This week we are coming with a cool demo of using Statiq with custom GraphQL and Liquid modules to render static content for Orchard Core as a headless CMS! But before jumping to that don't forget to check out the other news around Orchard Core and another demo about adding the ability to generate DisplayText with a pattern! On Orchard Core Avoid slash in the role name The slash will add another segment that prevents to use from editing or deleting the role. Now we are checking that if the name of the role is containing a slash or not. If yes, you will see an error message. Decoupled CMS guide When you navigate to the Orchard Core Documentation page and hit the Index under the Guides in the left, you will see that we have a new tutorial here, called Building a decoupled website with Razor Pages. By following this step-by-step tutorial you can easily develop your own decoupled CMS site from the scratch. In this tutorial we learn how to: Start a new Orchard Core CMS project Create custom content types Edit content items Create Razor Pages with custom routes to render the content Load content items with different identifiers Render WYSIWYG preview screens while editing the content Add Breadcrumbs zone There is a new zone called Breadcrumbs in the layout of the admin. With that zone, we can inject breadcrumbs. Anywhere, where the breadcrumbs were used they are now using this zone, for example on the workflows page. There is a zone tag, so everything that is inside this zone tag will be injected inside the Breadcrumbs section. And here you can see the RenderSectionAsync call in the Layout.cshtml of TheAdmin theme. Updating themes All the themes that are using Bootstrap now have been updated to use the latest version. The main change is that all the static assets now are included in the themes, which means they can now be served by the Orchard instance and not just the CDN. And now each theme has a ResourceManifest, that defines all the assets that each theme is using, like jQuery, Bootstrap, Bootstrap bundle and so on. The local version and the CDN is also defined here, that allows these themes to reuse the settings that we set in the admin to select which version of the resources we want to use either local or CDN or based on the environment (meaning development will use local, production will use CDN). You can see a vendor- prefix in the names, it is to prevent conflicts with the resource names that we have defined in the OrchardCore.Resources module. Orchard Core Docs new structure The structure of the Orchard Core docs will be reorganizing and come with a new MkDocs theme. Here you can see just the material and here you can see the new structure that coming soon. Demos Add ability to generate DisplayText with a Pattern Let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. Now head to the admin site and edit one of the content types, for example, the Article. Add a new Text Field to it, let's use the Name for the Technical Name. Now edit the Title of the Article. Here you will see an Options drop-down list with the following options: Title is editable: you can edit the title when editing the content item. Title is generated and input is disabled: you can't edit the title and the textbox for the title is disabled. Title is generated and input is hidden: you can't edit the title and the textbox for the title is hidden. And under that, there is the pattern used to render the title of this content type. The pattern gets injected and this gets called when the content item is updated. Now let's edit the existing Article, called About and fill the Name Text Field with some value, for example Name. And change the value of the Subtitle Text Field to Subtitle. After hit Publish. Now if you navigate to Manage Content page you will see that the title of this Article has been generated using the values of the Name and the Subtitle Text Fields. Because at the content definition of the Title we select that the Title is generated and input is disabled, when you try to edit an existing article, you will see the disabled textbox for Title. Generating static sites using Statiq(Wyam) and Orchard Core If you haven't heard about Wyam(Statiq) yet, let's recap the underlying concepts first: Wyam is a simple to use, highly modular, and extremely configurable static content generator that can be used to generate web sites, produce documentation, create ebooks, and much more. Since everything is configured by chaining together flexible modules (that you can even write yourself), the only limits to what it can create are your imagination. Common static sites are using tools like Jekyll/Hugo which are based on content in markdown files, stored in GitHub. Some arguments: This might work for small and technical teams, but when users are more than a handful or don't have technical knowledge it's not possible anymore. When assets management is required, with organizing images or adding metadata. Rights management, such that sections of the site can only be modified by some users. Editing workflow, when content needs to be reviewed and pass different levels of validation. Allow more complex editing scenarios, like editing maps, choosing a color. Managing more than a dozen content items, like e-commerce sites that could span thousands of products. When online B2B communications are required, like export processes, tax data updates, or webhooks. Now let's see how to generate static sites! First, let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. Now head to the Configuration and enable the following OpenID modules: OpenID Authorization Server and OpenID Token Validation. We also need the GraphQL, so enable that module too. The goal is to implement the authentication from a service to the Orchard Core by using Bearer tokens and OpenID. With that, you can use the APIs from another service. After go to the Authorization server settings under OpenID Connect/Settings and allow the Client Credentials Flow. The OpenId Connect Client Credentials grant can be used for machine to machine authentication. In this grant a specific user is not authorized but rather the credentials are verified and a generic access_token is returned. Now create a new application under OpenID Connect/Management. This will be our service that will connect to the Orchard Core instance. Don't forget to allow the Client Credentials Flow here and of course, provide a Client Id and a Client Secret. We will need these soon. Now we have a configured Orchard Core instance to serve content to our application using GraphQL and the Client Credentials flow. For the sake of simplicity, we will create a Console Application. This application has to use the Client Credentials Grant Flow for authentication. curl -XPOST "https://<region>.onelogin.com/oidc/token" \-H "Authorization: Basic <base64 encoded client_id:client_secret>" \-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \-d "grant_type=client_credentials" First, create a request on the /connect/token on the Orchard Core instance. Then create a Basic authentication header with the Client Id and the Client Secret. Remember you provided these data when setting up the OpenID application in Orchard Core. After we send the request and the response will be a JSON document with an access_token property. This property stores the value of the access token that we can use to send any request to the server as a Bearer token. Check this code snippet to receive this token. using (var httpClientHandler = new HttpClientHandler()){ httpClientHandler.ServerCertificateCustomValidationCallback = HttpClientHandler.DangerousAcceptAnyServerCertificateValidator; httpClientHandler.AutomaticDecompression = System.Net.DecompressionMethods.GZip | System.Net.DecompressionMethods.Deflate; using (var httpClient = new HttpClient(httpClientHandler)) { string accessToken; using (var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Post, new Uri("https://localhost:44300/connect/token"))) { request.Headers.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("theclientid:theclientsecret"))); request.Content = new StringContent("grant_type=client_credentials"); request.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); using (var response = await httpClient.SendAsync(request)) { var data = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); var doc = JsonDocument.Parse(data); accessToken = doc.RootElement.GetProperty("access_token").GetString(); } } }} And the value of the doc JsonDocument will be the following, where you can see the access token. {"token_type":"Bearer","access_token":"CfDJ8IFF_p0sw0lLjSdTpd..........cDRRiQXfpVZsHo","expires_in":3600} In the next step, we are creating a new Bearer token with the access token and we are pointing to the GraphQL endpoint with a query listing all the blog posts. With that, we can get all the blog posts. using (var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Get, new Uri("https://localhost:44300/api/graphql?query=query%20MyQuery%20%7B%20blogPost%20%7B%20displayText%20markdownBody%20%7B%20html%20%7D%20%7D%20%7D"))){ request.Headers.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", accessToken); using (var response = await httpClient.SendAsync(request)) { var data = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); Console.WriteLine(data); }} You can see that we pass the GraphQL query in the query string in an URL encoded format. Here is the query in a readable way: MyQuery { blogPost { displayText markdownBody { html } }} We use Console.WriteLine to see the data coming from Orchard Core. Because we set up our site using the Blog recipe and haven't added any additional blog posts, our response will be the following: So, this is how you do Client Credentials Flow to authenticate your application against Orchard Core. This is the first step needed to generate a static site. Now let's just refactor our code a little bit. Create a ClientCredentialsAuthenticate method to get the access token. With the ClientCredendialsAuthenticate method, we can do as many calls as we want. You can see the BlogPosts query that we will pass to a custom Statiq module called GraphQLQuery. This module will just take the GraphQL endpoint, the query, and the access token. We will also need to develop another custom module extension using Statiq, called Liquid module to be able to use Liquid. const string BlogPosts = @" MyQuery { blogPost { displayText markdownBody { html } } }";static async Task Main(string[] args){ var token = await GraphQlQuery.ClientCredendialsAuthenticate(new Uri("https://localhost:44300/connect/token"), "theclientid", "theclientsecret"); await Bootstrapper .CreateDefault(args) .BuildPipeline("Posts", builder => builder .WithInputModules(new GraphQLQuery("https://localhost:5001/api/graphql", BlogPosts, token)) .WithProcessModules( new SetDestination(Config.FromDocument(doc => new FilePath(doc.GetString("displayText") + ".html"))), new Liquid("templates/blogpost.liquid")) .WithOutputWriteFiles() ) .RunAsync();} For every blog post, it will apply the transformation, by getting the displayText property of the JSON document and create an HTML file based on that. After apply the Liquid filter based on the blogpost.liquid template, that has the following content: <h1>test</h1><p>{{ displayText }}</p>{{ markdownBody.html | raw }} If you run that application you will get one HTML file in the bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.0/output folder of your application called Man must explore, and this is exploration at its greatest.html. If you open the file you will see the following result. With that, you can go further and generate all the static sites you want based on GraphQL and use Razor or Liquid. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 98 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!

The Preview feature is improving, you can have admin templates and better defaults for the SearchController, and we are just scratching the surface of the new features that coming to Orchard Core. Let's check out those with some other fascinating features! On Orchard Core Validate stereotypes This prevents stereotypes from having non-alphanumeric values because these are used for file template names. Another issue was people assume that they can provide multiple stereotypes by passing a coma, but no, it's not a valid use case. Here's the fix in the UpdateAsync method of the ContentTypeSettingsDisplayDriver by adding the IsAlphaNumericOrEmpty private method. Fix attached media field add button visibility There was a couple of regressions with the media editor and media attached field editor: the delete button doesn't seem to work anymore (permanently disabled) in the media attached field editor, the add button doesn't reappear after deleting an image until you publish and re-edit the page You can see the fixes in the following gif. Adding shape_dump filter Do you remember the Shape Tracing feature in Orchard 1? It's like pressing the F12 button in a Chrome browser, but for shapes. You will see all the shapes that have been rendered and all the alternates and the source code for alternates. It makes easier to template shapes. The first step is towards this feature in Orchard Core is to use this filter to dump a shape. With this filter, you can export the JSON document of the shape. Let's say we have a site installed with the Blog recipe. Use the shape_dump filter in the Content-Article.liquid file by adding this line: {{ Model | shape_dump }}. After if you navigate to an article, you will see the following page with the rendered JSON document. This feature is under development, but you can check the current progress in this branch. Orchard Core Preview feature improvements The idea is to improve the Orchard Core Preview feature. Today when we do a preview it's using the ContentItemController, the one that renders the ContentShape. With that, you can have your own custom templates and it will render that. When you click on the Preview button, there is a new window that opens and this new window will call into a custom preview controller. This controller is in the OrchardCore.ContentPreview module, called PreviewController. What it does is when it's get called on a POST from the second window it gets the content item, which is inside the form post and tries to update the result of the POST, like it was a publish or a save action on the form. And in the end, we get a new content item as if we were about to save the content item form. And from this content item, we just call BuildDisplayAsync and render it using a view. And the Render.cshtml will just render the shape in the current layout of the frontend. The improvement would be to find a way to customize how to render the page in the preview window. This feature is working well when we are using the content shapes with the full CMS mode, but when we are in the decoupled mode to render anything it's not based on the content shape. It's based on the developer's own views and templates and controller actions. There will a new part, called PreviewPart, that contains nothing, but has settings. When you attach the PreviewPart to your content type, you will go to Settings and define the pattern to use to build the path. So, the developer makes their own view and then they can configure this content type to say that for the preview you should use my route that will display my content type. Then when we click on the Preview button, intercepting the Render to invoke the URL that will actually render the content item from the developers perspective instead of trying to render the content item using the content shape. In this case, we won't have any customization. In the end, we will have a working preview feature even in decoupled mode. If you are curious about the current state of this new feature, check out this branch. Demos Admin templates It's like templates, but for the admin. Let's see how it works! We have front end and admin themes. When you want to customize the admin theme, right now there is no other way than creating a new theme and having the theme as a base one and selecting your own admin theme in the dashboard. This feature is kinda same as the templates module and lets you create shape templates from the admin itself for the admin. This way most developers won't have to create a custom admin theme, because it's usually just to change a summary for a blog post or a detailed template for a specific widget to look different. Or maybe you would like to hide something like you want to hide the TitlePart editor in a way to make it different. Set up a site using the Blog recipe. To use this feature head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Admin templates feature. After you will see an Admin Templates option in the Configuration menu. Here click on the Add Template button to add a new admin template. Let's call this template Content_SummaryAdmin__BlogPost to override the summary admin shape of a BlogPost. Give it a likable content and hit save. Now navigate to the Blog option in the admin to see the list of the blog posts. Here you will see the new look of the one blog post that we have. This might also allow us to be able to create custom widgets to place on the landing page of the dashboard and many more. Better defaults for the SearchController The search feature is part of the Lucene module, that could not be the right way to do. Maybe we could have its own module, because there is a custom controller and it's doesn't care about what is indexing anything. By default when you have the Lucene module enabled you have a SearchController under the /search URL. It doesn't have any styling, because there is no customized search page for that in the TheBlogTheme. If you navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Search you can select which index you want to able to search and the default search fields which are the fields in which we will look for the content you type. If you haven't provided the default search fields, you will get a BadRequest in the front end with a Couldn't execute search. The search index doesn't exist message and also a log entry. But what is Content.ContentItem.FullText? For example, let's check the content type definition of the Article. Here you can see a section called Full-text. Here you can say what should be used to look for the Articles. For instance, by default, we include the display text and the body parts. But you could say I also want to use some more data, like the values of the different fields. You can use Liquid here to provide the values. Future improvements could be to make a custom shape for the search results for the list and for each item. And of course, change the themes to support this page correctly. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 97 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!

The first release of Orchard Core RC shipped last week, but the community has already added several new great features and improvements to the CMS! In our post, we show you two demos about the flow improvements and the new Sitemaps module! On Orchard Core Add helper and block Liquid tags to the Readme The documentation has been updated about how to use the helper and the block Liquid tags. Update asset cache to check Azure Media Storage is enabled Now you will get a warning message if you don't have the correct settings for the cache of Azure Media Storage. It means an updated media cache controller to check if the Azure Media Store is enabled or configured correctly, and shows an error, rather than an exception. Etch.OrchardCore.SEO module This is a module for Orchard Core that provides useful features for SEO. For example: Hostname redirects: define main hostname to redirect all domain variations and force SSL. Redirects: create redirect content items that'll redirect a relative URL to another URL. Robots.txt: manage contents of /robots.txt. If you are building a website and you would like to do the SEO to optimize your website for success, don't hesitate and get this module from NuGet! And if you are in GitHub, don't forget to check out the other modules from Etch, they created several features for Orchard Core. For instance the Etch.OrchardCore.Fields module with a collection of useful content fields and many more! Add WithPosition extension to set Field position There is a new WithPosition extension method on ContentPartFieldDefinitionBuilder, that you can now use instead of needing to use the MergeSettings. You can find this method in the ContentPartFieldSettingsExtensions static class. Document Azure Blob Storage We have updated the documentation about how to configure the Azure Media Storage feature and how to use the Media Cache feature. Demos Flow improvements Let's set up a new site using the Blog recipe. The Page content type here has the FlowPart attached, so let's create a new page. Let's add three new paragraphs to this page with some content. After that set the percentage of every widget to 33%. You can see a different UI at the bottom of every widget. Check out the dropdowns instead of radio buttons when setting the alignment or the percentage of the given widget. When setting the percentage, the editor is now updating with the new value, and in the case of 33%, you will see the three paragraphs next to each other in one row. You can also drag and drop the widgets to easily change the position of them! Now let's add a Container, that is just a container of other widgets. You can also define the width and the alignment of the container too. But here comes the trick! Before that, you cannot move elements outside or inside a container. If you would like to move a widget inside a container, you had to create that widget again in that container, which could be quite frustrating if you decide to move a dozen widgets to a container. Now with a simple drag and drop, you should able to take any widget and put it inside a container! Do you know editors from your company who'd love this feature? Show them these gifs! Sitemaps A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page. Let's see how it works in Orchard Core! Set up a new site using the Blog recipe. After go to the admin page and navigate to Configuration -> Features. Here search for the Sitemaps feature and enable it. This module will add a new option under Configuration, called Sitemaps. Here you can add a new Sitemap set by clicking on the Add Sitemap Set button. Give it a likable name and then hit the Edit Nodes button. Here you can choose between two different types of sitemap nodes: Sitemap Content Types: adds a sitemap entry for each one of the selected content types. Sitemap Index Node: adds a sitemap index that acts as a container for other sitemaps. Let's create a Sitemap Content Types node to have a sitemap that contains the Article Content Types of our site! As you can see on the screen we should add a description for the sitemap node first, then the path of our sitemap. And here comes a huge table that contains every available content types of your site. Put a tick near the Article and leave the other settings as-is. Note that when you uncheck the Include all checkbox, you can adjust the number of content items in the sitemap by setting the skip and take values. For now, just put a tick here. Now if you create this node, you will have a green View button next to it. This will show the content of your sitemap. In the URL you can see that path we have set up earlier and the relevant fields of the Article content types. As you can see we previously created one additional article with the my-second-article alias. The module has a great Readme.md file where you can read a lot more about the feature and the different node types. This feature is still under development and can be found in this branch. Big thanks to Dean Marcussen for this great contribution! On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 96 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!

The first release candidate of Orchard Core has been shipped! Read our post about the latest improvements of the new release and everything you need to know about where you can download the release and how you can work with an application that uses .NET Core 3.0! On Orchard Core Add contentitem tag helper and liquid tag Now we have a new contentitem tag helper and a Liquid tag. By using this tag helper we can render a content item directly and can also use caching. We still need to use the menu shape, because it has custom alternates that are specific to it, so we can't remove that. But at least now we have a contentitem helper that also do it for anything. Handle standard Startup class Until now if you add the Startup.cs to your module, you need to inherit the Startup class from StartupBase and you need to have to override the ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services) or the Configure(IApplicationBuilder builder, IRouteBuilder routes, IServiceProvider serviceProvider) method. Now you can define a Startup class and don't have to inherit from anything like in ASP.NET Core. Of course, you can include the ConfigureServices or the Configure method to configure the app's services if you want, but you don't have to override anything. Fallback to Detail display type for bag parts If you create a BagPart and in the settings, if you remove the display type of the content types that you want in the BagPart, then it will be null in BagPart.cshtml and will fallback to Summary. Because they are widgets if you haven't implemented the Summary view of the widget that you are rendering, it will fallback to template Widget__Summary. But this thing doesn't exist. So the result will be a shape not found error. The solution is to fall back to the Detail, which is the default display type that we use for widgets when we render them. Configure ContentParts and ContentFields with IOptions<ContentPartOptions> or IOptions<ContentFieldOptions> We don't inject a ContentPart in the DI directly. We add the type of the ContentPart to an option, which is IOption<ContentOptions>. In this case, we don't have to resolve the ContentPart to get instances of ContentParts to know what are the ContentParts that are available. We do the same for ContentFields. Content items: Bulk actions and Filters UX Here you can see a concept to redesign the content items page for the bulk actions and the other filters: As you may see, Antoine has been mainly inspired by the GitHub issues UX. The new features are: Select all aligned vertically with the other checkboxes. Smaller left and right padding in the items list. All filters and actions on only one line. Dropdown actions with a light background (correctly displayed on a small screen). Even the Culture filter could appear. Display the number of items and the number of selected items when checked. It is just a POC. To make it work completely, we will need to find a way to select and display the state of the different filters like GitHub does it. For example: type:Article status:published sort:created Just to have a big picture of the two different screens, the current UI looks like this: This feature hasn't been available in Orchard Core yet but will be added in the next version of Orchard, because it was too risky to change the content items page before the RC in this huge way. Add translation metapackage to Cms.Targets As expected we added the OrchardCore.Translations.All to the Cms.Targets. If you use the Cms.Core.Targets you won't have it, but if you use the Cms.Targets you will get the themes and all the localization in your solution. But it didn't work, because there were some missing MSBuild Targets. Now it has been fixed. Orchard Core first release candidate has just shipped The community proudly presents the first release candidate of Orchard Core! RC means that the software is almost ready for the final release. No feature development or enhancement of the software is undertaken; tightly scoped bug fixes are the only code you're allowed to write in this phase, and even then only for the most heinous and debilitating of bugs. Let's see the list of changes for this release. As you can see from the list, Orchard Core is now on ASP.NET Core 3.0. That means now if you would like to contribute to Orchard Core you will need to install Visual Studio 2019 16.3. By updating to this version you will automatically get .NET Core 3.0 too because it is included in this version, but from here you can download both the SDK and the Runtime. The NuGet packages in NuGet.org are also updated and have the version number 1.0.0-rc1-10004. Don't forget that from now you can also download the translation packages from NuGet.org. There is an OrchardCore.Translations.All package that contains all the languages, but you can find the packages for every language separately too. Oh, and don't forget the Docker images of Orchard Core! You can also try the new version on Try Orchard Core. So don't hesitate, upgrade your Orchard Core site from Beta 3 to RC now! Building modular, multi-tenant ASP.NET Core apps with Orchard Core framework There was the .NET Conf this week, which was a 3-day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Sébastien submitted a talk about Orchard Core modularity and multitenancy and he was able to speak! At September 24 at 00:00 (UTC), he made a great talk about building modular, multi-tenant ASP.NET Core apps with Orchard Core framework. If you haven't seen his section yet, you can watch the recording in Twitch. On Lombiq Silent improvements in the background in DotNest As you may now DotNest is a SaaS provider that gives hosted Orchard CMS web applications hosted by Lombiq Technologies. We are thrilled to develop and maintain a provider like that and improved our services for time to time to make a better DotNest for you! Now we have just added some infrastructure improvements and making payments safer with PSD 2. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 94 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!

Now we are in the finish line of releasing the RC version of Orchard Core! Read our post for the most important things you should now about the new release and for a quick demo about the Cypress e2e testing suite for Orchard Core! On Orchard Core Some performance tweaks Marko Lahma, the author of Quartz.NET made a lot of performance tweaks to make Orchard Core much faster. Let's see some of those! In the RunningShellTable.cs use host.IndexOf(':') != -1 instead of host.Contains(':'). And a same performance tweak here: instead of extensions.Contains(Path.GetExtensions(content.Name)) use Array.IndexOf(extensions, Path.GetExtension(content.Name)) != 1). Also, do not use dynamic typing when it's not necessary. Instead of context.AmbientValues.TryGetValue("LiquidPage", out dynamic page)) use context.AmbientValues.TryGetValue("LiquidPage", out var page));. He also created a project called OrchardCore.Benchmarks, where you can run some microbenchmark. Migrate all Content Type / Part / Field Settings to Settings<T> There were some places in the recipe where settings were not under the Settings property. Check the blog recipe for an example. Here you can see that everything is in its namespace. You can find a Settings property and inside that, there is a ContentTypeSettings property. By organizing all the settings in their correct path we get a cleaner recipe file. Add default paging to GraphQL queries We have three different new properties: DefaultNumberOfResults: if you don't say first or last in your queries, we will limit the results to 100. MaxNumberOfResults: if you define first of last (give me the last 2000 content items) we will block you and limit to 1000. If you didn't provide a first or last, and if you have so many results, it will slow down your system considerably. You should always page your queries, otherwise, you could load everything on the memory of the server and if you have multiple clients you will get out of memory or the performance will be slow. MaxNumberOfResultsValiadtionMode: specify the validation behavior if the max number of results is exceeded in a pager parameter.* Default: in production info will be logged and only the max number of results will be returned. In development, a GraphQL validation error will be raised.* Enabled: a GraphQL validation error will be raised.* Disabled: info will be logged and only the max number of results will be returned. Migration to .NET Core 3.0 RC Now Orchard Core using .NET Core 3.0 RC, which means you need to install the new SDK (v3.0.100-rc1) to work with Orchard from here. Sebastien pinned the 1.0.0-beta3-72452 version on MyGet, so it won't be deleted, and it is the last one targeting .NET Core 2.2. Don't forget: to work with Orchard Core, you will need Visual Studio 2019! Orchard Core RC release The plan is to ship Orchard Core RC next Monday, maybe on Tuesday, after .NET 3.0 is released, so we can update the dependencies and build the things. It will be on NuGet.org as well. This release will be followed with the 1.0 (RTM) version. The number of the new package will have the following convention: OrchardCore 1.0.0-rc1-10000. The build number will be reset to 10000 and will be increased by one with every build of the dev branch. We need to update the documentation and the ASP.NET package references. There will be blog announcements: they could be in the Asp.net site right after the .NET Conf. Try Orchard Core will be updated to use the new version too. Demos Cypress e2e testing suite for Orchard Core Cypress is a next-generation front end testing tool built for the modern web. Cypress is most often compared to Selenium; however, Cypress is both fundamentally and architecturally different. Cypress is not constrained by the same restrictions as Selenium. This enables you to write faster, easier and more reliable tests. To use Cypress in Orchard Core first you have to run npm install in the test/cypress folder. Then followed by npm run test to build and host Orchard and run Cypress test on it. This will execute the content of the test.js file. First builds the solution, starts the application and starts the different Cypress tests. The test cases are in the integration folder, where now you can find three different cases: Setup SaaS Blog Agency Let's check the content of the Blog one. You can find a file called 01-setup-blog-tenant.js. Here you can find different test methods, like cy.login(), or cy.gotoTenantSetup(blog). These functions are defined in the commands.js file within the support folder. Let's check quickly what are these methods for! As you can see, using some predefined command, you can easily navigate to a given URL using visit. You can target the different HTML elements using get and submit a form easily as you can see in the screen above. The Cypress testing suite for Orchard Core is in its early stage, but you can find the current state and follow the development in this branch. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 90 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!

Lots of PRs merged to Orchard Core this week again coming with new fixes, and features. You could also read about the new way how you could use the localization packages in Orchard Core soon. Check out our current post for more! On Orchard Core Editor direction should respect the Localization Part culture Everything that is editable (like TextField, TitlePart, etc.) will now be configured whatever the content item's culture is. There is a new helper method, called GetContentCultureAsync that gets the CultureAspect of a content item, that will provide the CultureInfo of the content item. If you have the Localization module enabled, it will set it using the LocalizationPart of the content item (otherwise it will use the default culture of the site). Add Properties Dictionary to IShape interface We decided to provide a Properties bag on the IShape interface where you can put anything on a shape. You can do it in Orchard 1.x and in Orchard Core too, but only if the shape is a dynamic object. The readme file is updated about how can you do that using Liquid. Clean double encoding Use the tag helper instead of the ActionLink when working with localized strings. Every time when you have an ActionLink with a localized string it will be double encoded because the ActionLink only accepts a string. OrchardCore.Translations Repository In this repository, you can see a Localization folder that contains the localization for each culture for each module. Crowdin sends pull request to this repository whenever is a new translation is available. It creates new commits with every change and then AppVeyor will build the changes and this will build NuGet packages for every language. Each NuGet package will only contain the localization files for the given language. We publish the NuGet packages to MyGet prefixed with beta3. Once the dev will be merged to master it will move to nuget.org. There is also a meta-package called OrchardCore.Translations.All, that contains all the other languages. If you just point this package, you can translate your admin in any language automatically. Of course, you need to add the given language as a supported one. .NET Conf 2019 There will be the .NET Conf soon, which is a 3-day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Sébastien submitted a talk about Orchard Core modularity and multitenancy and he is able to speak! At September 24 at 00:00 (UTC) he will be speaking about building modular, multi-tenant ASP.NET Core apps with Orchard Core framework. Don't forget to join! Starting a new project with Orchard Core Garry Woodfine, an experienced full-stack developer has just started to work with Orchard Core. In this blog post, he writes about how you can build new Web Applications with Orchard Core, install Orchard CLI and start your CMS Website. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 90 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!

Lots of PRs merged to Orchard Core this week that adds new improvements, fixes, and features. You could also read a demo about the Content Fields Indexing, that is a very useful feature for the developers: they can now query content items based on the value of the fields! Oh, and we will have a meetup soon in Budapest, where Lombiq will giving a talk on Orchard. Get ready for a longer post about these amazing features! We promise: you won't regret reading it! On Orchard Core Add ORCHARD_APP_DATA Environment Variable section If you want to change where the App_Data folder is, you can define an environment variable called ORCHARD_APP_DATA. Paths can be relative to the application path (./App_Data), absolute (/path/from/root), or fully qualified (D:\Path\To\App_Data). If the folder does not exist the application will attempt to create it. Localization files publishing When we deploy the app it will also publish the Localization folder, which is where the localization files go. Instead of the App_Data/Localization, they go into the Localization folder of the content root. Content Culture Picker improvements There is a new Liquid helper called switch_culture_url, that is responsible to return the URL of the Action that switches cultures. The ContentCulturePickerContainer is the template of the culture picker, that you can add in your front end themes to display a customized drop-down or a list of options to change the culture of the website. There was no example about how to override this using Liquid, now the documentation has an example using the new switch_culture_url helper. Workflows Internationalization Now every Task and Event have a LocalizedString property called DisplayText. With this change, you can localize the title of every activity. Make setting the page title format accessible to site administrators When you navigate to the general settings page you can find a new option called Page title format. Here you can now provide a Liquid expression to customize the way how you would like to render the title of your page. In the screen, you can see that we set the Page title format to {% page_title Site.SiteName, position: "before", separator: " -.-.-.- " %} By providing before as the position, we will show the name of the site first, then the title of the page with a custom separator. Check the second tab in the screenshot above to see the result of the expression. Handle UnauthorizedResult When trying to access an unauthorized ContentItem in the front end, the ItemController returns an UnauthorizedResult. Until there, it's correct. However, UnauthorizedResult is treated like any other error and an error message is returned: "An error occurred while executing this request." leaving us thinking there is a bug. The solution is we need to return the Forbid or Challange results, not just Unauthorized. If you are authenticated, we can just return Forbid to say you don't have access to this page. If you are not authenticated, we return a challenge, that will be redirecting you to the login page to give you a chance to authenticate yourself. In the future in most of the controllers, we should use this logic. Add documentation to health check The HealthChecks module is just enabling the middleware and the new documentation now mentions that the default endpoint is 'health/live'. Add support for typed shape tag helper properties There is a shape tag helper with the following syntax: <shape type="Foo" /> This will render the shape typed Foo. The Razor syntax to do the same is: @await DisplayAsync(await New.Foo()); You can pass parameters inside your page: @await DisplayAsync(await New.Foo(Age: 18, Color: "Green")); You can do the same using the shape tag helper: <shape type="Foo" age="18" color="Green" /> Let's say you create a file Foo.cshtm, that is the default template for the Foo shape. Inside that you can do the following: @Model.Age. What happens here is that you don't have IntelliSense for Age, because it's not typed. When you write the following in your template, what you get for the @age is the string 18. @{ var age = 18;}<shape type="Foo" age="@age" color="Green" /> In Razor, if the property doesn't exist on the type (which is the case here, because it's dynamic) it will be assigned as a string. It will evaluate that doing a .ToHtmlString(). If you really want to get integers, you have a new option in Razor tag helpers to bind a custom property with a prefix. <shape type="Foo" prop-age="@age" prop-color="Green" /> Using the prop- prefix the value will be converted to a property on the shape with the type of the variable that is passed. The @age will be the variable itself, in this case, it will keep the type of that we passed here directly to the property age, which is assigned to the shape. So the shape will keep the properties with the variable type instead of converting them to IHtmlContent. With this new improvement, you can pass complex objects to your shape types. For example, you can pass your object directly to a shape without needing a ViewModel. Demos Content fields indexing Now we have a new module which is Content Fields Indexing (SQL), that adds database indexing for content fields. You can also find documentation about the available tables for the database indexing and the usage of these index tables from a class, from a Razor template and from Liquid too. First, enable the Content Fields Indexing (SQL) module from the admin. If you are using the Blog recipe, you will have a Blog Post content type, thas has a Subtitle Text Field. Let's create some new Blog Posts. Let's create two published and one draft posts. Now head to the database, where you will see the new tables, like DateFieldIndex, BooleanFieldIndex, TextFieldIndex, etc. Because the Subtitle is a Text Field, let's check the content of that table. You can see the three blog posts here, where you can also notice that one of them hasn't published yet. If you enable the SQL Queries module, you can add a new SQL query to list the Blog Posts from the TextFieldIndex table. Hit Save and then Run the query. At the bottom of the screen, you will get the result of the query: the three BlogPost content types. Do you know developers from your company who'd love this feature? Show them that now they can query content items based on the value of the content fields! On Lombiq Talentera.Net meetup This one is for our friends in Budapest: we've partnered with the agile carrier building agency Talentera to bring you .Net meetups! The first one will be in three weeks, us giving a talk on Orchard. Join if you're in the city! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 91 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!

Let's start our post with a new contribution from Lombiq about back-porting Orchard Core's Live Preview feature to Orchard 1.x. Then read about two demos of Orchard Core's upcoming huge features: the Azure Blob Storage as CDN and about supporting custom Lucene analyzers! We also have other updates around our house as well. Check out our current post for more! On Orchard 1.x Demos Live preview feature A new Orchard module is available in Orchard 1.x, called Content Preview. This is the back-port of the Live Content Preview feature that you can meet within Orchard Core. To use the Content Preview feature, head to the Modules menu from the admin and enable the module. The main concept is the user wants to see the changes of a content item immediately somehow without needing to save the changes. Here you can see a Page content type with several parts attached. Here you can update the TitlePart, the BodyPart, and the LayoutPart too with a TextField and a NumericField. You can also have more than one TinyMCE editor in the editor of the content item, it will work without issues. If you edit a content item with invalid data (for example typing some text in the editor of a NumericField), you will see the error notification immediately in the preview window. In the live preview window, you can find a warning message: "The Content Preview feature doesn't support properties where there are relationships to ContentPartRecord (e.g. Taxonomies, Tags). These won't update in the preview windows but otherwise, keep working." You can see this message because this feature hasn't been implemented yet, but feel free to have a contribution and add this feature to the Content Preview in Orchard 1.x! Thank you for the contribution to Milán Keszthelyi from Lombiq Technologies! On Orchard Core Add more detail step on README.md of OpenId In the documentation, there are more steps about how to add the relevant identity of OpenId when using MMC.exe. New Orchard Core collaborators & teams in GitHub There is a new OrchardCore Devs team in the GitHub repository of Orchard Core. The members of this team now have wright access to the repository, they can merge PRs, create and delete branches, but can't merge to master. They contributed enough and with good quality that we can trust them now. They learned how to contribute to Orchard. :) Demos Azure Blob Storage as CDN We don't want to serve the Azure Blobs directly by rendering their own URLs that points to their Blobs. So, the clients load the Azure Blob directly and not us. We want Orchard to load the Blob, save it locally on the server and we serve the file directly. This file, which is copied locally from the Blob Storage is what we call the Media Cache. We do that because if we want an actual cache, that the clients don't ask us to serve a file, we will use a CDN which Azure Blob Storage is not and by doing that we can process the files to resize them if they are to be resized by ImageSharp. So, there are two things to solve here. For example, if you would like to show an image on your page with three different sizes, there are three requests coming for the same image with different sizes. But there is only one Blob on Azure. You just send one request to Azure to get the file, store it locally and then resize it to the three different pipelines and serve the three different files, which are cached by ImageSharp also. There is a cache of the Blob file in the Media Cache, and there is three cached, resized images from ImageSharp. This Purge Media Cache button under the Configuration -> Media Cache section is responsible for delete the Media Cache, not the ImageSharp cache. This feature is still under development. Supporting custom Lucene analyzers and additional Lucene indexes settings In the Lucene Indices settings page, you can now have an Edit button for each index. If you click on Edit, you can set the content types and also have an option to index a draft version of the content item. Before - by default - it was indexing everything, not just the ones we want. And - by default -, it was only indexing the published versions, without an option to index draft. If it's checked, it will still index one content item, but the latest version. When we index and tokenize the text, we need to tokenize based on the language. Using the Analyzer Name select list you can provide different language analyzers for each index. If the text of these items will be French, then you can use a French analyzer. This feature is still under development. On Lombiq Improving your employment security with Orchard Did you know that the Employment Security Department of Washington State also uses Orchard? Well, they do and thanks to them we've back-ported the Orchard Core live content preview feature to 1.x! See our post about it: https://lombiq.com/blog/improving-your-employment-security-with-orchard Migrate from Bitbucket Mercurial repositories to Git - we can help! Do you need help after Bitbucket dropping Mercurial support? If you want to move to Git, check out this page in our website about what are your options now. We've been doing hg-git conversion for six years! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 92 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!

More Razor helpers, advanced Liquid support in GraphQL, a new OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets meta package, Full-Text-Indexing and updated milestones for Orchard Core. Want more? Then check out our current post! On Orchard Core Added Liquid support to Markdown GraphQL query We have a property in GraphQL for instance called Html on Markdown and HTML body. The new thing is that this Html property on the Markdown body was evaluating the Markdown of the content item. On the client you can directly have the Markdown evaluated, but not the source Markdown. But what was missing is that this Markdown in this body could also have Liquid. It would not interpret the Liquid syntax. Now the method first evaluates the Liquid and then convert the Markdown. Added Liquid Razor Extension Method & Markdown Helper parses Liquid Two extensions, one just to render Liquid as IHtmlContent and the other to render Liquid as a raw string that can be passed to another extension method like the markdown helper. LiquidToHtmlAsync: parses a Liquid string to HTML as IHtmlContent. MarkdownToHtmlAsync: converts Markdown string to HTML. See the updated documentation about the LiquidToHtmlAsync, and MarkdownToHtmlAsync helpers. Documentation to explain how to generate PO files Documentation to explain how to generate PO files has been merged with the tool called PoExtractor. That tool will analyze all the source code and extract all the strings that are used in the localizer. A new OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets core CMS meta package There is an OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets already that you can point to. If you reference this NuGet package in your project, the CMS will just run and all the dependent Nuget packages will be downloaded. It's also linking all the themes that we have in Orchard Core and there is no way to remove them. Let us introduce a new package, called OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets, that just contains the modules and only the TheAdmin theme. In this way you can just reference your own themes and not the other ones, that will make your deployment smaller. So, OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets contains every theme that we have in the solution and OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets is just the TheAdmin theme. Full-Text-Indexing in Orchard Core This is the settings page of a Content Picker field. Here you can see the following settings: include this field in the index: be able to include the value of this element in the index. stored: when you want the value of the field to stored with the Lucene index. analyzed: when you want the content of the field to split into different words. It means you can search by word and not as a whole. Also, simplify every word, so you can find the root of the word like depends, depending will be converted to depend. sanitized: when you want to remove any HTML from a field. So HTML tags will be not available when you search. tokenized: when you want to convert the value of the field with some custom Liquid logic. Here you can take the content of the field and you can convert it using a Liquid filter and do some computation and so on. If you go to a created content item, you can see there is an option for Full-Text-Indexing in Liquid, that determines if this content type can use a customizable full-text index field by using Liquid. The Liquid template here is accessible in queries with Content.ContentItem.FullText. You can use the Model helper to reference the current element. This feature is still under development and hasn't available in the dev branch yet. Orchard Core updated milestones and Roadmap The milestones have been updated in GitHub of Orchard Core. There are more of them now: rc: we still have the rc for September 23. 1.0: now we have a 1.0 milestone for late October. 1.1: which means the next major release. 1.0.x: some bugs we need to fix that not blocking 1.0, but have to be fixed before a major release. backlog: good idea, will see when we can do that. Let's have a look at our Roadmap! On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 91 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!

Getting closer and closer to the release of .NET Core 3.0 and Orchard Core RC! What do we need to ship the new version and what are the newest features of Orchard Core? Find out now! On Orchard Core Updating YesSql In SQL server it was not working correctly if you pass the parameter as the limit value. You can do SELECT * FROM FOO @limit, where the @limit is the parameter. That will be converted to SELECT TOP @limit FROM FOO in SQL server, but that doesn't work. When you use a variable like this it needs parenthesis. Now every time when we render it in YesSQL, it's in parenthesis: SELECT TOP (@limit) FROM FOO.You can also find a xUnit test in the SqlParserTests.cs file, where the parameters of the InlineData attributes are also using parenthesis. Ability to extend/clear ContainedContentTypes Now if you want to update the ContainedContentTypes of the Container Part then you can do that. Before that, if you add a type it removes the old one. Now you can choose to merge it with the existing one. And by using the ClearContainedContentTypes extension method, you can also clear the ContainedContentTypes. Remove JSON specifier from GraphQL MD code blocks The documentation used the JSON highlighting for the GraphQL queries, which is the closest to a GraphQL query, but it's wrong. It could show some wrong colors, so now it's just doing nothing. A GraphQL query is not a JSON payload, just the result of the query. .NET Conf 2019 There will be the .NET Conf next month, which is a 3-day virtual developer event co-organized by the .NET community and Microsoft. Sébastien is submitting a talk about Orchard Core modularity and multitenancy. We hope that he will able to get a talk! On these days they launch .NET Core 3.0, which is the 23rd of September. A plan is to ship Orchard Core RC on the day after the .NET Core 3.0 and the builds are available. Upgrading an Orchard Core site that using .NET Core 2.2: it's non-breaking in terms of database or recipes and everything. We are just upgrading the APIs from 2.2 to 3.0. So, in theory, if we take a site that has been built with 2.2 and we just upgrade to the branch that using 3.0, then it should not change anything. The only thing it should change hopefully is the performance of the site because .NET Core 3.0 is much faster and use less memory than 2.2. The image of .NET 3.0 will also be available on Docker. To ship Orchard Core RC, we only need to have finalized all the things for localization. We have most everything we need, instead of the field syncing. Let's have a look at our Roadmap! You can see that everything is implemented from the backlog. Adding more localization packages will not be that hard, the repositories are already done for these packages. And we have PRs for almost every bonus features that listed in the roadmap. We also need to focus on every issue in GitHub that marked for RC and has a priority tag on it. A new website using Orchard Core Patient Access connects you to healthcare services when you need them most. Book GP appointments, order repeat prescriptions and explore your local pharmacy services. This site is running on Docker for Linux on Azure as an Azure Docker Service on Linux. It's based on GraphQL. For example, when you navigate to Pharmacy services and searching for healthcare services, then it's GraphQL. If you search for Hay fever treatments and using S66 as the postcode, the results that you got is returned by GraphQL. 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. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 88 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!