This week in Orchard - 08/30/2019
Let's start our post with a new contribution from Lombiq about back-porting Orchard Core's Live Preview feature to Orchard 1.x. Then read about two demos of Orchard Core's upcoming huge features: the Azure Blob Storage as CDN and about supporting custom Lucene analyzers! We also have other updates around our house as well. Check out our current post for more!
On Orchard 1.x
Demos
Live preview feature
A new Orchard module is available in Orchard 1.x, called Content Preview. This is the back-port of the Live Content Preview feature that you can meet within Orchard Core. To use the Content Preview feature, head to the Modules menu from the admin and enable the module.
The main concept is the user wants to see the changes of a content item immediately somehow without needing to save the changes. Here you can see a Page content type with several parts attached. Here you can update the TitlePart, the BodyPart, and the LayoutPart too with a TextField and a NumericField.
You can also have more than one TinyMCE editor in the editor of the content item, it will work without issues. If you edit a content item with invalid data (for example typing some text in the editor of a NumericField), you will see the error notification immediately in the preview window.
In the live preview window, you can find a warning message: "The Content Preview feature doesn't support properties where there are relationships to ContentPartRecord (e.g. Taxonomies, Tags). These won't update in the preview windows but otherwise, keep working." You can see this message because this feature hasn't been implemented yet, but feel free to have a contribution and add this feature to the Content Preview in Orchard 1.x!
Thank you for the contribution to Milán Keszthelyi from Lombiq Technologies!
On Orchard Core
Add more detail step on README.md of OpenId
In the documentation, there are more steps about how to add the relevant identity of OpenId when using MMC.exe.
New Orchard Core collaborators & teams in GitHub
There is a new OrchardCore Devs team in the GitHub repository of Orchard Core. The members of this team now have wright access to the repository, they can merge PRs, create and delete branches, but can't merge to master. They contributed enough and with good quality that we can trust them now. They learned how to contribute to Orchard. :)
Demos
Azure Blob Storage as CDN
We don't want to serve the Azure Blobs directly by rendering their own URLs that points to their Blobs. So, the clients load the Azure Blob directly and not us. We want Orchard to load the Blob, save it locally on the server and we serve the file directly. This file, which is copied locally from the Blob Storage is what we call the Media Cache. We do that because if we want an actual cache, that the clients don't ask us to serve a file, we will use a CDN which Azure Blob Storage is not and by doing that we can process the files to resize them if they are to be resized by ImageSharp. So, there are two things to solve here.
For example, if you would like to show an image on your page with three different sizes, there are three requests coming for the same image with different sizes. But there is only one Blob on Azure. You just send one request to Azure to get the file, store it locally and then resize it to the three different pipelines and serve the three different files, which are cached by ImageSharp also. There is a cache of the Blob file in the Media Cache, and there is three cached, resized images from ImageSharp.
This Purge Media Cache button under the Configuration -> Media Cache section is responsible for delete the Media Cache, not the ImageSharp cache.
This feature is still under development.
Supporting custom Lucene analyzers and additional Lucene indexes settings
In the Lucene Indices settings page, you can now have an Edit button for each index.
If you click on Edit, you can set the content types and also have an option to index a draft version of the content item. Before - by default - it was indexing everything, not just the ones we want. And - by default -, it was only indexing the published versions, without an option to index draft. If it's checked, it will still index one content item, but the latest version. When we index and tokenize the text, we need to tokenize based on the language. Using the Analyzer Name select list you can provide different language analyzers for each index. If the text of these items will be French, then you can use a French analyzer.
This feature is still under development.
On Lombiq
Improving your employment security with Orchard
Did you know that the Employment Security Department of Washington State also uses Orchard? Well, they do and thanks to them we've back-ported the Orchard Core live content preview feature to 1.x! See our post about it: https://lombiq.com/blog/improving-your-employment-security-with-orchard
Migrate from Bitbucket Mercurial repositories to Git - we can help!
Do you need help after Bitbucket dropping Mercurial support? If you want to move to Git, check out this page in our website about what are your options now. We've been doing hg-git conversion for six years!
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