Shape Components, new Anchor Tag Helper - This week in Orchard (11/09/2020)
We prepared with an interesting topic for this week about how could you use shapes like reusable Angular components? But before that, we checked the latest updates of Orchard Core, like the new updates around Tag Helpers.
Orchard Core updates
Add UI permissions based on the user role
This is about hiding some buttons based on the permissions, instead of returning the 401 page when clicking on those. What do we mean? Well, let's say we have a permission that doesn't contain a role to publish or unpublish pages. That means users with that permission can't see the Publish button at the bottom of the editor in a case of a Page content item.
Meeting information in the documentation
When you open the Orchard Core documentation page and navigate to Resources, you will find a new link in the Resources column at the left called Meeting. If you click on that you will see a brand new page where you can find every relevant information about the steering committee and the triage meetings.
Support for dropping a password from a password manager during setup
Some password managers let you drag and drop a password to a textbox. During setup, if we do this rather than focus then type or paste, the tick appears in the input, but the strength indicator doesn't update and clicking Finish setup just does nothing with no indication. The fix was to update the strength.js file to check for the drop event.
Add missing Tag Helper references
The root of this issue was the Tag Helpers are found during development because of the runtime compilation. But when you change the environment from development to production, it stops working if you don't have a direct reference on the ResourceManagement project. The compilation doesn't find the issue, because it's a runtime resolution. Yes, you can use the a tag it will compile, but in runtime, it has a different behavior based on the projects you reference and you don't get the behavior you expect. The only thing you can do is to have a functional test to be sure that it would work.
Tag Helper for the anchor tag with asset-href attribute
Added an HtmlTargetElement to the Anchor Tag Helper to also address anchor tags with asset-href attributes. Added needed const and property and changed the Process logic to require non-null asset-href for anchor tags. So, if you use the asset-href in the anchor tag, it will convert the URL of a media URL to a public URL.
Demos
Shape Components
What makes it hard to build a new site using Orchard Core? The ultimate solution would be to remove the templating in Orchard and just use decoupled. So, you don't have to know about shapes at all. And then you just write your pages, your controllers, you have lot's of APIs to get your content, you can reuse ASP.NET caching and do your decoupled site like this. It would be a decoupled site. Let's just forget about shapes and rendering everything from modules. Just let people render their own things and provide tools to render the site. It might be slower at first to build the site, but they will never be blocked by 'I don't know what a shape is.' or 'I don't understand how shapes work.', 'What is placement?' and so on.
We have themes and recipes today that build some predefined solutions, like a blog or an agency site and they can be extended to anything. For that, you still have to understand all the shape- and display mechanisms to build these elements. A new solution would be to still create recipes, but recipes that would contain Razor Pages and controllers and anything that would build a blog even if we didn't have shapes and placement and everything. Like build a decoupled site that is a blog and this is the recipe. When you install it you have the same blog, the same theme working and if you want to change it, you don't have to learn shapes. You just look at the page that renders the blog, the blog post and you just change it. Or you create a new one and change the code directly. This would be just ASP.NET, there is nothing new to learn out of ASP.NET. That would be a solution to have.
But let's say the issue is not about the shapes, because shapes are great. The issue is zones and placement. And these are harder to learn. Shapes in the end, if you just take shapes by themself, they are just dynamic ViewModels that have alternates and that can be rendered using templates. It's like a view component in ASP.NET. But it's like a view component with more features like it can have an ID, CSS classes, attributes, it can have dynamic behavior, it can have a caching, it has alternates. So, it has a dynamic resolution of templates, which the view component doesn't have.
Let's think about a shape like a reusable component, like a view component in ASP.NET, but like an Orchard shape component, that can be reused. Were we able to pique your curiosity? Then just navigate to YouTube and see this exciting demo about shape components!
News from the community
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