What is the Dojo Course?

The Dojo Orchard Course is a free and open online course that guides you through the basics of using and extending the Orchard content management framework. The online Course runs simultaneously with a classroom course at Óbuda University, John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics. Participants of the Dojo Course and the classroom course receive the same tutorials (the online participants in form of lecture videos), notes, supportive materials and are graded in the same way. Yes, this means that if you enroll we'll grade your work too!

Who is providing the Course?

Lombiq's trainers (Benedek and Zoltán specifically) are teaching you while Óbuda University provides the opportunity for the Course to be a university subject as a classroom course with participating students.

What should I do to complete the course? What is the schedule?

What participants are asked to do to complete the course (equally for online and local participants) is the following: learn + deliver a project + present = acquire useful knowledge.

1. Follow the Course on Orchard Dojo, watch the tutorials that we publish weekly, take a look at the notes. Learn Orchard!
2. Continuously develop your very own Orchard-based project (see the next question!). We advise you to start early! Submit your project for reviews, so we can help make it better. Deliver it on time. Do Orchard!
3. Submit your final project together with its presentational video (don't create a slideshow presentation, but rather a demonstration). Get a well-deserved final grade and final review. Sit back. Enjoy Orchard!

You can find the continuously updated source code for the Course here (you can download the latest source in a zip from here). Make sure to take a look at the Training Demo module for many-many samples on Orchard development.

Enrollment is continuous from 19. September 2013 until 1. December 2013 (but enroll and start to work on your project as early as possible so you can take advantage of our reviews as much as possible!). Deadline for submitting the final project and the presentational video is midnight, 20. December 2013, CET.

How should I deliver my Orchard-based project?

You project should be a complete Orchard application, together with the database. The project should contain at least one custom-made module and theme as well as proper content and/or configuration to be able to test these.

We ask you to upload your project to a public repository, preferably GitHub. This way everybody can learn from each other's progress.

The repository should contain a complete Orchard source, your custom module and theme as well as any 3rd party modules or themes, an SQL CE database file containing the site's content (with the corresponding Settings.txt) and the Media folder. There should be an administrative user account with the name "admin" and password "password". This all serves so we can run and try out the site locally without the possibility of getting something different then you wanted. Also please copy the solution file (Orchard.sln) under a custom name of yours (e.g. MyProjectName.sln).

Please exclude any compiled binaries from the repo! To help you with getting it right, here you can download proper ignore files for mercurial and git repositories.

In the end we grade the overall quality of the software (including but not limited to functionality and UI, structural cleanliness, error handling and inline documentation) and presentation. The presentation, for all participants, is published on Orchard Dojo too.

How can I take part? Why should I take part?

Just fill out the enrollment form and you're done! Enrollment is continuous from 19. September 2013 until 1. December 2013. Enroll and start to work on your project as early as possible so you can take advantage of our reviews as much as possible!

All the materials of the course will be freely available to anybody; participants, however, will also get their course project reviewed and graded:

• We publish periodic reviews of the projects submitted for review: the reviews go into detail about judging the quality of the project (we are trying to be honest and to criticize only constructively) while giving advices on how to improve it. The reviews are published on Orchard Dojo.
• At the end of the course all the projects are graded on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the best grade.

All successful participants also get a certification of accomplishment at the end of the course!

What can I do if I have questions?

We ask you to post any question except administrative questions related to a specific enrollment exclusively on the Orchard Discussion board. This makes it possible for others to learn from your questions and possibly also help you. Make sure to prefix your thread's title with "Dojo Course - ". We constantly keep an eye on the discussion board and will chime in as soon as possible if we see such a thread.

If you have questions related to a specific enrollment - and only then please! - send them to us directly.

I'd like to be trained more/faster/in my own pace or I want to get advices/mentoring regarding my Orchard-based project. How?

Don't hesitate to drop us a line as we're eager to help you!