This week in Orchard - 9/14/2018

Check out our current post for the Dynamic compilation with C# 7.3 support in Orchard 1.x and for a lot of exciting Orchard Core improvements!

On Orchard 1.x

Demos

Dynamic compilation with C# 7.3

First of all, let's mention two notion in a nutshell:

• Static view compilation: you can build your Razor files without needed to build the solution
• Dynamic compilation: you do not need to build your solution if you modify a cs file for example, you just need to hit save in your IDE and you can test your newly implemented features

You can find dozens of documents about Static view compilation and Dynamic compilation in the web, so if you are interested in this topic just fire up a web search engine.

Orchard 1.x not just supports dynamic compilation, but the Roslyn compiler has also been updated, so you can use the newest language features of C# that comes in the version 7.3.

You can find a great demo about the Dynamic compilation in the latest Orchard podcast thanks to Benedek Farkas from Lombiq. In this demo he showed the working of the Static view compilation, the Dynamic compilation and he also overwrites a Razor file via FTP to a site that has been deployed to Microsoft Azure.

On Orchard Core

Crate a Font Awesome Icon Picker

The idea is to create an editor for the TextField that would show a Font Awesome editor. In this page you can see an example for a dropdown where you can search and filter icons: https://farbelous.io/fontawesome-iconpicker/

David Ouwinga has an existing implementation for this feature in Orchard 1.x, that works in the following way:

Show Login pages on the admin theme

Last time we mentioned that the login controller (AccountController in OrchardCore.Users.Controllers) redirects us to a front-end page to login. Then it tries to find the theme and it will fail, because in a Decoupled CMS that is not necessary to have a shape. The login can't be decoupled right now, because it's completely coupled to the front-end.

In WordPress, the Log In page has a different theme than the front end. Maybe Orchard Core could have the same approach here: have a different back-end theme for the Log In page. In this case when you design your front-end theme you should not have to care about to style the Log In page.

User management: separate admin users and front-end users?

When we authenticate on the Log In we can see all the users on the admin page. The users we show in the admin is a mix of the admin users (who has access to manage content) and the front-end users.

Let's say we have an e-commerce site where we have customers. The question is should be the customers and the administrators of the site being stored in the same database/table and showing in the same list of users?

Listen the conversation about the pros and cons of the concept of separating the admin and the front-end users at the end of the latest Orchard podcast!

On Lombiq

Win a year of free custom domain usage: Still time to fill out the developer survey!

As we've written about before we ask you to tell us everything you wish DotNest would do differently. The DotNest developer survey is still on, but not for long: We'll close it on the 23rd. If you haven't filled it out here's the time, because you may also win a year of custom domain usage!

So tell us your thoughts in the survey, enjoy an improved DotNest and win!