature from the Orchard Core admin. It'll work, despite it not running in Amazon. Magic! And with this, our app fully works! Why would you (not) use Exoscale? OK, so we've seen that running Orchard Core under Exoscale works. This is not a huge surprise, but it's nice to get it verified and have the basics figured out. Why would we do this, though, instead of choosing the beaten path with Azure or AWS, for example? European Exoscale is not just hosting in Europe, but the company itself is also based in a European country. If that matters for you, either for sentimental reasons or as a matter of company policy (like using a provider that's not under the US CLOUD Act), it can be a big plus. Note though, that while Switzerland is highly aligned with the EU legally, it's not an EU member state, nor part of the European Economic Area. Costs Exoscale can be a lot cheaper. At €17/month, the Exoscale server provides roughly the same as an A1_v2 Azure VM, which costs €45/month. However, the smallest managed Postgres instance at €42/month is way above what we'd use on Azure for an entry-level app, where an S0 Azure SQL DB would be around €13/month. So, in the end, Exoscale costs around EUR 60/month, while the roughly equivalent service in Azure would be basically the same. We do get more with Exoscale (a dedicated VM for the DB, and I think the web server is faster too), a lot more room to grow, but the cost advantage, in itself, disappears, at least in the beginning. For an entry-level app the storage is cents in both cases, but if you increase your usage, Exoscale's storage costs can be dramatically lower (EUR 0,00002750/GB vs Azure's Standard Hot tier at EUR 0,0185/GB). Network costs at Exoscale (EUR 0,02/GB for egress) and per-operation costs at Azure (there's no simple number for this) complicate things, though, so be sure to calculate what's applicable for your app. All this being said, at Azure, we'd rather use App Services: This is a higher-level "websites as a service", offering a bunch of convenience features like automated deployment, staged publishing, and configuration management. The smallest proper App Services-based infrastructure (with a staging slot and separate staging and production DBs) comes at around €90/month, though, but that also contains a lot of features lacking from VMs. Simplicity Without consulting any resource, just by playing with the Console, I could fully understand the Exoscale offering (I think...) within like half an hour. Getting the full Orchard Core environment running wouldn't have been much more, have I not written this post at the same time (plus getting stuck on the mentioned storage configuration). The cons Coming from frequently using the cushy but extremely complex ecosystem of Azure, using a more basic provider like Exoscale is certainly an interesting change. It seems to me that ultimately, there's a lot of work to do if you want to have a full-blown, highly automated hosting environment for Orchard Core, with an option for horizontal scaling. Below are the features that I'd consider necessary, and while these are given with Azure, you need to roll your own solutions with Exoscale: Staged publishing (blue-green deployment): You'd need to set up multiple VMs or multiple sites, and manage swapping staging with production somehow on your own. Automated deployments: I think under a Windows server, the easiest would be to set up Web Deploy and use it from an automation platform like GitHub Actions. Observability: You'd either need to host an observability platform yourself, or use an external service. The lack of a search/indexing service is less of an issue, because you can just use the Elastic Cloud (what's the option in Azure and AWS too), and I'd consider the lack of an e-mail service not a huge issue either (you can just use something like SendGrid). Managed Valkey is good, but starting at €43/month, it's not priced for an easy entry (just as Postgres), although it also provides a lot more resources than the lowest tiers of Azure Cache for Redis do (for a lower price). Yes, you could build an all-in-one infrastructure with Kubernetes, and have containers with services for all the above features (and a DB and storage as well), but that's a large complexity you need to manage. Using Terraform, supported by Exoscale, to ramp up your infrastructure can cut down on manual repetition (and aid portability to other providers to an extent), but is also work that you have to invest. And at the entry level, managed solutions for services like SQL and Redis (instead of hosting your own VMs/containers) can be more cost-efficient too (but that flips if your app's demand increases).There are also three notable things I very much didn't like about Exoscale's pricing: All prices on the pricing page are shown for usage hours only. That's necessary, but a metric frequently a lot more useful is the monthly cost. While I can always multiply by 730 to get an approximation of a month, it would be much clearer to have it indicated in the pricing table already. Also, I'd welcome seeing these hourly and monthly costs indicated in the Exoscale Console, when creating resources, too. The Pricing Calculator helps, and it does show monthly costs too, but it's better to show this information everywhere. The prices in EUR, CHF, and USD are exactly the same. Given that 1 CHF is 1,07 EUR, and 1 EUR is 1,16 USD as of writing this, there's a significant difference in your costs depending on what you pay with (you pay almost 25% more in CHF than USD). According to the website, "Your account can be setup in either CHF, EUR or USD, depending on your initial legal residence." This seems like an arbitrary disadvantage for Swiss users, and an advantage to non-EU ones. The latter is a surprising policy for a company primarily targeting EU customers. I'd welcome the price differences to disappear.You can only pay in advance, at least as a new customer. This requires you to either be ready to top up your balance any time you get a low credit notification, or you need to park an excessive amount at Exoscale. In either case, it's also a manual process. It would be better if they would just charge my card after each month's usage. So, what should I do?Based on the feature set, Exoscale can be a good choice to host your Orchard Core app if you don't need anything beyond what's easily possible with the existing offering, or if you already invested into a portable Kubernetes-based infrastructure. However, I think the particularities of Exoscale's pricing are not for everyone. And if you need help hosting Orchard Core at Exoscale, Azure, or onboard of a satellite (not kidding), drop us a line!

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Reimplement batching in YesSql, Azure Application Insights module - This week in Orchard (26/02/2021)

Refactoring the Content zone, reimplement batching in YesSql, hiding Setup recipes, adding more indexes to index tables, Azure Application Insights module and a lot more is waiting just for you in this post! Orchard Core updates Do not display Setup recipes in the admin UI You can easily list all of the existing recipes of your site under Configuration -> Recipes. If you create a recipe, like myrecipe.recipe.json, and put it in a Recipes folder of one of your modules, that recipe will be listed on this page. Let's add a simple one and check out the content of that page. You can see that our recipe with the display name My Recipe is on the list but wait! What happened with the other recipes? We have several other built-in recipes like the Blog, the Agency, and so on. Where are they? From now the logic in the Index method of the AdminController in the OrchardCore.Recipes module is slightly changed. If the recipe is a setup recipe (defined in the issetuprecipe of the JSON file) or has the hidden tag, the recipe will not appear in that list. You can see that our myrecipe has the false value for the issetuprecipe but the Blog recipe has the true value. Admin Dashboard Widgets We mentioned the Admin Dashboard widgets two times in This week in Orchard that allows you to add cards to the homepage of the dashboard, which is about to represent a piece of functionality of a given feature or module. You can find the first post here and the second one here. And now this feature has been merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core and there is also a new page in the Orchard Core Documentation about this module. It hasn't got too much information yet but the embedded recording could help you to see this feature in action. If you haven't heard about this feature, don't forget to check out the previous blog posts and the demo video! Use DocumentId in indexes This fix is also about using the correct combination of fields for each index that we use. For example, the index for the UserIndex table now contains every field of the table. So, from now you will find indexes for every index table. Refactor ContentZone - Tabs, Card, Column containers With more and more dynamic shapes coming into Orchard Core (all the tab/card grouping shapes, and also shapes like the ContentCard) it would be potentially useful to have a ShapesViewModel that could be used as a hard type abstract class to create specific targetted ViewModels, i.e. a TabViewModel. The problem with the ShapeViewModel is it doesn't support a list of positioned Items, so right now we are using Shape because many of these tab/card/content card shapes require a list of positioned items as well. So we was not intending that a ShapesViewModel was actually an IShape, just an abstract that could be used to build shapes with, and the mixin would still turn it into an IShape, by mixing in the ShapeViewModel which has all the required IShape properties. The idea being you could then use the IShapeFactory to create a shape, then add items to it. var shape = ShapeFactory.CreateAsync<TabViewModel>("Tab", m =>{ m.TabId = tabId});foreach(var item in thetabs){ shape.Add(item);} The current usage builds 3 different shapes, even when displaying on the front end, and there are no groups. Here we do a quick check first, to see if there are any groups, and if there are none, just render the zone directly. No extra shapes. Also Removes uses a dynamic, and moves to hard typed models. Uses ToLookup instead of GroupBy (better usage). Uses fewer dynamics for injected properties, i.e. DisplayAsync can be resolved directly to its interface instead of being dynamic (this needs evaluation, as we might do it for the other C# Shape Attributes, or not). If you check out the modifications of the ZoneShapes class, you will find the implementation of the ContentZone shape and building the TabContainer shape by using the new GroupingsViewModel. And by having the GroupingsViewModel ViewModel we can use that instead of a dynamic one as you can see in the TabContainer.cshtml file. Demos YesSql: Reimplement batching When we do updates on the content items and when one deletes a document all the index tables corresponding to the document type get a DELETE query. And this DELETE query is actually a single DELETE query. If we see a benchmark we can realize that the batching isn't working. So, if you would like to delete multiple content items, the code is just about to send multiple DELETE requests instead of sending one. If you run the query locally using SQL Server and you have 1000 indexes, it takes one second. So, you might not notice that it's slow. It's slow but it could look like that's because we have several indexes. Extra Indexes: 1, Elapsed 00:00:00.0371806Extra Indexes: 100, Elapsed 00:00:00.1317780Extra Indexes: 200, Elapsed 00:00:00.2826214Extra Indexes: 500, Elapsed 00:00:00.6213360Extra Indexes: 1000, Elapsed 00:00:01.2628232 But when you have the SQL Server in Azure, the deletion of 1000 indexes could take 28 seconds. At this point, you will start noticing the performance just after 100 indexes. Apparently, we have around 20 indexes in Orchard Core but you can quickly arrive at 100. Extra Indexes: 1, Elapsed 00:00:00.0838498Extra Indexes: 100, Elapsed 00:00:02.5644737Extra Indexes: 200, Elapsed 00:00:05.0814065Extra Indexes: 500, Elapsed 00:00:12.6558409Extra Indexes: 1000, Elapsed 00:00:28.6622291 In YesSql, when you update a document, it needs to update all the indexes, which means it will rebuild them. And an index can return multiple records like if I'm indexing the name of someone, I might want to index the first name, the last name, the middle name. These are three records, one per name. So, what it does is, it builds the three records in memory and it will send a query to delete any record that was associated with the document and then sends three inserts for the new records. So you have one for the delete and three for the inserts. But it sends a delete even for the indexes that didn't return anything because the fact that you didn't return anything might mean that there is nothing anymore associated. So you need to delete and send nothing. This way we get a delete per index. That's not optimal but that's how YesSql works and that's optimal for reads and not writes. To goal is to make reads faster than writes. Still, we should not have to send one independent query to do the deletes per index. That's what this issue is about. And Sébastien Ros managed to fix it. And here are some numbers. These are all for dummy indexes that never perform any writes. Just cause deletes. What we can see in the profiler is that everything easy to batch is batched together. The big batch with mostly deletes, and a couple of inserts, is now long-running, instead of many many short runs. Probably from the look of it, the insert is still expensive, so which pushes up the time run. Before batchingLocal Indexes 1, Elapsed 00:00:00.3004236 Indexes 100, Elapsed 00:00:00.2375774 Indexes 200, Elapsed 00:00:00.3583902 Indexes 500, Elapsed 00:00:00.7695818 Indexes 1000, Elapsed 00:00:01.2836934Remote Indexes 1, Elapsed 00:00:00.7207663 Indexes 100, Elapsed 00:00:03.3552247 Indexes 200, Elapsed 00:00:05.5547927 Indexes 500, Elapsed 00:00:13.8364514 Indexes 1000, Elapsed 00:00:27.2306443After BatchingLocal Indexes 1, Elapsed 00:00:00.2207824 Indexes 100, Elapsed 00:00:00.0910920 Indexes 200, Elapsed 00:00:00.1632908 Indexes 500, Elapsed 00:00:00.4007200 Indexes 1000, Elapsed 00:00:00.4559752RemoteIndexes 1, Elapsed 00:00:03.6326000Indexes 100, Elapsed 00:00:04.9639312Indexes 200, Elapsed 00:00:09.8273422Indexes 500, Elapsed 00:00:16.1340951Indexes 1000, Elapsed 00:00:15.2008296 And how it looks like is the following. If you create a blog post in Orchard Core and after the change, there is a single communication to the database that contains everything that you can see here. This contains creating the Document, creating the ContentItemIndex, updating the ContentItemIndex with the DocumentId, and so on. These are three indexes to update (ContentItemIndex, ContainedPartIndex and AutoroutePartIndex). insert into [Document] ([Id], [Type], [Content], [Version]) values (19, 'OrchardCore.ContentManagement.ContentItem, OrchardCore.ContentManagement.Abstractions', '{"ContentItemId":"4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg","ContentItemVersionId":"4953p18bj3gyy5yy82f7mj7w4y","ContentType":"BlogPost","DisplayText":"The title","Latest":true,"Published":false,"ModifiedUtc":"2020-12-31T00:31:34.3346095Z","PublishedUtc":null,"CreatedUtc":"2020-12-31T00:31:34.3346095Z","Owner":"48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8","Author":"admin","TitlePart":{"Title":"The title"},"AutoroutePart":{"Path":"blog/the-title","SetHomepage":false,"Disabled":false,"RouteContainedItems":false,"Absolute":false},"BlogPost":{"Subtitle":{"Text":"Subtitle"},"Image":{"Anchors":[],"Paths":[],"MediaTexts":[]},"Tags":{"TagNames":["Space"],"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4ykev5wxfcny7tvsahz9y64mwe","TermContentItemIds":["4nv0z7r24r1vw3sfpq7t6xws59"]},"Category":{"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4tpy2wv97bkbf0zkx8tyd1bm4q","TermContentItemIds":["4bsstr09f29rp0sgy85n9f07wj"]}},"MarkdownBodyPart":{"Markdown":"Some text"},"ContainedPart":{"ListContentItemId":"491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds","Order":0}}', 1);insert into [ContentItemIndex] ([ContentItemId], [ContentItemVersionId], [Published], [Latest], [ContentType], [ModifiedUtc], [PublishedUtc], [CreatedUtc], [Owner], [Author], [DisplayText]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', '4953p18bj3gyy5yy82f7mj7w4y', 0, 1, 'BlogPost', '2020-12-31T00:31:34', '', '2020-12-31T00:31:34', '48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8', 'admin', 'The title') ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];update [ContentItemIndex] set [DocumentId] = 19 where [Id] = (last_insert_rowid());insert into [ContainedPartIndex] ([ListContentItemId], [Order]) values ('491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds', 0) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];update [ContainedPartIndex] set [DocumentId] = 19 where [Id] = (last_insert_rowid());insert into [AutoroutePartIndex] ([ContentItemId], [Path], [Published], [Latest], [ContainedContentItemId], [JsonPath]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', 'blog/the-title', 0, 1, '', '') ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];update [AutoroutePartIndex] set [DocumentId] = 19 where [Id] = (last_insert_rowid()); When we create a blog post there aren't any delete requests, because there is nothing before but when we update we need to delete all the indexes and these calls contains unnecessary deletes because for example there is no LayerMetaDataIndex on the blog post but the logic here is hey, we are dealing with a content item and there is an index for all of the content items called LayerMetadataIndex. So it will send the delete just in case which is dumb. But you can see here for each index we have a delete and it used to be a single query communication query with the database. Now let's divide by two the part where we insert and update the indexes. Instead of having to insert something then update something for each index now, we have just inserted it. We still have all the deletes and some of them are still useless but these are quick. So we have just this request now when we update a single blog post. insert into [Document] ([Id], [Type], [Content], [Version]) values (23, 'OrchardCore.ContentManagement.ContentItem, OrchardCore.ContentManagement.Abstractions', '{"ContentItemId":"4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg","ContentItemVersionId":"4ypdrxm7xbndr0dvcpwaraa95g","ContentType":"BlogPost","DisplayText":"The title","Latest":true,"Published":false,"ModifiedUtc":"2020-12-31T05:55:56.8113646Z","PublishedUtc":"2020-12-31T01:22:37.7926461Z","CreatedUtc":"2020-12-31T00:31:34.3346095Z","Owner":"48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8","Author":"admin","TitlePart":{"Title":"The title"},"AutoroutePart":{"Path":"blog/the-title","SetHomepage":false,"Disabled":false,"RouteContainedItems":false,"Absolute":false},"BlogPost":{"Subtitle":{"Text":"Subtitle"},"Image":{"Anchors":[],"Paths":[],"MediaTexts":[]},"Tags":{"TagNames":["Space"],"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4ykev5wxfcny7tvsahz9y64mwe","TermContentItemIds":["4nv0z7r24r1vw3sfpq7t6xws59"]},"Category":{"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4tpy2wv97bkbf0zkx8tyd1bm4q","TermContentItemIds":["4bsstr09f29rp0sgy85n9f07wj"]}},"MarkdownBodyPart":{"Markdown":"Some text"},"ContainedPart":{"ListContentItemId":"491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds","Order":0}}', 1);delete from [ContentItemIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;delete from [AliasPartIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;delete from [LayerMetadataIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;delete from [ContainedPartIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;delete from [AutoroutePartIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;delete from [TaxonomyIndex] where [DocumentId] = 22;insert into [ContentItemIndex] ([ContentItemId], [ContentItemVersionId], [Published], [Latest], [ContentType], [ModifiedUtc], [PublishedUtc], [CreatedUtc], [Owner], [Author], [DisplayText], [DocumentId]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', '4q3271jp1705etwnf52c0nnbwz', 1, 0, 'BlogPost', '2020-12-31T01:22:37', '2020-12-31T01:22:37', '2020-12-31T00:31:34', '48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8', 'admin', 'The title', 22) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [ContainedPartIndex] ([ListContentItemId], [Order], [DocumentId]) values ('491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds', 0, 22) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [AutoroutePartIndex] ([ContentItemId], [Path], [Published], [Latest], [ContainedContentItemId], [JsonPath], [DocumentId]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', 'blog/the-title', 1, 0, '', '', 22) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [TaxonomyIndex] ([TaxonomyContentItemId], [ContentItemId], [ContentType], [ContentPart], [ContentField], [TermContentItemId], [DocumentId]) values ('4ykev5wxfcny7tvsahz9y64mwe', '4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', 'BlogPost', 'BlogPost', 'Tags', '4nv0z7r24r1vw3sfpq7t6xws59', 22) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [TaxonomyIndex] ([TaxonomyContentItemId], [ContentItemId], [ContentType], [ContentPart], [ContentField], [TermContentItemId], [DocumentId]) values ('4tpy2wv97bkbf0zkx8tyd1bm4q', '4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', 'BlogPost', 'BlogPost', 'Category', '4bsstr09f29rp0sgy85n9f07wj', 22) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];update [Document] set [Content] = '{"ContentItemId":"4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg","ContentItemVersionId":"4q3271jp1705etwnf52c0nnbwz","ContentType":"BlogPost","DisplayText":"The title","Latest":false,"Published":true,"ModifiedUtc":"2020-12-31T01:22:37.6390174Z","PublishedUtc":"2020-12-31T01:22:37.7926461Z","CreatedUtc":"2020-12-31T00:31:34.3346095Z","Owner":"48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8","Author":"admin","TitlePart":{"Title":"The title"},"AutoroutePart":{"Path":"blog/the-title","SetHomepage":false,"Disabled":false,"RouteContainedItems":false,"Absolute":false},"BlogPost":{"Subtitle":{"Text":"Subtitle"},"Image":{"Anchors":[],"Paths":[],"MediaTexts":[]},"Tags":{"TagNames":["Space"],"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4ykev5wxfcny7tvsahz9y64mwe","TermContentItemIds":["4nv0z7r24r1vw3sfpq7t6xws59"]},"Category":{"TaxonomyContentItemId":"4tpy2wv97bkbf0zkx8tyd1bm4q","TermContentItemIds":["4bsstr09f29rp0sgy85n9f07wj"]}},"MarkdownBodyPart":{"Markdown":"Some text"},"ContainedPart":{"ListContentItemId":"491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds","Order":0}}', [Version] = 1 where [Id] = 22;insert into [ContentItemIndex] ([ContentItemId], [ContentItemVersionId], [Published], [Latest], [ContentType], [ModifiedUtc], [PublishedUtc], [CreatedUtc], [Owner], [Author], [DisplayText], [DocumentId]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', '4ypdrxm7xbndr0dvcpwaraa95g', 0, 1, 'BlogPost', '2020-12-31T05:55:56', '2020-12-31T01:22:37', '2020-12-31T00:31:34', '48v9vt5vxznr5z9m1df9zmvjm8', 'admin', 'The title', 23) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [ContainedPartIndex] ([ListContentItemId], [Order], [DocumentId]) values ('491emynv0kavbzhy40xmqv1wds', 0, 23) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id];insert into [AutoroutePartIndex] ([ContentItemId], [Path], [Published], [Latest], [ContainedContentItemId], [JsonPath], [DocumentId]) values ('4cpw0fnmjb1kp07dmzxx8n8ecg', 'blog/the-title', 0, 1, '', '', 23) ; select last_insert_rowid() [Id]; Using the other PR we are able to teach the index when not to send deletes as there will never be any index related to this Document, so don't send deletes. After that, you can see there is no more LayerMetaDataIndex and no more AliasPartIndex calls because the blog post doesn't have these. delete from [ContentItemIndex] where [DocumentId] = 23;delete from [ContainedPartIndex] where [DocumentId] = 23;delete from [AutoroutePartIndex] where [DocumentId] = 23;delete from [TaxonomyIndex] where [DocumentId] = 23; This is by having a new method on the IndexProvider to explain when to not use the IndexProvider. So it would not even go to the Map method. In this case, we say if you don't have the AliasPart, don't use the IndexProvider. context.For<AliasPartIndex>() .When(c => c.Has<AliasPart>()) .Map(contentItem => Check out the following recording on YouTube to know more about this YesSql improvement! News from the community Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights This new Orchard Core module from Lombiq enables easy integration of Azure Application Insights telemetry into Orchard. Just install the module, configure the instrumentation key from a configuration source (like the appsettings.json file) as normally for AI, and collected data will start appearing in the Azure Portal. Would like to learn more about our new module? Then head to the repository now where you can find every detail about how to set up and use that module in your site! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 191 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!

Distributed cache, Media crop picker - This week in Orchard (08/11/2020)

This week we will see the new IDocumentStore, which is a cacheable, committable, and cancellable document store allowing to get documents from a shared cache. And don't forget to watch a demo about how you can add an alt text and crop the images of your Media Field! Orchard Core updates Make features actions sticky while scrolling If you navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and head to Configuration -> Features, you will see all of the currently available features of Orchard Core. This list is now getting longer and longer, so the idea here is to use a sticky bar on scrolling for very long pages instead of the scroll to top button. The first page that gets this sticky bar is the Features page, which looks like the following now. Edit button for lists in DetailAdmin view This is a feature that was already there in Orchard 1. When you want to edit something in the admin, you can return a route to the controller that will edit an entity. Or that will display it as a list or display it as a detailed object in the admin. And when you have a list, you have two options. Either you want to show all the content of this list or you want to actually edit the list itself. And to do that, when you see a blog and you click the link of the blog in the content items, it will go to the list of blog posts. This is the DetailAdmin view. And if you actually want to edit the blog you need to click on the edit button. This feature is about adding a new button for the list and you are now not confused about clicking the link or click in the properties button. Move feeds to feature There is a new feature now in Orchard Core called Feeds. Don't forget to enable that module if you would like to have feeds capabilities on your site! Generate xml documentation (comments) for nuget packages Whatever documentation we put on the files, they were not available, because if you don't put the GenerateDocumentationFile tag then it's not generated in the XML file that contains all the documentation, it's not embedded into NuGet, and Visual Studio won't load it. You need that to export your API docs. Not even to generate documentation, just to be able to have it in the NuGet package for the IntelliSense. If you don't do the NoWarn, every public member that doesn't have an API doc would fail the build. The <NoWarn>$(NoWarn);CS1591</NoWarn> removes the warning that some public members do not have comments. Now you will have more documentation when they use the NuGet packages to build sites! Distributed cache Whenever you want some cacheable document that is stored in the storage using YesSq for instance you need to inject the IDocumentStore interface. This will use YesSql to load the document and it will be able to cache it. So, for instance, if you would like to get the site settings you can use the IDocumentStore to do that because it's stored as a document and you want to cache it. And then when you load the site settings using IDocumentStore by passing the type, you can say GetOrCreateImmutableAsync or GetOrCreateMutableAsync. Mutable meaning that when you load the site settings just to read it, you want to say I want an immutable object. And when you want to load the site settings to update it, then use the GetOrCreateMutableAsync method. The difference is in the way that it will either cache it or not and also would it take it from the cache or not, or put it back in the cache or not. Or invalidate the entry in the cache. And there is the IFileDocumentStore which has the same methods as the IDocumentStore, but it's a totally different service. This one can be used to store a document on the file system that can be also cached. But it's a different store. We use the IFileDocumentStore to store the content type definitions. Demos Media crop picker and Alt text editor Set up your site using the Blog recipe. That recipe comes with the Blog Post content type that has the Banner Image Media Field by default. Let's check out the predefined blog post content item to see the new features of the Media Field. If you select the post-bg.jpg image and click on the button with the speech bubble icon, you can set the alt text for the image. Another new button is doing a more interesting thing. If you click on the button with the target cross icon, another new modal window will open where you can select the anchor for the selected image. Using the target cross, you can easily specify the crop point of the image. If you open the preview in another window you can easily see the changes of the image in real-time. But how you can enable/disable these options? Navigate to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and hit Edit near the Blog Post and edit the Banner Image settings. Here you will find two new options. One is about allowing alt text and one is to allow the center cropping. These are on by default, that's why you could see the mentioned buttons when you edit the media field. And that's not all! If you would like to know more about this feature don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community 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!

Blazing Orchard, Replace and Delete Content Definition Deployment Steps - This week in Orchard (30/10/2020)

Blazing Orchard is a modular application framework that turns your Blazor project into a CMS-powered Blazor application by leveraging Orchard Core as a decoupled backend/CMS server using its REST & GraphQL APIs. Check out our current post to read more about Blazing Orchard and many more! Orchard Core updates Introduce Replace and Delete Content Definition Recipes The Content Definition Recipe deployment step always merges settings. When using this on a dev/stage/prod environment this means arrays, like BagPartSettings and FlowPartSettings are merged. When you've removed a content type on dev, and removed it from the BagPartSettings this change is not reflected on the server when the content definitions step is running. What also happens is the widget content type definition also remains, as the recipe only focuses on updating the definitions in the step. Of course, this is good for the scenario where definitions may have changed on both servers, and for bringing them into sync (kind of, but that scenario gets a bit confusing). But don't worry! Here comes two new deployment steps and recipes to the rescue! Replace Content Definitions: Replaces or Creates Type and Part Definitions. Delete Content Definitions: Allows a comma-separated list of types and/or parts to delete. Let's check them out! Set up your site using the Blog recipe then navigate to the Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans and create a new deployment plan. Hit the Add Step button if you are ready and search for the Replace Content Definitions step in the Available Steps modal. Here you can see a list containing all of the available content types and content parts that you have in your tenant. If you choose something from the list, the type and part definitions will be removed and recreated. The Delete Content Definitions deployment step is just about to delete your content type and content part definitions. Remove type="text/javascript" from script tags The W3C validator checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. The validator found a warning in an Orchard Core site that says: The type attribute is unnecessary for JavaScript resources. If you open up the MDN web docs by Mozilla you can learn more about the script element. Add ShapeResult - RenderWhen The problem is that SummaryAdmin shapes are added during BuildDisplayAsync so the conditions will be evaluated for every front-end BuildDisplayAsync display, even though they're only intended to be placed in a SummaryAdmin display. The goal here to add a Func to the ShapeResult that can be invoked after placing a shape in a location, to evaluate whether it should be placed. This would mean that for all of the SummaryAdmin shapes the RenderWhen will only run after they have been placed in SummaryAdmin. So the evaluation will not occur during a Detail or Summary view on the front end. The AuthorizeAsync isn't a super heavy call, but we often want to conditionally evaluate in a driver whether to return a ShapeResult so it makes sense to have something that can be applied later in the BuildDisplayAsync pipeline when we know that we are actually going to place the shape in a location. The ContentsDriver renders the ContentsButtonActions_SummaryAdmin shape, that is responsible to display the Publish, Preview, Unpublish, etc. buttons. You need to have some permissions to be able to see these buttons. See the refactored logic here using the RenderWhen method. Adding ID for FormPart Now there is a new content part called FormElementPart that turns a content item into a form element by providing an ID to the form. Now the built-in Form widget has this part attached meaning that when you add the Form widget to a FlowPart, you can define an ID. And here comes the modifications in the Form.Wrapper.cshtml wrapper. If the content item has the FormElementPart attached, then get the ID from that and use it as the ID for the form HTML element. Demos Blazing Orchard Blazing Orchard is a modular application framework that turns your Blazor project into a CMS-powered Blazor application by leveraging Orchard Core as a decoupled backend/CMS server using its REST & GraphQL APIs. Orchard Core is used here as a headless CMS, which means that Orchard Core is a separate application in the solution. The Blazor application is also a separate project. Therefore you need to host these two separately in a separate container for example. Clone the repository of the solution and check it out yourself! The structure is the following. The BlazingOrchard.Web.Application is shared by both the Blazor client host (BlazingOrchard.Web.Client) and both the server (BlazingOrchard.Web.Server). Let's see how you can render stuff with the help of Blazor in this solution. Check out how the menu rendering works! There is a NavMenu component (NavMenu.razor) in the Shared folder of the BlazingOrchard.Web.Application project, which comes with the default placement template. But here we are using a custom component (Menu.razor) that comes from the BlazingOrchard.Menu library. This thing is also using another component called ContentItemView, which gets the data from Orchard using an HttpClient. It's reusable, which means you can use this in other components too, like in the ContentPage component. Let's navigate to the server and manipulate the menu items of the Main Menu by adding a new Link Menu Item to it called Readme. Now you can see that the menu structure has been updated in the Blazor application. Or let's see the CounterButton component. This piece of code is about having a currentCount int variable to store how many times the user clicks on that button. The IncrementCount method is responsible to do the business logic for this. If you navigate to the Orchard Core server and create a new Liquid Page, you can use Liquid expressions to render this component. To do that, you can just simply add the following Liquid expression to the body of the content item: {{ "CounterButton" | shape_new | shape_render }}. Notice that here we are creating a new shape based on the CounterButton component and render it in the body of the Liquid Page. The CounterButton component has a public ButtonText parameter. And - because we are dealing with shapes here - you can set the value of that variable by providing it in Liquid when creating the shape like: {{ "CounterButton" | shape_new: ButtonText: "Click on this button!" | shape_render }}. This way we can use the CMS to configure these components. And you can do a lot-lot more using this PoC solution thanks to its creator, Sipke Schoorstra! Head to YouTube and check out the recording of this demo now to know more about what you can achieve by using this solution! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 167 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, Renamed SummaryAdmin shapes - This week in Orchard (16/10/2020)

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!

Shape Components, new Anchor Tag Helper - This week in Orchard (11/09/2020)

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!

Shape Tracing Helpful Extensions, Alt and Class attributes for the Image Shortcode - This week in Orchard (28/08/2020)

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!

Export contents as setup recipe, Shape Debug Mode to dynamic cache - This week in Orchard (24/07/2020)

Export contents as setup recipe and import recipe from JSON are about to make it easier to manipulate data and setup your Orchard Core site. Edit cached shapes using the Shape Debug mode to see your changes right away. We think if you are an Orchard Core developer, you will find these features very useful. These are the bigger topics for this week! Orchard Core updates Export Contents As Setup recipe This is a new feature that allows you to use a checkbox when you want to export some content and remove any information that would reuse properties like the content item ID, author, owner. Let's see an example for this and create a deployment plant that contains only that All content deployment step and see the JSON schema of the Blog content item that you can get if you install your site using the Blog recipe. So, if you leave this checkbox unchecked, you will see the following content. Nothing special here, you see the same content as you saw before. The content item has an ID, a version ID, and the dates when this content item was published and modified. But let's see what will happen if we put a tick in that checkbox! In this case, all the IDs are regenerated (for now it's not the case for the contained content items) and the values for the owner and the author are coming from the AdminUsername parameter. But be aware of the note that you can read under the checkbox: If checked, you will have to manually declare variables for the Content Picker fields, Taxonomy fields, Tags fields, and List item ids and replace them where needed in the recipe. Any reference to these content items will be lost. And the logic in the ContentDeploymentSource is about checking the value of the ExportAsSetupRecipe boolean property. If you want to export contents as a setup recipe, then the related properties of the objectData will be changed as you can see in the recipe file. We have to mention one new thing here. If you add the All features deployment step to your plan that exports the state of all features, you can say to ignore the disabled features. In that case, your recipe will only contain the enabled features and not the disabled ones. Import Recipe from JSON If you navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export in the admin UI, you will see a new option called JSON Import. This new feature will let you type some JSON and then run it, so you can execute some custom recipe steps from this UI. This new edition comes with the Deployment feature and it's using permission which is the Import permission. Let's say you want to change the site theme of your site for the default one. To do that you can use the following JSON. You can see you can do it in the same way as you would do it in a recipe file. Fix modules referencing other modules You may notice how many modules are referencing other modules for no need. Mostly this is just because they are doing so to get transitive references. The solution was to take direct references on the required abstractions/core projects instead of transitively depending on other modules to provide those references. Dean Marcussen also reviewed other references, removed superfluous references, and ordered them all. Migrate the OpenID module to OpenIddict 3.0 OpenIddict 3.0 has matured enough to envision using it in Orchard Core 1.0 RTM for both the server and validation features. As part of this migration, a few properties will be added to OpenIdServerSettings and OpenIdValidationSettings and others will be renamed for clarity. Due to this change, existing deployments will have to be updated to use the revamped settings. No exception should be thrown and the migration should be limited to re-configuring the server/validation options using the UI and/or updating custom recipes to use the new names. An important aspect of this migration is that the validation feature will now internally use the OpenIddict validation handler instead of the Microsoft JWT bearer handler, even with external OAuth 2.0 authorization servers. Unlike the MSFT JWT handler, the OpenIddict validation handler uses the new Microsoft.IdentityModel.JsonWebTokens stack and comes with JWT token type validation enforced by default, which is required by the not-yet-standardized JWT access token specification. This change will break existing deployments targeting OAuth 2.0 authorization servers that don't issue "typ": "at+jwt" access tokens. At least the following implementations are known to be impacted: Azure AD/B2C. IdentityServer3.IdentityServer4, except its latest 4.0 version (unless 4.0 is configured to use a different typ header) OpenIddict-based deployments are not impacted, as the validation handler includes special logic to deal with the tokens produced by OpenIddict 1.0 and 2.0, whose JWT tokens always include a special token_usage claim to prevent token substitution attacks, which has the same purpose as the "typ": "at+jwt" header. To ensure the validation feature can still be used with servers that don't issue "typ": "at+jwt" access tokens, an opt-in option was added to the validation configuration UI. This option can only be enabled when configuring a remote OAuth 2.0 server and is not shown when using a local OpenID server or a server located in another tenant, as OpenIddict 3.0 always issue "typ": "at+jwt" access tokens. Demos Shape Debug Mode to Dynamic Cache If you have a lot of menu shapes in your site and if you want to edit the templates you can't do that easily because the items are cached. The solution here is to provide an easy way to disable the cache, so in that case, the menus will not be cached. To set the cache mode, head to Configuration -> Settings -> General, where you will find a new tab called Cache. The settings here are very similar to the resource settings, the default is that the cache would be enabled in production and disabled otherwise. You can say I want to enable or disable it all the time. And there is a very useful option called Enabled with cache debug mode. Let's select this one and see what will happen! Now navigate to the homepage of your site and view the page source. Everywhere where is a cached block you will get a little piece of information about the given block. It shows you the cache ID, the dependencies that it's using, how long it's cached for, and any of the variations that are present. You will also see where is the end of the block. Let's see how it works! You will find a CacheStatement class that is about to check the value of the cacheOptions.DebugMode and if it's true, then it will add the additional content to the source of the page. If you are interested in more details about the cache settings, head to YouTube, and see the recording of the demo! News from the community 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 154 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!

Tabs, Cards, and Columns for the Admin, RenderTitle option - This week in Orchard (03/07/2020)

Heads up, several improvements coming this week! Editor shapes now support grouping placement, which allows you to group editor shapes, to create a variety of content editor layouts. The Title Part now has a Render Title option to show or hide the value of the Title. And last week we did an Orchard Core workshop about module development. Check out our current post for more! Orchard Core updates TitlePart with RenderTitle option and Placement for Form, Label Let's say you set up your site using the Blog recipe and want to edit the content definition of the Blog Post. If you edit the definition of the attached Title Part, you will find a new option that you can use called Render Title. With this option, you can enable or disable rendering the value of the Title Part in Detail and Summary display types. The Blog recipe using the TheBlogTheme by default where we override the content of the Blog Post (Content-BlogPost.liquid) and displaying the DisplayText of the content item whether the Render Title option is on or off. So, to see this in action we should use a theme where there is no override for the Blog Post content items. Let's navigate to Design -> Themes and make the Default Theme as the current for now. After that, you will be able to see the differences. The upper window here is about to render the title, but under that, you can see the default blog post without displaying the value of the title. We have some content types where is no need to display the title by default. These types are the Form and the Label. If you check the migration of the Label for example you will see how you can use the TitlePartSettings to hide the title by default. Fix jsonparse Liquid filter to supports arrays The jsonparse Liquid filter converts a JSON string to a JObject. This can be useful to build collections and iterate over the values in Liquid. Now, this filter is about to support arrays. To do that the community had to use the JToken.Parse method instead of the JObject.Parse one as you can see in the JsonParseFilter class. Add menu display text (differentiator) classes to menu shapes When using multiple menus on a site it is possible to do a lot of the styling with CSS, which can avoid having many, many templates. Now Orchard Core will add the menu differentiator (which is calculated from the display text) as an additional class on the menu. So out of the box, you will get: class="menu menu-main-menu". Demos Tabs, Cards, and Columns for the Admin We are able to use placement to move some of the fields/parts into a tab in the admin area. The new thing is now you can use Bootsrap Collape to organize your content into cards. And now you can also move fields into columns, in that case, you can have a Media Field near to the HTML Body Part for example. But after this intro let's go deeper and see some examples of placement. Modifier for tabs remains #, but now supports ; before as a position modifier for the tab grouping. Modifier for cards is %, also supports ; as a position modifier. Modifier for columns is |, supports ;, and _ as a column modifier, _9 will be applied as col-md-9 automatically, or _lg-9 which will be applied as col-lg-9. _9 should be sufficient for most, as it will by default break at md. ; must be immediately after , whereas : is the shape placement, and applies anywhere in the placement string. So, in nutshell the normal tab modifier is a #, the card modifier is a %, and the column modifier is a |. The column has a name and another modifier that allows you to say how big you want the column to be. Now try out these in your Orchard Core site! We will use the Orchard Core source to set up a site and we will modify the content of the placement.json file in the OrchardCore.Contents module. In the following example we place the MediaField_Edit shape in a tab called Media, and position the Media tab first, and the Content tab second. The Html Field goes first in the Content tab and the rest goes under the Html Field. Let's play with this a little bit more! Now we place the MediaField_Edit shape in a card called Media, and position the Media card first, and the Content card second. And lastly, we are playing a little bit with the columns. In the following example we place the MediaField_Edit shape in a column called Media, and position the Media column first, and the Content column second. We also specify that the Content column will take 9 columns, of the default 12 column grid. By default, the columns will break responsively at the md breakpoint, and a modifier will be parsed to col-md-9. If you want to change the breakpoint, you could also specify Content_lg-9, which is parsed to col-lg-9. If you want to know more check out the official documentation and don't forget to watch the video about the new features of the placement! News from the community Orchard Core RC 2 on ASP.NET Blog You can find a new blog post in the ASP.NET Blog that telling you the Orchard Core Release Candidate 2 now available! In this post you will learn how to create an Orchard CMS website using the templates, you will see the notable improvements and you can check out the development plan of Orchard Core! Module Development - Orchard Core Workshop 4 We had some great crowd at the Orchard Core module development workshop on Saturday, thanks all for coming! Would you like to attend a workshop too? Other community members will hold ones soon: https://orchardcore.net/workshops. Are you interested in something else? Leave a comment below! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 151 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! There will be no This week in Orchard post next week because of vacation, so see you in two weeks!

CodeMirror improvements, 100th This week in Orchard - This week in Orchard (26/06/2020)

The 100th This week in Orchard is here! In this post you could see a great demo about the CodeMirror improvements, we mention the updated Send Email activity, the new sample in our Orchard Core Training demo module about how to do unit testing, and many more! Thanks for joining us for the 100th time! Orchard Core updates Add Reply-To Header to Workflow EmailTask activity When you send an email to a subscriber and they click Reply, the reply message is typically sent to the email address listed in the From: header. A Reply-To address is identified by inserting the Reply-To header in your email. It is the email address that the reply message is sent when you want the reply to go to an email address that is different than the From: address. If you want to configure the Reply-To header in your EmailTask activity now you can do it! Just add the Send Email task to your workflow and use the updated editor of the activity! Allows ZoneShapes to be overridden If you were trying to override the ContentZone implementation in ZoneShapes.cs to get some different behavior for some tabbed shapes, it won't work, because it was not attributed with [Feature(Application.DefaultFeatureId)]. Just a note here: the [Application.DefaultFeatureId] attribute is used to allow core shapes to be overridden. Demos CodeMirror improvements CodeMirror in Orchard Core was a little bit outdated because it was not updated from quite a long time ago. All the views in Orchard Core have been changed that is using CodeMirror and now there is a new style called codemirror that is registered in the ResourceManifest.cs of the OrchardCore.Resources module. And that's not all, here you can see several other add-ons that are included by default. Here you can see the content of the TextField-CodeMirror.Edit.cshtml file. But let's see in action what can you do with these add-ons! When you are using HTML, you will have auto-close for the tags. If your text is too long, it will wrap the lines and the currently active line is being highlighted. And these features are provided by the newly added CodeMirror plugins. In this GIF you can see a Text Field and an HTML Field. We set the editor option to Code Mirror for the Text Field and Standard for the HTML Field. And as you could saw in the code above, you can turn on or off these features just by setting the values of the editor. If you don't want to have an auto-close tags feature, just simply say autoCloseTags: false. If you want to know more about the CodeMirror improvements, don't forget to check this recording on YouTube! News from the community Unit Testing in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core We added a new service and tests to it to learn a bit of unit testing! First, we'll create a service that we'll then later test in a test project. This service won't be used anywhere else, it's just an example to be tested. Why a service? Services are where usually most of the complex logic of an Orchard-based web app goes. You can test anything as long as you've written it in a testable way (by, for example, not utilizing hidden dependencies but injecting them all), you can write tests for controllers, drivers, background tasks, you name it. However, we think that unless you're aiming for 100% test coverage it's best to focus your unit and integration testing efforts on services. Then, the rest of the app can further automatically be tested via e.g. UI tests. Check out the service that will be tested here and here come the tests for it! This week in Orchard for the 100th time! We started our This week in Orchard series to inform our readers with the latest news and improvements around Orchard 1.x and Orchard Core. In this series we try to cover the most important features of the CMS and of course from time to time we are looking under the hood and show you the different code changes. But this series is not just for developers. We also want to target the super users of Orchard Core to know and be able to use every feature of it by learning the usage of the admin UI. Last year we started to upload Orchard Core demos in separate videos from the weekly podcasts to be able to find the given feature that you are really interested in as quickly as possible. We have also created a playlist for it on YouTube that contains more than 30 videos for now! And don't forget our Orchard Nuggets series that we have started in December last year! In that series, we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out these posts for bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have any questions! We hope that you like our series and find it useful! Thanks for reading us! 4000 stars on GitHub In GitHub, you can star repositories and topics to keep track of projects you find interesting and discover related content in your news feed. Starring a repository also shows appreciation to the repository maintainer for their work. Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. And we are proud to present that on June 22, the Orchard Core repository reached 4000 stars and it's still growing! Congratulations on the community! Using the admin UI of Orchard Core - Orchard Core Workshop 3 Last Saturday we did a workshop with 11 attendees about how to use the admin UI of Orchard Core! This Saturday we are gonna show you how to develop 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 151 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!

Content Picker Menu Item, Kast case study - This week in Orchard (02/05/2020)

Soon you will able to show content items in your menu easily! How? Check our newest This week in Orchard post and read about an amazing demo to see the new Content Picker Menu Item in action! We published a brand new case study this week on our website about the latest Orchard Core site we developed. By reading that study you can see the possibilities that you can easily achieve by using Orchard Core as your CMS! Don't forget to read our whole post for the most interesting news around the community! Orchard Core updates Added ability to restrict widgets within a flow part You can use the FlowPartSettings to give content managers the capability to restrict which widgets are available within the flow editor. If no widgets have been selected then all widgets will be available, as per the current implementation. Let's see it quickly! Set up a site with the Blog recipe and then edit the content type definition of the Page content type. To do that navigate to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and choose the Page. Then find the attached parts and hit Edit near the Flow one. Here you can select which content types this flow can contain. Just for the sake of demonstration, we say that the Flow editor of this page can only accept Liquid widgets. Let's see what will happen when we create a new Page! Hit New -> Page and try to add something to the Flow editor. You will see that only the Liquid one will be on the list because in the previous step we only allowed Liquid widgets. So, when you attach a FlowPart now you can decide what content types you want to be able to use in a FlowPart. It can be useful if you create a form page type with a FlowPart for it. You could then decide just to allow for form widgets. Remember: if you don't select anything you will be able to use any type of content type with the Widget stereotype in your editor. Added support for IN (SELECT) SQL statements You can use a custom SQL statement, that is about to parse for the queries module, the one that uses the generic SQL language and that will be translated to any dialect that the CMS supports (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server). If you use this language now you can use the select expression inside an in statement. It's also supporting the not in correctly and the like and not like was not working well, so these are also fixed. Check the new InlineData attributes added to the ShouldParseExpression test method to see some examples with the new expression. Fix shape table providers There was an issue with the way you would be able to override a template from your module, override a template for a dependent module. This change will look for shape templates in a module for any first-level dependencies and it's also improving performance because there would be fewer shape templates loaded in the memory. And if you have a feature depending on another feature then it won't be able to override the second level feature, you have to depend on that. It makes sense because you are creating a template for the second level feature, so you can depend on that because you expected that it would be there. Deployment plans search Let's navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export and create one or more deployment plans. Here you can filter the deployment plans and also do bulk actions. To do bulk actions select two or more deployment plans and after that, you will see the Delete option in the Actions dropdown. Content culture picker shape documentation If you navigate to the Content Localization section in the Orchard Core documentation, you may have noticed that there were no Razor example codes. From now the documentation has been improved with Razor examples! Demos Content Picker Menu Item Let's set up a site with the Blog recipe, create a new Page, and call it My brand new page. Then choose the Main Menu option in the admin UI and hit the Add Menu Item button. Here you could see the Available Menu Items modal window with two options: Link Menu Item and Content Picker Menu Item. Let's choose the second one! The Content Picker Menu Item is about having the ability to choose from the content items available in the CMS with a content picker. There is the Selected ContentItem dropdown, that can be used to select the content item that you would like to show on the menu. You can type to search or just simply select your item from the list. We will select our newly created page here. Publish the menu and navigate to the homepage of your site to see your menu. We placed the new menu item after the About, but of course, it's your choice to set the position of your menu item. If you are interested in the full demo don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube! Note that this feature is under development and can be found in this branch! News from the community Orchard Nuggets: How to add a culture URL segment for localization in Orchard Core So you're building a localized Orchard Core site and want all URLs to be in the form of /culture-name/rest/of/the/url, e.g. /hu-HU/my-page. What do you need to achieve this? In our newest Orchard Nuggets post, we give you the answers! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Helping Kast build a multi-tenant platform on Orchard Core Kast is an Australian company and one of their primary goals is to implement the Kast platform with the Kast Group Finder component. We worked together with Seth Cleaver (Co-founder and Director of Kast) on this tool to be able to create an intuitive self-service process that enables people within a church to easily find a suitable group to attend, simplify the administrative processes required for getting people into groups, and provide information to the group co-ordinators that might assist in planning and measuring effectiveness. Check out this case study about how we've developed this multi-tenant social group management platform for churches! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Orchard Core Training Demo module: combining ASP.NET Core Options with Orchard Core site settings Our Orchard Core Training Demo module has a new tutorial on combining ASP.NET Core Options with Orchard Core site settings. In the SiteSettingsController you could see how to use the Site Settings to access tenant-level settings and any other custom settings! Orchard Core Training Demo module is a demo Orchard Core module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that including the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can use it as part of a solution the uses Orchard Core NuGet packages, however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. The module assumes that you have a good understanding of basic Orchard concepts and that you can get around the Orchard admin area (the official documentation may help you with that). You should also be familiar with how to use Visual Studio and write C#, as well as the concepts of ASP.NET Core MVC. Bug reports, feature requests, and comments are warmly welcome, please do so via GitHub. Feel free to send pull requests too, no matter which source repository you choose for this purpose. Updated Lombiq Technologies logos You may have noticed that we rolled out our updated logo in the last few days. The spirit is the same: The lab flask with which we distill our IT solutions ("lombik" in Hungarian means lab flask :)). So, please welcome it! 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 140 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!