This week in Orchard - 09/27/2019

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

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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!