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Deployment UI improvements, display all users in the User Picker Field by default - This week in Orchard (15/07/2022)

Updating the Getting Started page, Deployment UI improvements, using proper Canonical URL in SEO Tags, displaying all users in the User Picker Field by default. Check out our current post to read about the details! Orchard Core updates Updating the "Getting Started" page of the documentation The Getting Started page of the documentation is outdated, so much so that it is not possible to get the results described. As an example, the latest version of Orchard Core 1.4.0 uses .Net 6.0, and accordingly, if you create a new empty project '.NET Core web application' with .Net 6.0, you will not have a Startup.cs file in which all the basic manipulations should take place. For new developers, this section is an important element of getting started with Orchard. And such difficulties in the guide can have a negative impact on entering a new environment. The goal here was to update this section for use on the latest stable version of Orchard Core and be sure to specify the platform versions on which it should work in case of obsolescence to be clear for which version this instruction is valid. Now, if you open up the Getting Started page of the documentation, you will see a section that helps you get started with Program.cs only using .NET 6 Framework. Add Manage Steps to the button to the deployment and add a description to the feature When viewing deployment plans on the UI, clicking the title directs the user to the manage steps page, which is great. However, there is no other indication about managing steps. In other words, the user does not know the difference between editing or managing steps. Now, there is a new button called Manage Steps that directs the user to the manage deployment steps page. This way the user can easily understand that there are 2 edit functions here (i.e., one for editing the steps and the other one for editing the deployment plan itself.) Also, the Deployment feature now has some sort of description like: Provides a way to import and export recipes. You can see both improvements on this screen. Display all users in the User Picker Field by default unless the user selects a specific role When a user attaches a User Picker Field to a content type, the field settings do not have default roles selected or have the DisplayAllUsers set to true, so in this case, the search for a user returns no records. The fix is to display all users in the User Picker Field by default to allow all users to show up. If the user wants to override that behavior, then they can specific roles to select from. Without this, no users will show up in User Picker Field unless the user edits the field and set the settings. Here we played with our favorite content type, the BlogPost, where we added a User Picker Field to it (Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types -> Blog Post -> Add Field). And that's all we haven't done any other modifications regarding the settings of the User Picker Field. Now, if you create a new blog post, you will see that the User Picker Field will list every user from the site instead of listing nobody by default. Use proper Canonical URL in SEO Tags Piers Lawson noticed that when he generates the URL of a Content Item that happens to be the Home Page, then the URL generated includes the permalink for the page. This then flows into other uses of the URL such as when the SEO module creates the og:url property or the Twitter:url. <meta content="https://localhost:44300/home-page" property="og:url" /><meta content="https://localhost:44300/home-page" name="twitter:url" /> He thought he could override this behavior by turning on the SEOMeta Part for the Content-Type used for the home page and providing a Canonical URL for the Content Item that is being used for the home page. That causes the link rel canonical to be added and set correctly but not the other tags: <meta content="https://localhost:44300/home-page" property="og:url" /><meta content="https://localhost:44300/home-page" name="twitter:url" /><link href="https://localhost:44300/" rel="canonical" /> The issue was it doesn't appear possible to set up a page to be the home page without Autoroute nor with Autoroute and a blank permalink. Now, this has been fixed in the SeoMetaSettingsHandler.cs. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 291 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post 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 around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Sitemap deployment plans and recipes, Device Preview module - This week in Orchard (04/11/2021)

Sitemap deployment plans and recipes, improve reset password email experience, a new Device Preview module, and many more coming this week! Do you want to know more? Then don't forget to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates Sitemap deployment plans and recipes 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. You can learn more about that module in this post where you can also see a demo of the feature. Let's assume that we have already created a sitemap that contains the blog posts of the site. Now let's navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans and create a new deployment plan. If you add a new deployment step to your plan you will see a new plan, called All Sitemaps. Choose this one and execute the plan by downloading the given zip file to the computer. If you check out the Recipe.json file inside the zip, you will see a step called Sitemaps which contains the sitemap and the sitemap index itself. Improve reset password email experience You can allow users to reset their passwords. If they do that, they will get an email with a link that allows resetting the password. To prevent any misusage, the wording of that email has been changed like "Someone recently requested a password reset" instead of "Dear user" and "if you did not request a password reset, please ignore this email." Fix user picker field ordering We have a field in Orchard Core called the user picker field, which field allows you to connect users with a content item. If you haven't heard about that field yet, check out this post with a nice demo. If you edit the content definition of the user picker field, you can allow multiple elements to be selected and allow the picker to display users from multiple roles. There was an issue when the user picker resets the order of selected users when saving because it comes back in database order. Now, if you add multiple users to the user picker field and hit save, the system will keep the ordering of the users. News from the community Device Preview module This repository contains premium modules for the Orchard Core CMS. The Device Preview module in this repository adds a live preview to your production-ready pages on different devices. It previews your content in various form factors and tests without leaving the content editor screen. The Device Preview module enables live content preview on Smartphones, Tablets, Laptops, and Desktops.The Readme.MD file of the module contains some lines on how you can add this module to your solution and how to include it in your recipe to enable the feature by default. New Lombiq team member: Bálint Aracsi Please welcome our new Orchard Core developer colleague, Bálint Aracsi! See his full bio here, where you can find out which part of IT he likes most, and the color of his toothbrush :)! You can check out his full bio here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 232 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post 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 around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!