Media Theme for Orchard Core, Orchard Harvest survey results - This week in Orchard (13/01/2023)
Fixing that FlowPart's widgets are not indexed in Lucene, migrating the OpenID module to OpenIddict 4.0, demo about the new Media Theme, and announcing the results of the Orchard Harvest survey! Check out our post for the details!
Orchard Core updates
Fix FlowPart's widgets were not indexed in Lucene
FlowPart's widgets were not indexed with Lucene (even with all the necessary settings on the Parts and Indexes). Marco Serralheiro added a FlowPartIndexHandler that is basically a clone of the BagPartIndexHandler to solve this issue.
Migrate the OpenID module to OpenIddict 4.0
This is about updating the OpenID module to use OpenIddict 4.0 RTM, which shipped in December. The previous versions - including OpenIddict 3.x - are no longer supported.
While OpenIddict 4.x itself has many internal improvements, the "public" API hasn't changed much so the changes here are mostly cosmetic. If you want to know more about the latest version of OpenIddict, check out this great post from Kévin Chalet!
Demos
Lombiq Hosting - Media Theme for Orchard Core
The Lombiq Hosting - Media Theme for Orchard Core repository contains an open-source project which will allow developers to host their themes in the Orchard Core Media Library, including templates and assets. The inspiration came from our public Orchard (Core) SaaS called DotNest. If you don't know it, you can use this site to sign up and get an Orchard (Core) site with two clicks for everyone. We don't vet who is signing up, so it should be safe, and it should be limited. But still, we want people to be able to have their sites as flexible as possible. And of course, there are a lot of built-in features in Orchard for that, you can do a lot from the admin. Part of the things you can do from the admin as well in a limited fashion is theming. There is the Templates module, if the developer or the operator of the application allows it then you can also upload CSS files and do all kinds of tricks. In the end, you can adjust the styling of your website. But we wanted to have something closer to the usual developer experience. And that is pretty much creating a theme for your DotNest site with the help of Media Theme for a tenant in a Saas, and that's what media theming is about. We have documentation about that here which contains a link to the DotNest Core SDK. This is what we will use in this demo!
We also have automatic deployments either from the command line or from a GitHub Actions action if you will.
You can fork the SDK or can work with an Orchard Core-based solution and create a theme (it needs to use Liquid). When you are satisfied, you can either create an import package by using the .NET Command line tool or, you can use Orchard Core's remote deployment feature to import the package on your production site. Or you can also use our GitHub Actions to deploy your theme.
If you would like to try it out in your own SaaS, feel free, and if you have questions, please let us know! If you would like to have a DotNest site and use this feature, just sign up here!
And of course, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube to see the usage of the Media Theme in a site runs in DotNest!
News from the community
New websites using Orchard Core: the site of Capri Exclusive Homeware and the site of BagPortr
Capri's purpose is to provide high-quality homeware to everyone, and BagPortr collects your baggage from your doorstep and checks it onto your flight. Both sites were developed by Gert Smith.
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.
Orchard Harvest 2023 survey results
For those too young to remember, we had Orchard conferences, called Orchard Harvest. And the conference website was available under orchardharvest.org, but unfortunately, it's not anymore. The last one was in 2017 in New York. So, having another get-together is very much overdue. If you would like to see or get a feeling of how this looked like before, we have a couple of mood videos on the Orchard YouTube channel, like this one from the first conference.
The point is that we should really think about organizing the next one, and we at Lombiq can take part in that or provide an organizing role with anybody who wants to take part. We created a survey, and now we have the results!
Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received a significant number of responses so far which has helped us to get a better idea of the right place and time. We have created a Discussion in GitHub where we described the possible dates and locations of the upcoming conference. Mike Alhayek also reached us saying he may have the right contact needed to facilitate the event in Las Vegas. Thanks, Mike! As we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter too!
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