Add search handler; fix bad async usage in RecipeHarvester, and a demo about the Gravatar Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add search handler You may need a way to be able to log search attempts. Like if a search is leading to 0 hits, you want to know about it and report on it. This is something we can easily add by adding a handler that is called after a search is executed. So, this feature is about adding an ISearchHandler which is called from the search controller. This handler has a SearchedAsync method that is triggered after a search is executed. In the following screen, you can see the ISearchHandler interface itself, and the code that invokes its SearchedAsync method. Fix bad async usage in RecipeHarvester The IRecipeReader interface has a GetRecipeDescriptor method, which is now marked as obsolete. Instead of that, you will need to use the new GetRecipeDescriptorAsync in the future. The reason for that is the HarvestRecipesAsync method in the RecipeHarvester was not awaited, and the solution was to have a foreach loop to do an await GetRecipeDescriptorAsync() since it doesn't require thread safety. Demos Gravatar Module Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally unique avatars. On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an image of their choice to be associated with that email address. And the OrchardCoreContrib.Modules repository contains a module that utilizes the Gravatar service! So, for this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository, which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by community members who love Orchard Core. This will encourage all the passionate developers to build modules that aren't included in Orchard Core. Such modules may be necessary for the community or essential for any sort of CMS. The module that enables user avatars using the Gravatar service is called the Gravatar Module. If you run this solution and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the "gravatar" word to enable the Gravatar feature. This will mean that now you can utilize the new Gravatar HTML Tag Helper and the gravatar_url Liquid Filter. Let's try them out! To use the new Liquid Filter, we created a new content type with the Liquid Part attached to be able to add some Liquid code to our content item. We created a new content item of this content type and called it Gravatar Liquid Filter Demo. Here we constructed a list that contains the names and email addresses of some of the main Orchard Core contributors. Please note that the reason why we can use these email addresses here is that all of these addresses have an associated Gravatar. The gravatar_url Liquid Filter calls the GetAvatarUrl method of the GravatarService to retrieve the Gravatar image URL. Once we have the URL, we can use it as the src for the img HTML tag. The Gravatar Tag Helper is already utilized by the Gravatar module. If you check out the navigation bar of the admin site, you can see the Gravatar of the currently logged-in user here instead of the default one. That's because the module contains a UserMenu.cshtml file which overrides the given shape. Here we used the email address of the currently logged-in user and also provided a size, which is the width of the rendered image. And as always, if you would like to learn more about this module, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 434 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add Culture Picker for the Admin Site; a new version of Fluid, and a demo about the Health Checks Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add Culture Picker for the Admin Site Unless you have a language switcher on website pages you cannot switch a language in the admin panel. This can be solved by having a dropdown in the admin panel header to switch languages. If you head to Configuration -> Features and type "culture", you will see two features: Admin Culture Picker which provides a culture picker shape for the admin area. Content Culture Picker which provides a culture picker shape for the frontend. The first one is the new one, so enable the Admin Culture Picker feature! After you enable this feature, probably nothing will change. But why? Well, that's because if your site only supports one culture, there is no need to display a culture picker to choose from the different cultures. So, let's navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Localization and have at least two different supported cultures. After that, you will see the new dropdown in the NavbarTop zone of the admin theme which you can use to switch between cultures. Fluid 2.4.0 Fluid is an open-source .NET templating engine that is as close as possible to the Liquid template language. It's a secure template language that is also very accessible to non-programmer audiences. It also contains an ASP.NET Core MVC View Engine. And of course, Orchard Core is using Fluid too to generate templates. Fluid 2.4.0 has been released this month, so let's see some of the changes that this release contains! This release contains the implementation of some missing strftime formats. You can write: var source = "date:"{{Date | date:'%F %T.%3N'}}""; which results date:"2022-12-19 14:23:02. %3N". And as you can see, the %3N does not take effect. So, now all of these formatting parameters are implemented in Fluid meaning you can have more ways to print formatted dates. Like adding support for formats that will depend based on the first day of the week. Or if you ask for the number of weeks of the current day, then it might depend on what is the first day of the week. And there is a standard like Monday but sometimes you say that Sunday is the first day of the week. Another change is to introduce a "local" time zone for the time_zone filter. Meaning if you want to use a time zone that is the local time zone of the configuration (in Orchard it would be configured as the standard time zone), then you can use "local". Because you might get a UTC date and you want to display it with the local time zone. To do that, you can do: {{ now | date | time_zone: 'local' }}. Demos Health Checks Module For this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by the community members who love Orchard Core. This will encourage all the passionate developers to build modules that aren't included in Orchard Core. Such modules may be necessary for the community or essential for any sort of CMS. This repository contains several modules, this time we will check out the one called Health Checks Module, which provides health checks for the website. Orchard Core has a built-in Health Check module, the goal of this one is the extend the functionality of the built-in one. If you run this repository and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the Health Checks module. And while we are here, let's also ensure that the SendGrid module is enabled. But why? Because the Health Checks module is capable of checking the status of the SendGrid module. If you navigate to /health/sendgrid, you will see an Unhealthy message. Meaning that the SendGrid module is available and could be used without any issues but you have to configure its settings to make that service available for the users. Try to enable the Multitenancy feature as well and create a new tenant but do not set it up, just create it. After, head to the /health URL and see what it shows. Here you can find the status of SendGrid as before and another one called Tenants Health Check. As you can see, the name of the tenant that we have just created is Blog, but we haven't set it up (just created it), that's why you can see an Unhealthy status here. You can see the System Updates Health Check here as well because we enabled the System Module last week. And as always, if you would like to learn more about this module, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 434 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries, enhance the Search module and UI, and a demo about the System Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries In a recent change to the background tasks, a title was added to the background tasks. This works great for entries that have not been saved into the database. However, for entries that are already saved in the database, we do not have a title to show so it leads to no name being displayed on the UI. Since the title is not an editable field, we should always set the title to the default settings when showing tasks on the UI. Enhance the Search module and UI Currently, we have two different SearchController. Each one handles its own search provider, Lucence and Elasticsearch. We should be able to combine these two into one and place it on the Search module since that module's sole purpose is to export a front-end UI for the search. Also, we should add a setting to change the placeholder for the search bar. Additionally, we should have a Search Form widget that would allow the user to add a search widget. So, this update contains the following enhancements: Remove the SearchController from both Elasticsearch and the Lucene module. We now have one common SearchController in the Search module. The new controller now returns a shape instead of a view model which allows the user to override the default views. Adds settings to allow the user to define a title for the search page and also a placeholder text for the search bar. Add a Search widget that a user can add to their site. The default widget will direct the user to the /search route. Allow the user to optionally pass the index name in the route value. For example, /search/index-name the index-name is an optional value, and when it is not provided, the default index is used. Let's see some of the improvements mentioned in action! For this demonstration, we set up our site using the Blog recipe, and to be able to test the enhanced Search module, we have to enable the Search module itself and one search provider, which will be Lucene, for example. Now, we need to create a Lucene index under Search -> Indexing -> Lucene Indices. Here we added the name BlogPosts and included the Blog Post content type to the index. After that, we navigated to Search -> Settings -> Lucene and selected the BlogPosts search index as the default index to use for the search page and put a tick into the "Allow Lucene queries in search form" checkbox. Now we have a simple search set up, let's see the new Search Widget in action! We decided to place this widget on the home page. The predefined Blog content item is the home page in this recipe, so we edited the content definition of the Blog content type by adding a Flow Part to it. By having a Flow Part, we can add the new Search Form widget to the Blog content item. Here we can add some placeholder text if we want and can define the index name. Now it's time to utilize our widget! If we navigate to the home page of our site, we will see our Search Form widget. Let's type something and hit the Search button. As you can see, it lists our test posts which contain the "post" word. And you may notice the index name in the URL too (BlogPosts). If we had multiple indices, we can replace the BlogPosts one with any other existing index and that would mean that we search for something based on the content of that index. Remove .tiff from the supported images array Most modern web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, do not support the display of TIFF images natively on web pages. This is because TIFF files are typically very large in size and may take a long time to load. If you check out the MediaOrchardHelperExtensions class, you will see that the .tiff is now missing from the _imageExtensions. Demos System Module For this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by the community members who love Orchard Core. This will encourage all the passionate developers to build modules that aren't included in Orchard Core. Such modules may be necessary for the community or essential for any sort of CMS. This repository contains several modules, this time we will check out the one called System Module, which provides information about the currently running application; it can display the available system updates and put your site in maintenance mode while you upgrade. If you run this repository and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the "system" word. This will list the following features: System, System Maintenance, and System Updates. Enable them all! Now you will find a new option on the menu called System. Click on the Info under System! This page lists several useful information, like the ASP.NET Core Version, the OS Version, the Tenants, the enabled features, and so on. But you can find another option under System, called Updates. On this page, you can make sure that you are using the latest version of Orchard Core. If you are using the latest one (1.5 currently), you will see a "You're all up to date!" text, meaning there is no newer version of Orchard Core. And the third thing is the Maintenance mode. You can enable this mode by navigating to Configuration -> Settings -> System -> Maintenance and putting a tick into the "Allow maintenance mode" checkbox. If you do that and navigate to the front end of your site, you will see the page which shows you that the site is currently offline for maintenance. And as always, if you would like to learn more about this module, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 430 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Updating Workflows documentation, adding new permission to allow editing content owner, and adding new GetAsync extension. Interested in the details? Well, then check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Update Workflows docs Let's say you have a workflow event (implemented EventActivity), and you want to print a property value using Liquid when using a for loop like this: <h4>Here is the responses</h4><ul> {% for item in Workflow.Input["ThresholdSummaries"] %} <li>The response to '{{ item.Title }}' was '{{ item.Respond }}' while threshold is '{{ item.Threshold }}'</li> {% endfor %}</ul> However, the notification replaces {{ item.Title }}, {{ item.Respond }}, and {{ item.Threshold }} by empty string instead of the actual value. The reason for that is from memory, you need to define a Liquid MemberAccessStrategy for this custom type to allow its properties to be accessed. The Orchard Core documentation has been updated to describe how you can trigger a custom event activity and register a member access strategy if you are looking to use Liquid to access the member of a custom object. Add new permission to allow editing content owner Currently, SiteOwner permission is required to be able to see/edit the Common Part info like the owner. Let's say you want to allow a moderator to change the owner of a specific content type. Currently, there is no way to do that without granting moderators SiteOwner which isn't acceptable. From now on, we have EditContentOwner and EditContentOwner_{} permission to control who can edit the owner of a content item when Common Part is attached. Let's see this quickly in action! Here we assume that you set up your site using the Blog recipe. First of all, we have to make sure that we are logged in with a user who has permission "Edit the owner of a content item permission". If you check out the permissions of the Administrator role, you will see that users within this role have this permission by default. Now, we will modify the content definition of the Blog Post content type a little bit, and attach the Common Part to it. We can do it under Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types where we need to hit the Edit button near the Blog Post. After that, we can simply add the Common Part to the Blog Post. Before finalizing editing the content definition, don't forget to edit the Common Part settings and put a tick into the "Display owner editor" checkbox. It's time to see the result of our work! We have one predefined blog post on the site, so we will edit that one. And as you can see, the first textbox here is the one called Owner (we can move this textbox anywhere of course) with the value "admin". That's because the username of our super user is "admin" and we set up the site with this user. And of course, now you can modify the owner user of this content item. But don't forget, here you have to provide the user's name of an existing user. In the following screen, we tried to change the owner to "admin2" but we faced an error because we don't have a user with that user name in our system. Add new GetAsync extension Currently, we have GetAsync(IEnumerable<string> contentItemIds, bool latest = false) and GetAsync(string contentItemId, VersionOptions options) but not GetAsync(IEnumerable<string> contentItemIds, VersionOptions options). When doing a bulk update, it is much more helpful to use GetAsync(IEnumerable<string> contentItemIds, VersionOptions options) than GetAsync(IEnumerable<string> contentItemIds, bool latest = false) if we want to get multiple VersionOptions.DraftRequired, not just the latest. And here you can see the new GetAsync method, which accepts the contentItemIds and the VersionOptions! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 412 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

The MiniProfiler visibility is now based on permissions, tenant APIs improvements, and using ListContent permission instead of ViewContent to see the content items list. Interested in the details? Well, then check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates MiniProfiler visibility based on permissions MiniProfiler is a library and UI for profiling your application. By letting you see where your time is spent, which queries are run, and any other custom timings you want to add, MiniProfiler helps you debug issues and optimize performance. And MiniProfiler is a built-in feature in Orchard Core that has some updates. Let's say an admin needs to profile a production instance. Enabling MiniProfiler for everyone to see is not acceptable in most cases. Also, a user may want to profile an ajax request to analyze a query or other info. The solution here is to provide new permissions when you enable the Mini Profiler feature. If you navigate to Security -> Roles and hit Edit near any role, you can see the new permissions which enable you to view the Mini Profiler widget on the back end and the front-end pages. Tenant APIs improvements Orchard Core tenant APIs got several updates lately. First of all, there was no way to update some tenant settings from API calls. Meaning, the tenant's category was missing in the ApiController. We should be able to set a tenant's description via an API call, so this property is now included in the sent model. Another improvement is the new Edit endpoint because there was no way to update tenant settings from API calls. The new Edit endpoint in the Tenant's ApiController takes care of this and enables us to modify the tenant settings either if the tenant is uninitialized or running. The updateable properties are the same as what is displayed on the tenant editor on the Admin UI. Use ListContent permission instead of ViewContent Currently, we use View Content as a minimal permission to list the contents in the content items UI. We use the same permission to also show the Content -> Content Items admin menu. Here the List Content permission should be used, not View Content. What if someone wants to allow a user to view content using a direct link but does not want them to list the contents in the UI? Currently, this isn't possible. Additionally, ViewContent is granted to all Anonymous and Authenticated roles, which is fine. But, access to list contents should be granted by the ListContent permission to avoid allowing listing content without explicit permission grant. If you check out the change logs in the docs of the upcoming release, you can read about the updated permissions. News from the community Hastlayer is now fully open-source Hastlayer is being developed by Lombiq Technologies, a software, training, and services company focusing on web development with open Microsoft technologies. Hastlayer transforms .NET software into FPGA-implemented logic circuits. (FPGAs are chips that can mimic other chips.) The result is code that runs faster and uses less power than a code-only solution without sacrificing the ability of further developing your software. Using Hastlayer will optimize your performance and lower the power consumption of hardware, which will bring you more satisfied customers who want your solution and a boost in your company’s revenue. And we have just recently fully open-sourced Hastlayer! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 410 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add placement example for dynamic parts, responsive Admin Theme, improve the Feature Profiles feature, and a demo about self-service tenant registration! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Added placement example for dynamic parts We have an article on the Orchard Core Documentation site that is about display management and placement files. Any module or theme can contain an optional placement.json file providing custom placement logic. This article describes the format of the placement.json file, how to render a shape, editor shape placement, and so on. Now you can see a new section here as well, telling you the structure of the placement file when you are working with dynamic parts. Responsive Admin Theme Last November, we mentioned that a huge improvement is coming to Orchard Core that makes the Admin Theme responsive. Note, that it's an option that is disabled by default, and you have to do some modifications in the appsettings.json file to make this work (under the StyleSettings section), and after that, your custom editors rendered in the admin have to support this, by utilizing the necessary helpers, like Orchard.GetEndCssClasses(). You can read more about how to set up the TheAdmin theme in the Change Logs of the upcoming release. Improve the Feature Profiles feature If a Feature Profile is renamed, it'll break existing tenants since the name is stored in the appsettings.json file, and also, other modules are not able to contribute to the Feature Profiles setup. We have had Feature Profiles for a long time now in Orchard Core, and if you haven't heard about it, you can check out a demo in this post. In a nutshell, this is about using app settings/configuration to add the ability to restrict the features and/or themes that are available to either a tenant and/or all tenants or a mix of both. You can add Feature Profiles under Configuration -> Tenant Feature Profiles once the Tenant Feature Profiles module is enabled. Here you can set the rules that you want to use. By default, you can have an Include and an Exclude rule. By using these, you can easily say that I don't want to allow the given feature for the assigned tenants or I want to allow my custom feature to the given tenants. The Expression contains the name of the feature, but it can include stars like OrchardCore.*Templates that will match the OrchardCore.Templates, OrchardCore.AdminTemplates and OrchardCore.ShortCodes.Templates feature as well. Let's say that we don't want to allow the TheAgencyTheme and the features with names that start with OrchardCore. and end with .Templates. And if you create a tenant, you can optionally specify which Feature Profile should be applied to the given tenant. You can rename the Feature Profile if you want, and renaming it could cause some issues. So, from now on when using Feature Profiles, we add an ID to the profile instead of using the existing editable name. This way renaming the profile won't break anything. To keep it backward compatible, we treat the current name as the ID for old entries. Note renaming old entries won't cause any issues since we consider the ID as the name before the new name is saved. If you check out the appsettings.json file of this tenant, you will see the ID here. And also, we allow the user to have multiple profiles more than explained in In a SaaS setup, how can the SaaS admin/owner manage the tenant features? Demos Self-service tenant registration In this demo, we can see a module created by Niraj Soni. He provides you with a new way to implement a site sign-up, so you actually create steps for someone to sign up, pay and get access to the tenant in a SaaS environment and everything happens right away. If you install the module, you will see a Registration Pages option in the menu under Multi Tenancy, where you can actually create the flow of the sign-up process. Here is a page called School, where you can capture school-related information using widgets during the sign-up process, like address, city, state, zip, etc. On another page, you can capture information to create an admin account, like user name, password, and email. There is also a step to verify email and capture payment. This contains integration with Stripe, so this will be utilizing Stripe. And finally, you can review and finish the whole process. Using this feature, you can add any page you want; you can remove a page if you want. And that's just the surface! If you would like to see this in action, check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 406 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Extending user permissions, updating Localization documentation for the PO extractor tool, and fixing using a media profile the quality parameter had no effect. Check out our post for the latest updates on Orchard Harvest and a new tutorial series from Lombiq! Orchard Core updates Extend user permissions Last September, you could see a demo about extending user permissions. This involved several changes in how we handle users on the site, and we added more permissions to the Users module to make it more usable and robust for many use cases: List users in {0} role Edit users in {0} role Delete users in {0} role Assign users to {0} role Manage user profile settings Also, we now have settings that would allow the user to prevent username and/or email changes on the edit screen. Here is a screenshot of the new settings. If you would like to try out the features mentioned in the linked post, now, you can do that easily by using the nightly build packages of Orchard Core! Update Localization documentation for the extractor tool Hisham Abdullah Bin Ateya released the stable version of the PO Extractor Tool. As you can see in the Readme, this is a dotnet global tool to extract translatable strings from the C# and VB code, Razor templates, and Liquid templates to POT (portable object template) files. It is designed to follow conventions used in the Orchard Core project. The Localization page in the Orchard Core documentation has been updated to reflect the changes, like updating the URL of the tool and the commands that you can use to install the tool and generate PO files. Fix using a media profile the quality parameter had no effect When using the Liquid filter resize_url the quality parameter of a media profile will have no effect for jpg/webp. The issue can easily be fixed by moving the quality parameter behind the format parameter. To fix the resize_url filter a change to the ordering of parameters in OrchardCore.Media.Services.MediaProfileService.GetMediaProfileCommands(string name) is required. And here, you can see this quick fix to make the quality parameter work. Because with Dictionary the order of items is not guaranteed the fix is not regression proof. OrderedDictionary could be used as an alternative, but this would require a reference to System.Collections.Specialized in addition. News from the community Orchard Harvest updates Last year we conducted a survey to help us organize this year's Orchard Harvest conference. We shared the results last month, and based on your feedback, the event will be held in North America. Mike Alhayek also reached us saying he may have the right contact needed to facilitate the event in Las Vegas. Now we needed a date for the conference, and based on the results, the best would be to hold the conference in the Q2 of 2023. If you follow the official Twitter account of Orchard, you may face a poll where the goal was to find the best date. Based on the results, the winner is the option May 22-23 (Mon, Tue). Thanks for voting! Now the next goal is to be able to find the best location in Las Vegas. Also, we are looking for sponsors and contributors for the following: T-shirts. Location. A meet-up after the programs. Recording the presentations. Renting equipment for presentations. Catering. Webpage (we can host the conference site on DotNest for free). If anyone could help in any way that would be really appreciated. Please use the following thread in GitHub Discussions if you feel, you can join in organizing the upcoming Harvest, or if you want to be as updated as possible chime into the discussion! As we move forward, we will keep everyone informed of the details, and you will also find every piece in this newsletter! New tutorial series from Lombiq: DotNest Core Tutorials The Lombiq Hosting - Media Theme for Orchard Core repository contains an open-source project which will allow developers to host their themes in the Orchard Core Media Library, including templates and assets. The inspiration came from our public Orchard (Core) SaaS called DotNest. If you don't know it, you can use this site to sign up and get an Orchard (Core) site with two clicks for everyone. We don't vet who is signing up, so it should be safe, and it should be limited. But still, we want people to be able to have their sites as flexible as possible. And of course, there are a lot of built-in features in Orchard for that, you can do a lot from the admin. Part of the things you can do from the admin as well in a limited fashion is theming. We first wrote about the Media Theme a few weeks ago in this post. Although you can't install custom themes on DotNest (see "Limitations") you still have a lot of control over theming. Using Media Theme you can develop themes using Liquid templates and static assets as usual, from your favorite IDE, working with a local version of your DotNest site, and deploying code to it. Please follow the guidelines of the DotNest Core SDK, and if you prefer tutorial videos instead, check out our brand-new playlist. This playlist called DotNest Core tutorials will contain 5 videos starting with how you can create your first DotNest site and we will also see how to set up your local development environment to style a DotNest site, how to use recipes to keep your local environment up to date and how to deploy your theme to your DotNest site. 3 videos are out, the 2 remaining's will be available during the weekend. Would you like to run your Orchard Core site on DotNest? Create your Orchard Core site with two clicks on DotNest! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 406 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add a title to background tasks and improve the UI, update Azure AD Docs, add hidden content type settings to allow hiding a content type from GraphQL Schema, and a demo about the Lombiq Node.js Extensions project! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add a title to background tasks and improve the UI Currently, the background task name/technical name is the full name of the C# class. This is not a user-friendly name for a UI. The long technical name (aka task Id) should not be visible to the UI. The improvement here is to add a user-friendly title to every background task. We can continue to use the current "name" in the URL, and locate the task. So, here is a summary of the changes regarding the background tasks UI: A new search bar was added to the list page. The technical name is no longer visible. Instead, we show a title. The Create action was removed from the controller as we can never create a background task using a UI. The Edit action will now create a settings entry in the document if an entry does not exist. The following screen shows you the before and after screens of the Background Tasks landing page and the Edit background task page. Improve Azure AD Docs The documentation of how to authenticate users with the Azure AD Account had a few errors and omissions, so after figuring out what needs to be configured to make login work, the documentation has been updated. Add hidden content type settings to allow hiding a content type from GraphQL Schema GraphQL exposes all content types to the user. A permission check is applied to filter out content types users can't view. There is no way to control which content types should be exposed to the API. Not everyone wants to expose every content type. For example, if we have a SitePage content type we want everyone to be able to view it, but we do not want anyone to query it from the API. The solution was to simply add a content type setting to hide the content type like we do today for the content parts. Demos Lombiq Node.js Extensions The Lombiq Node.js Extensions project is supposed to provide front-end asset pipelines as a reusable project where under the hood, we actually run some Node.js scripts. We tried to do that in a way that the consumer of this project doesn't really have to know much about how it works and doesn't really have to configure much or anything at all. And we also set out to make this available as a NuGet package. So that you can drop in a completely working, but also configurable Node.js front-end pipeline which means compiling/minifying and linting SCSS and JS files and things like that. One more thing to know is that we drop Gulp from the equation altogether because Gulp is officially not compatible with anything higher than Node.js 12. It does work on Node.js 14, but we had problems with upgrading to Node.js 16, which came out over a year ago, and now the current LTS version is Node.js 18, so we decided to drop Gulp from the whole pipeline and build the whole project just using npm scripts and some custom written node.js scripts. Now let's see a quick example of how to utilize it! We will check it out in our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution. You will find our other useful Orchard Core-related open-source projects there, too. Here you can find a class library called Lombiq.NodeJs.Extensions.Samples where we added a configuration section called nodejsExtensions to the package.json file. Here you can see we are looking for JS files in the CustomJsFolder and SCSS files in the NonDefaultScssFolder and rendering them into those target folders. We also have assets copying, which we do a lot in our modules where we copy files from node modules (for example, Bootstrap or other front-end libraries) into Webroot. Then we also have Markdown linting with another sample package.json file in the Lombiq.NodeJs.Extensions.SolutionMarkdownAnalysis project. The markdown can be enabled by providing a source folder which can be any relative path. And we have a lot to cover! If you want to know more about this new project, check out this recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 400 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Make the Features module optional to the non-default tenant, add AddIndexProvider and AddScopedIndexProvider extensions, and a demo of the freshly released 1.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Make the Features module optional to non-default tenant Currently, the module OrchardCore.Features are always enabled. We recently added a feature for the default tenant to be able to manage features on the behalf of any tenant. We can remove the AlwaysEnabled flag from OrchardCore.Features as the Saas owner may not want to allow the tenant to control their own features. It means this change allows to be able to not enable the Features module, such that only the default tenant can add/remove features even if there is an allowlist of features.This also introduces a breaking change which you can read about in the Orchard Core documentation containing the breaking changes of the upcoming release. Add AddIndexProvider and AddScopedIndexProvider extensions This change is about adding two new extensions that you can use in your Startup file to register your index providers in a simpler way. As a reminder, the IScopedIndexProvider is an index provider that will be resolved through DI in a scoped lifetime because it probably requires scoped services. Demos Orchard Core Commerce MVP Orchard Core Commerce will be an Orchard Core port and partial rewrite of the open-source Nwazet Commerce module that was built for Orchard CMS 1.x. Nwazet Commerce was initially built in 2012 by Bertrand Le Roy, loosely based on a commerce sample by Sipke Shoorstra. The initial goal of Nwazet Commerce was to power the website of the hardware startup Nwazet. While Nwazet is no longer operating, the Nwazet Commerce project went on and was further developed by a group of passionate contributors who are using the platform for their own, and their customer's websites. Like Orchard, Nwazet Commerce was built with extensibility in mind, and as such, it has its own extensions (typical examples include local tax and shipping modules). It's also a pure, idiomatic Orchard. Orchard Core represents a major evolution of the Orchard design principles and is sufficiently different that running Nwazet Commerce on it will necessitate significant work. As such, the community decided that starting from a blank slate was the best way to go, so they will port Nwazet Commerce piece by piece, being careful to accurately apply Orchard Core's new design principles. The community also decided to adopt a new name that gets rid of the now obsolete origins and establishes our ambition for the module to become the go-to commerce module for Orchard Core. Last May, we published a demo where you could see the current state of the module. A few months later we reached another milestone when we finished with the basic implementation of Stripe Payment integration (without taxation, shipping, etc.). Stripe is a payment service provider that business owners can use to accept dozens of payment methods, from credit cards to buy now, pay later services. Stripe Payments handles the steps between a customer providing their card information and learning that their payment has been accepted. And as you may know, Lombiq provides stewardship for the Orchard Core Commerce module. That actually means that we do code reviews and work on features and fixes. To have that, we added an Orchard Core Commerce MVP planning survey. This was about asking the community what the most essential features for you would be in an Orchard Core-based e-commerce solution. We had the results, we had a better understanding of what were the topics that made into the MVP as our short-term goals. And now we can proudly present the 1.0 release of the Orchard Core Commerce module! Let's see some of the key features of this brand-new release! You can try it out by cloning this repo or including the NuGet package in your own Orchard Core project. After you cloned the repo and set up the site with the Blog recipe, for example, you can enable all of the Orchard Core Commerce-related features to be able to try out everything that the module could provide to you. But you can run the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe on the setup screen, which will do the same. You can find several recipes under Configuration -> Recipes if you filter on the "commerce" word. By using these recipes, you can decide which features of the Commerce module you would like to utilize in your solution. By using these recipes, you can have a predefined Product content type, some sample content items, and everything that you might need when dealing with a commerce site. But as we mentioned, if you would like to see the whole of the Commerce module without doing any additional setup, the best is to run the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe on the setup screen. If you do that, you will get a Product content type with one TestProduct content item. In terms of taxation, you can set the gross price of the given product (the price with tax) and the tax rate. You also have simple inventory management, which means you can set the number of items in stock, and you can set the maximum and minimum number of this item one can order. You can also set up discounts if you want. For example, you can say that the discount percentage that is applied to this product will be 50 and you can also set up a beginning and expiration date and time of the discount. In case you want to limit the number of products that the discount can be applied to, you can also do that. Now let's check out what the user sees if they navigate to the display view of this product. As you can see, the price of this product is $10, and the gross price is $12.70 because of the 27% tax rate. We have 5 items in the inventory, and currently, we have a 50% discount. Meaning that the new price with a discount after taxes is $6.35. The MVP also comes with several settings that you can utilize under Configuration -> Commerce. You can set up the Stripe API under the Stripe API option, but you can see two new options here as well. But if you execute the recipe called Orchard Core Commerce - Samples - Custom Tax Rates, you will find another one here called Custom Tax Rates. Here you can add complicated tax handling based on the postal code, state or province, or country. The following screen means that if the country of the user is the United States, and the state or province is New York, the tax rate would be 4%. If the user has a Hungarian address (HU), the tax rate would be 25%. And you have just seen the basics of this release! If you want to know more about the Commerce module, check out the documentation page that contains the key features, and as usual, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 390 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add permission check for the content type filter, prevent the Users feature from breaking when the Roles feature is disabled, add new database options, and a demo about the new Build Version Display module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add permission check for content type filter The content type filter should only show accessible content types. The user should only see content types that they can view. Before this fix, all of the content types were listed, even if you don't have permission to see it. Let's say that I am an editor user who has no access to view the Blog content type. In this case, when this user navigates to Content -> Content Items and clicks on the content type filter, the predefined Blog content item will not appear in the list. Prevent the Users feature from breaking when the Roles feature is disabled This was an old issue in Orchard Core if you disable the Roles module, the site crashes because the Users module needs the following services to work: IRoleService RoleManager IRoleStore This issue is now fixed, and you can disable the Roles module from the UI without facing an error. You can find the implementation details in this pull request, thanks to Mike Alhayek! Add database options like TablePrefixSeparator, Schema, IdentityColumnType, and DocumentTable Here is a summary of the changes: both TableNameConvention and TablePrefixSeparator were removed from YesSqlOptions. The following properties were added to the ShellSettings of each tenant: TablePrefixSeparator when this value does not exist, we assume _, however, if an empty string is found, we use no prefix for the tables. Schema was added to allow you to provide a specific schema to use. IdentityColumnSize when this value is empty or invalid, we assume Int64. DocumentTable when this value is empty, we assume Document. If adding a new tenant failed due to missing Encrypt=false or TrustServerCertificate=True, we add the error to the log file to provide the admin with more about the issue. The following means that now you can find a new section in the configuration called OrchardCore_Data_TableOptions. Now you can define the name of the Document table if you want to change it, change the table name separator (changing the _ in tenant1_tablename), and the default identity column size, which is Int64 by default. Every existing tenant will work with Int32, but the new tenants will use Int64. It can happen because YesSql now supports Int64 as well. You can find some new lines about these settings in the documentation as well. If you want to migrate the existing tenants, you have to do your own migration. You can also define the schema of the tenant (DatabaseSchema) which is also configurable from the UI. This way all the table names are the same, just the schema that could be changed for each tenant. Demos Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display The goal of the Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display for Orchard Core module is to display the build version (i.e., .NET assembly version or other) on the admin of the Default tenant. By using this module, you can see at a glance which version of the app is deployed. But of course, there are various ways to know what's currently deployed into a specific environment (like staging or production), but the goal of this module is to cover the following use case: when you are looking at the app, you will know what's there. The only thing you have to do is to install the module, and navigate to Configuration -> Features, and enable the Lombiq Hosting - Build Version Display feature. After you navigate to the homepage of the admin UI, you will see the following on the dashboard. You can find the Orchard Core version, the version of the .NET assembly is currently being executed, which means the web application. If you have a CI build, usually that will generate a version number for you. And finally, during the build, you can also add a link to the build. This is just a dummy link for examples, but you can link to a GitHub action. You can read more about it in the Readme file of the module. Do you want to quickly try out this project and see it in action? Check it out in our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions full Orchard Core solution, and also see our other useful Orchard Core-related open-source projects! And as always, if you want to know more about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 396 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!