We have no Orchard meeting this week, because it 'conflicts with the World Cup and they didn’t want to cancel'. :) So, let's see the most important news of this week. On Orchard Core Let’s see some numbers of the Beta 2 release of Orchard Core. If you visit the NuGet Gallery, you will find that more than 250 user downloads the OrchardCore.Mvc.Core Nuget, and there are numerous downloads for the previous releases as well. If you type OrchardCore in to the search box of the NuGet Gallery you can find that there are 137 packages mainly from Sébastien Ros of course, but there are other packages as well, for instance the Disqus.OrchardCore module, that allows you to add comments on a content type. There aren’t any new commits in the dev branch of Orchard Core, but the contributors pushing the features and fixes in their branches industriously. For instance there are several commits in the culture-settings branch to implement a feature that will allow to set the allowed cultures and the default one in the admin. In GitHub you can find the issues that marked with the beta3 tag. These are the planned features and fixes that would be included in the Beta 3 release of Orchard Core that has an estimated due date in 3rd of September. There are about 100 open issues left, so carry on and pick some to work on! If you have any questions or you are just interested in the discussion around Orchard Core, feel free to drop on Orchard Cores dedicated Gitter. On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Maybe you haven’t heard about it yet: last week Lombiq announced the Orchard Dojo Newsletter. If you subscribe to this newsletter you will get an e-mail every time when a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including ‘This week in Orchard’ of course. So, if you want to keep up to date with Orchard news, subscribe to Lombiq’s Orchard Dojo Newsletter!

Orchard Core Beta 2 is out now! Orchard Core Framework and Orchard Core CMS Beta 2 are now public on NuGet. Read the release notes and the documentation for more details. On Orchard 1.x Orchard 1.x has only one small change regarding the WebRequestActivity.cs where the handling of HTTP Delete method was missing. On Orchard Core Orchard Core Beta 2 The Beta 2 release of Orchard Core comes with several changes. To list the changes from the release notes: Update to ASP.NET Core 2.1 Precompiled Razor Views Razor Pages Updated to Bootstrap 4.1 Admin responsive menu Assets user interface improvements Fragment caching Content and Query tag helpers Code based manifest files Updated OpenId Social login support Email module Password reset Email confirmation Site and User timezones Date Time (with timezone), Date and Time fields Workflows module Forms module Azure Blob Storage Assets Data Protection dotnet new templates There were 60 contributors on Orchard Core, and it's just the second beta release. Check out the trend in the project's GitHub page! Now, by using Read the Docs, Orchard Core has a quite detailed documentation about how to start working with the framework, descriptions about the CMS and Core modules and so on. The community also provides a solution with several Orchard Core samples in GitHub. This sample web application is demonstrating how to build a modular and multi-tenant ASP.NET Core application. But if you need a step by step tutorial about building a multi-tenant ASP.NET Core application read Sipke Schoorstra's article on Building multi-tenant ASP.NET Core Applications with the Orchard Core Framework. If you have a profile on Facebook, follow the newly created Orchard Core page where you can read about the most important news around Orchard Core and don't forget to join to the Orchard Core User Group. Demos Creating a new website using the code generation templates In the next short tutorial, we will create a new Orchard Core website using only the code generation templates. First you have to make sure that you have the latest version for both Runtime and SDK of .NET Core. The current version of the SDK is v2.1.301 and the Runtime has a version of v2.1.1. You can download the installers from here. Fire up the Command Prompt with administrator privileges. The following command will install the most stable templates for creating Orchard Core Cms web applications. dotnet new -i OrchardCore.Cms.Templates::1.0.0-beta2 You can also use the latest dev branch of Orchard Core if you specify the NuGet source to use during install, but for now let's just work with the most stable version. dotnet new -i OrchardCore.Cms.Templates::1.0.0-beta2 --nuget-source https://www.myget.org/F/orchardcore-preview/api/v3/index.json Navigate to the folder where you want to install your application. The dotnet new occms command will install a new Orchard Core Cms Web App to the current directory. If you type dotnet run, the compiler will compile your application and for default it will listening on http://localhost:5000. Open a browser and visit the newly created site. If you are interested in every new changes that added to the Beta 2 version of Orchard Core to this week, don't forget to check out the recording of the weekly Orchard podcast. Now go ahead and set up your Orchard Core application!

The Orchard community is so close to release the Beta 2 version of Orchard Core. If you check out the beta2 milestone tag in the project’s GitHub page, you can see the few issues that are left for the upcoming release. On Orchard 1.x But this week is not just about fixing the issues of Orchard Core and implementing its new features. Smaller bug fixes were also added to Orchard 1.x: E.g. if you wanted to hide and show text per radio button, it works by clicking on the radio button, but at Page Load everything was shown. Or new css rule-sets added for superscripts and subscripts of the Theme Machine’s Site.css, and now these tags don't look like normal text. On Orchard Core Workflows (OrchardCore.Workflows) As mentioned, there were a lot of merged changesets to the developer branch of Orchard Core. If you are interested about every fix and feature, check out the recording of the latest Orchard community meeting from 3:15. Forms (OrchardCore.Forms) The OrchardCore.Workflows module is available, and you can enable it from the dashboard. The Workflows module provides a way for users to visually implement business rules using flowchart diagrams. And from now every activity can start a workflow, not just Event activities, that typically listen for an event to happen before execution continues. There are also two sub-features of the Workflows module: HTTP Workflows Activities and Timer Workflow Activities. By enabling HTTP Workflows Activities, you have the option to add new task and event type activities to your workflows. For example you can add an Http Request Event activity that you can set as a starting point of your workflow. By sending an HTTP request to a generated URL (like https://localhost:44300//Workflows/Invoke?token=CfDJ8MBBg4_qSN5) you can fire different events. In the attached screenshot, after invoking this endpoint with a GET request the site will redirect the user to the homepage using the HTTP Redirect Task (that also comes from HTTP Workflows Activities) and show a notification to the user. For more information about the Workflows module, check out the author's, Sipke Schoorstra's post about the new features of this module or if you are interested in a tutorial on creating a new content approval workflow from the ground up, please follow the steps of this demo: http://www.ideliverable.com/blog/orchard-core-workflows-walkthrough-content-approval. You can find a Readme.md file in the module's project, where you can read about the available activities. Forms (OrchardCore.Forms) By enabling the OrchardCore.Flows module, you have the ability to attach Flow content parts to your content types. The OrchardCore.Forms module relies on this module, that means now you can add several different type of Widgets to your custom type. Therefore you can simply build a form where users can enter a text and submits its content. The editor looks like the following: You can see the settings of the Form and the added widgets, like Input, Button and Validation. To be able to use Captcha, don’t forget to set up the Site Key and the Site Secret under /Admin/Settings/nocaptcha. Demos In this week we don't have any demos, but because this is the first post of the 'This week in Orchard’ series, let’s check out some demos from the previous meeting. New editor type for the Boolean field When you add a new Boolean field to your content type you have the ability to choose what type of editor you want to use. If you chose the 'switch' option, you'll have a different styling for the Boolean field when you specify the value of that field while creating a new content item of that type. In this screenshot below you can see two editors with switch and standard types. Setting database presets If you enable the Tenants module, you have the ability to create multiple tenants. When you create a new tenant, you have the option to set the database presets under /Configuration/Tenants. Let’s say you would like to use SQLite for your database. Then if you navigate to the setup screen of the newly created tenant, you don’t have the ability to set or change any setting regarding the database presets. If you choose SQL Server for the database, you also have to specify the connection string from the main tenant. You can't configure the connection properties from the subtenants. If you are interested in every new issue and feature that was added to Orchard Core, don't forget to check out the whole recording of the latest Orchard community meeting!