Support static data migration methods

Public static data migration methods are now supported for Create, CreateAsync, UpdateFromX, UpdateFromXAsync, Uninstall, and UninstallAsync, so CA1822 suppressions are no longer required for migration steps that don't use instance state. It means that all methods could now be static if we don't use services, and we can remove the warnings that say mark members as static.

Make List Part pagination configurable

From now on, for the List Part, you can choose to use the current PagerSlim, which just shows next and previous, or use page numbers as well. But don't forget that showing page numbers, too, requires an additional database query to determine the total item count. By default, we are still using PagerSlim. Thanks to Jack Liu for his first contribution!

We can try this out quickly by setting up our site using the Blog recipe. The Blog recipe provides us with the Blog content type, which has the List Part attached. If we navigate to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types and click Edit next to Blog, we can find the attached List Part, where we can see the new Show full pager checkbox.

Now, let's see the differences between using a full pager and not using one. On the left side of the screen, we can see the full pager in use. In this case, you can see the page numbers and the << >> arrows to be able to jump to the first and the last page of the list. The right side of the screen shows you the PagerSlim usage, where you can only navigate to the previous and next pages.

Demos

Copilot Integration

Let's continue our journey with the AI suite, this time with the AI Copilot Orchestrator!

If you navigate to Tools -> Features and enable the AI Copilot Orchestrator feature, it will provide a GitHub Copilot SDK-based orchestrator for AI chat sessions. Then, you can go to Settings -> Artificial Intelligence, where you will see a new Copilot section. You can set the authentication type and choose between GitHub Signed-in User and API Key (BYOK). The API Key can be used if you have this service hosted in Azure. For the sake of the demo, we chose the GitHub signed-in user authentication type and followed the steps mentioned to create a GitHub app.

Now, we can go to Artificial Intelligence -> Chat Interactions, where we can create a new chat or continue an existing one. Here you can select the orchestrator to use for this chat interaction. The orchestrator controls how tools are selected and how the AI execution loop is managed. If you select the GitHub Copilot Orchestrator here, the site will ask you to log in to your GitHub account. Once you have it, a new drop-down will display where you can select the Copilot model to use for this interaction.

Copilot will be aware of all the capabilities that you select under the Capabilities tab, and it is also aware of the documents that you can attach under the Documents tab. And the same applies to profiles. You can reach profiles under Artificial Intelligence -> Profiles, where you can edit/create profiles and set the orchestrator nearly the same way. Here you can read more about Profiles and Chat Interactions.

And as always, if you want to see this feature in action, head to YouTube for a recording by Mike Alhayek, and don't forget to check out the official documentation about the Copilot Integration!

News from the community

Speaker application for Orchard Harvest 2026 and Orchard Harvest 2025 recordings

The next Orchard Core conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada, on the 10th and 11th of September.

Do you have an interesting Orchard Core-related topic that you'd like to present to the community? Development techniques, memorable case studies, and useful experiences that you'd like to share?

This year's leading themes:

• From CMS to content platform: where Orchard Core fits in 2026.
• Automation superpowers: AI tools, recipes, and workflows in everyday projects.
• Performance and reliability in Orchard Core.
• Looking beyond Orchard Core 3.0: what’s next for the platform and community.

Application form: https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCICDdeeZFbXdAlSWTkdgpZAtUQzA3UzVNUERJTk4zVlEwRUtXNkM2SlI4Sy4u

Apply to be a speaker by the 5th of May, midnight, anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest in 1 or 2 weeks after the application period. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event.

The 8th Orchard Harvest Conference was held in Prague on the 11th and 12th of November, 2025. We recorded every session, and are currently publishing them on the Orchard Core YouTube channel. The videos are published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 4:00 PM UTC. If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to this YouTube channel for the Harvest videos and some inspiration if you are considering being a speaker this year! Here you can find the playlist for last year's Harvest recordings.

Bringing Orchard Core into the classroom at Óbuda University

Ever wonder how a CMS can make university courses more practical? At Óbuda University, Orchard Core did just that. Students learn ASP.NET Core by building live sites on DotNest. They go through milestones, create custom forms and workflows. We talked with our project leader, Gábor Domonkos, about how it started, what students build, and why it prepares them for real careers.

Students gain practical experience, the university gets a more hands-on subject, and the industry gets people who are better prepared for real projects. We believe more universities could benefit from this kind of collaboration, whether with Orchard Core or other open-source technologies. And if you are exploring something similar, we are always happy to share what has worked for us so far.

Check out the full interview here!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 419 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Warn against unsafe Liquid output in SQL queries

A SQL query is actually a Liquid template. This allows your queries to be shaped based on the parameters it gets. But you could srew up with SQL and Liquid if you start by injecting Liquid in a value, as you can see below. Because in that case, you can inject any SQL and expose all your databases. So, do not inject user-provided values directly with Liquid output expressions, as this can lead to SQL injection.

Use SQL parameters (@name or @name:default) for all user-provided values, and only use Liquid templates to change the shape of the query.

This change by Georg von Kries adds some validation, so whenever you edit a SQL query like the one we mentioned, it will tell you not to use this kind of usage in Liquid. The SqlLiquidOutputExpressionDetector will detect the issues based on the resolved FluidParser. What matters here is the OutputStatementDetector, which inherits from AstVisitor in Fluid and lets you detect specific statements. Here you can see the VisitOutputStatement, which checks for curly braces; when it finds them, the ContainsOutputStatement checks whether they contain curly braces. And in this case, we emit a warning to let users know to be careful when doing that.

And we can easily try it out by navigating to Search -> Queries -> All Queries and adding the query we mentioned above. Once we hit save, Orchard warns us that potentially unsafe Liquid output expressions ('{ ... }') were detected in this query template.

Add IJSLocalizer infrastructure and framework-agnostic JavaScript localization helpers

This is about providing localization for JavaScript files. In a nutshell, this will load the localization from the PO files and make it available in JavaScript.

When a Vue, TypeScript, or plain JavaScript component needs translated strings, it cannot call IStringLocalizer directly. IJSLocalizer bridges this gap: each module registers one implementation that knows how to map a group name to a dictionary of localized strings, which a Razor view or layout can serialize and pass into a scoped module entry point before the script runs. Check out the documentation of the JavaScript Localization to see how you can register a custom implementation, pass localizations to the browser, use localizations in JavaScript or TypeScript, and more with examples!

Demos

AI Chat Admin widget and Frontend widget

Let's continue our journey with the AI suite, this time with the widgets!

If you head to Design -> Widgets and hit the Add Widget button for one of the defined Zones, you will find a new option called Artificial Intelligence Chat. Once you have it, you can select whichever profile you want to use with this widget. If you are not familiar with AI profiles, you can check out our previous post or head to the official documentation for CrestApps Orchard Core to learn more. Once you select your profile and navigate to the frontend of your site, you will notice the new AI Chat widget there, and you can start a chat with it.

The other new feature that we want to highlight today is called AI Chat Admin Widget, which provides a floating AI chat widget on every admin page, allowing users to interact with a predefined AI profile. You can enable it under Tools -> Features. Once you enable it, you can configure it under Settings -> Artificial Intelligence, where you will find a new section called Admin Widget. Here, you need to select the API Profile to use for the admin widget. Users with the appropriate permission can chat with this profile from any admin page. But you can also set the maximum number of previous chat sessions to display in the widget history panel and the primary color for the admin chat widget. After that, you will see a UI similar to the frontend, with the same capabilities.

And it's still not all of it! If you want to see these features in action, don't forget to head to YouTube for a demo by Mike Alhayek!

News from the community

Speaker application for Orchard Harvest 2026 and Orchard Harvest 2025 recordings

The next Orchard Core conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada, on the 10th and 11th of September.

Do you have an interesting Orchard Core-related topic that you'd like to present to the community? Development techniques, memorable case studies, and useful experiences that you'd like to share?

This year's leading themes:

• From CMS to content platform: where Orchard Core fits in 2026.
• Automation superpowers: AI tools, recipes, and workflows in everyday projects.
• Performance and reliability in Orchard Core.
• Looking beyond Orchard Core 3.0: what’s next for the platform and community.

Application form: https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCICDdeeZFbXdAlSWTkdgpZAtUQzA3UzVNUERJTk4zVlEwRUtXNkM2SlI4Sy4u

Apply to be a speaker by the 5th of May, midnight, anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest in 1 or 2 weeks after the application period. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event.

The 8th Orchard Harvest Conference was held in Prague on the 11th and 12th of November, 2025. We recorded every session, and are currently publishing them on the Orchard Core YouTube channel. The videos are published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 4:00 PM UTC. If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to this YouTube channel for the Harvest videos and some inspiration if you are considering being a speaker this year! Here you can find the playlist for last year's Harvest recordings.

DotNest has a new look!

The previous site was starting to show its age. Not just visually, but also in day-to-day site management UX. So we took a step back and rebuilt the frontend from the ground up.

The new site is built with Tailwind CSS and a much more user-friendly content management approach. Our goal was a simple, straightforward UX that stays out of the way of the content, no unnecessary fluff, just clarity and focus. Stay tuned for an in-depth case study!

Take a look at this post here, and if you're curious, you can create Orchard Core sites here for free!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 419 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Independent Render Liquid and Sanitize HTML settings for HTML and Markdown components

The current SanitizeHtml settings' hint could be a little bit misleading, and enabling or disabling it causes potentially unwanted behavior because the hint only refers to preventing custom scripts, which is true, but it does much more by default. This, in itself, is trivial to fix. However, the SanitizeHtml setting also governs whether Liquid markup is rendered. If SanitizeHtml is false, that means Liquid is rendered. This prevents a simple use case where (script) sanitization is desired, but Liquid should still be rendered.

Regardless of the setting, the Liquid code is always validated. This is problematic when Liquid code is included as a code sample (in a <code> block) and is invalid, e.g., because it references a Liquid tag that is not available in the current system. This affects HtmlBody Part, Html Field, Markdown Part, and Markdown Field.

Let's see Benedek Farkas's solution to this issue! If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, you will get a predefined Blog Post content type with the MarkdownBody Part attached. If you edit the settings of the attached MarkdownBody Part, you will notice the new Render Liquid option, which lets you control whether your Liquid markup is rendered or displayed raw. Please note that the Liquid rendering support is here only for backward compatibility and will be removed in version 4.0. As you can see, both settings are false in our case.

Now, let's create a new Blog Post with some sample content. As you can see in the screen below, the Liquid code is not validated because the Render Liquid option is disabled.

New Data Localization Liquid filter

And while we are talking about Liquid, let's take a look at a new Liquid filter by Hisham Bin Ateya, that localizes dynamic data string using the current culture. We fire up the blog post that we created earlier and make sure that the Render Liquid option is set to true. Then we have to make sure that our site supports multiple cultures under Settings -> Localization -> Cultures. We used the Dynamic Translations UI under Settings -> Localization -> Dynamic Translations to add a Hungarian translation for the Blog Post content type. If that UI is new to you, it's OK; that's quite a recent addition that you can read about in detail in this post.

Now let's see how that filter works! As you can see, we want to display the localized value of the Blog Post string, and the context for the string is Content Types. If we publish this content item and view it in the front end, we will see that the site displays the text Blog Post as Blogposzt.

Demos

AI Documents for Chat Interactions and Chat Sessions

We will continue the demo from last week, where we discussed the AI Data Source module of the AI Suite, which provides AI data source management, knowledge base indexing, and RAG search capabilities for Orchard Core. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here.

Let's say we don't want to have only data in the indexes; we also want to use the uploaded documents, work with them, and ask questions about them. The features called AI Documents (OpenXML) and AI Documents (PDF) extend the AI Documents feature by allowing PDF and OpenXML files (ie, docx, xlsx, pptx). If we enable the AI Documents for Chat Interactions feature, we will be able to upload documents in the Chat Interactions UI.

Now we can go to Artificial Intelligence -> Chat Interactions, where we can start a new chat or continue an existing one. You will notice the Documents tab, which allows you to attach documents to chat against your own data. The content will be extracted and used as context for AI responses. But as you can see, it warns you to select an index profile for indexing documents in chat interactions.

To do that, we need to navigate to Settings -> Artificial Intelligence and select an index profile.

Now we can go back to the Chat Interactions UI, attach documents, and ask questions like "summarize the file". AI can do that because the document is processed and indexed, so we can retrieve data from the index.

There is another feature called AI Documents for Chat Sessions, which provides document upload and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) support for AI Chat Sessions and Widgets. The difference between Chat Interaction and Chat Session is that Chat Interaction is a playground that you can reach under Artificial Intelligence -> Chat Interactions, the one that we showed you previously. There is nothing preconfigured.

If you want to have a Chat Session, you have to create a Profile first under Artificial Intelligence -> Profiles. A Profile allows you to preconfigure system instructions, setting up an initial prompt, the Profile Type, and so on. But what's interesting for us here is the content of the Documents tab. If you enable the AI Documents for Profiles feature, you can allow Documents and Attachments in this tab, which means users can upload documents to chat sessions using this profile, as you can read. If we upload a file here and create a new chat based on the profile (which we can do by clicking on the Actions button and select the New chat from the drop-down menu near the profile under Artificial Intelligence -> Profiles), we can chat about the content of the uploaded document without having the need to upload the given documents again and again because it's preconfigured.

And it's still not all of it! If you want to see these features in action, don't forget to head to YouTube for a demo by Mike Alhayek!

News from the community

Speaker application for Orchard Harvest 2026 and Orchard Harvest 2025 recordings

The next Orchard Core conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada, on the 10th and 11th of September.

Do you have an interesting Orchard Core-related topic that you'd like to present to the community? Development techniques, memorable case studies, and useful experiences that you'd like to share?

This year's leading themes:

• From CMS to content platform: where Orchard Core fits in 2026.
• Automation superpowers: AI tools, recipes, and workflows in everyday projects.
• Performance and reliability in Orchard Core.
• Looking beyond Orchard Core 3.0: what’s next for the platform and community.

Application form: https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCICDdeeZFbXdAlSWTkdgpZAtUQzA3UzVNUERJTk4zVlEwRUtXNkM2SlI4Sy4u

Apply to be a speaker by the 5th of May, midnight, anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest in 1 or 2 weeks after the application period. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event.

The 8th Orchard Harvest Conference was held in Prague on the 11th and 12th of November, 2025. We recorded every session, and starting next Monday, we will begin publishing them on the Orchard Core YouTube channel. The videos will be published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 4:00 PM UTC. If you haven't done so yet, subscribe to this YouTube channel for upcoming Harvest videos and some inspiration if you are considering being a speaker this year! Here you can find the playlist for last year's Harvest recordings.

Event management backend for one of the largest retailers - Avastec case study by Lombiq

When a live, high–traffic event platform needs new features urgently, you don't get the luxury of rewrites or downtime.

That was the situation when Avastec asked us to take over and continue the development of an Orchard Core–based headless event management backend used by one of the world's largest retailers.

The system was already in production, powering a public Node.js frontend. The goals were clear:

• ship new functionality quickly,
• improve performance and reliability,
• keep upgrades safe and traceable,
• all without disrupting users.

Our work focused on long-term maintainability under real delivery pressure:

• Replacing recipe-based data migrations with code-based migrations for better traceability.
• Introducing automated UI tests to protect core user journeys.
• Delivering new features like ticketing, GDPR integrations, multi-brand rollout, and QR code-based entry management.
• Adding observability via Azure Application Insights to support stable operations.

All of this was done incrementally, without breaking the live experience.

As Steve Taylor, CTO and Founder of Avastec, put it:

"They (...) delivered improvements without disrupting a live, high-traffic platform… balancing rapid feature delivery with long-term maintainability and performance."

This project is a good example of what Orchard Core enables when combined with disciplined engineering practices: fast change, low risk, and systems that keep improving instead of accumulating debt.

Read the full case study here!

Do you want to launch an event management platform on Orchard Core? We have actually built several more too, get in touch with us!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 421 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

New OrchardCore.ContentFields.Core module

Every time you want to use any content field, for example, creating your own migrations, you have to reference the OrchardCore.ContentFields project. But it's unnecessary because in this case, you don't really need anything more than the class derived from ContentField and the corresponding settings.

Thanks to Hisham Bin Ateya, all the content fields were moved to a new OrchardCore.ContentFields.Core project. From now on, if you just want to use the fields, you don't need to include the entire OrchardCore.ContentFields module, just the core one.

Arguments Source Generation

This is to improve the performance. The idea is that we have a From method here in the Arguments class. When we create shapes, we can pass custom properties. These properties have to be in an instance of type INamedEnumerable. It lets you list arguments and also get them by name and position. And by using the Arguments.From, you can pass any kind of objects, including anonymous objects, and it will convert these objects to an INamedEnumerable. And it will do that by reflection.

The idea from Georg von Kries is to use source generators. The first case is when we do Arguments.From and then we pass a custom class. What it will do is enhance this custom class, which has to be partial. It will return a dedicated INamedEnumerable instance that won't use reflection.

You can also see an ArgumentsFromInterceptor, which is a next-level source generator. It's when you call something like the From method, but it won't actually call it. It will replace the invocation of From with something else, such as directly instantiating an object that implements INamedEnumerable. And it will use the From method as a marker.

Check out Orchard Core's documentation for real-world examples, the migration guide, architecture details, and best practices!

Demos

AI Knowledge Base Indexing

Before redesigning the UI in the AI Suite and integrating everything into the AI mechanism, we used multiple providers and relied heavily on the Microsoft.Extensions.AI libraries. It was a provider-driven communication, and there was no such thing as trying to understand what this user wants, or trying to give that user as much power as we can, or trying to rewrite their prompt. The whole design now looks like a standalone orchestrator. This means the prompt goes to the orchestrator, which is determined by your settings. It is not responsible for a lot more than just sending the prompt. Now we have a true orchestrator.

So, the orchestrator was redesigned to handle prompt routing, provider selection, and data retrieval, enabling the use of any index as a data source for AI interactions, and supporting document upload and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

How does that all work? First, don't forget to clone the CrestApps Orchard Core Modules repository and run the solution. Once you are done, enter the admin area and go to Search -> Indexes, where you will see two new sources when you click the Add index button. Let's focus on the AI Knowledge Base Index!

That index automatically lets you embed any data from any index. It can become available for the orchestrator. So, it automatically chunks, embeds, and indexes source documents into a master AI Knowledge Base index for efficient vector search.

We also created another index for content, which we called articles. It stores the data for Article content items.

We want to expose this data to AI. To do that, we navigated to Artificial Intelligence -> Data Sources and clicked the Add data source button. This UI has changed a lot. Now you can select whichever index that you want to pull the data from and the knowledge base index. And then you can define whichever fields you want.

Now you have a data source! It means we can go to Artificial Intelligence -> Chat Interactions and add a new interaction. Here you can see the Data source drop-down, which is similar to what we had in the past. And now, if you ask questions, it will look up the data in the selected index and pull it from there, too.

If you want to see this feature in action, don't forget to head to YouTube for a demo by Mike Alhayek!

News from the community

Helping out the builders of Ontario - RESCON case study by Lombiq

When your homepage shows outdated content, it's not just a bug; it affects credibility.

Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) runs a headless Orchard Core backend with a separate Vue frontend. Over time, their homepage widgets started surfacing older news and posts again, even though everything looked fine right after publishing.

We investigated the architecture, traced the issue back to a search indexing inconsistency, and made a deliberate choice: Instead of endlessly hardening the setup, we simplified the system. In the case study, we walk through:

• The original architectural setup.
• The real root cause.
• Why simplify beat hardening?
• What we improved beyond the immediate fix.

If you're running Orchard Core in a headless or multi-layer setup, this will likely feel familiar. Read the full case study here!

If your Orchard Core application behaves unpredictably, whether it's publishing inconsistencies, performance issues, or architectural drift over time, we can help diagnose and stabilize it. Get in touch and let's take a look!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 421 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Remove implicit CancelAsync from ValidateAsync

This change means the code won't cancel the current session if an issue occurs during validation in the DefaultContentManager.ValidateAsync() method. It's up to the caller of the validation, because this can discard unrelated pending changes from other components sharing the session.

So, session cancellation is now the caller's responsibility, matching the expected pattern in which the consumer decides how to handle a validation failure. ValidateAsync() only performs validation and returns the result. It no longer cancels the session on failure. The change has been mentioned in the release notes of the upcoming v3 of Orchard Core. There is another page in the documentation that describes how to create a new content type, adding content parts to a type, consuming content parts and fields from C#, etc. That page also contains an example of consuming your content item as your content part in a controller. And in that code, you can see that inside the UpdateProductPriceAsync method, we first validate the content item. If validation fails, we cancel the session to discard any pending changes.

Fluent Placement Location Builder

A new PlacementLocationBuilder fluent API has been added as a type-safe alternative to manually constructing placement location strings in display drivers. The builder uses a single class where all methods return the same instance for easy chaining, following the placement nesting hierarchy (Zone -> Tab -> Card -> Column). Each method in the chain returns the same builder instance, so all methods are available at any point after .Zone(). Note that levels can be skipped, for example .Zone().Card() without a .Tab() is valid.

To help you better understand this change, Mike Alhayek also updated the documentation with the available methods and added some nice examples!

Demos

Admin Menus Localization support

The Admin Menu module allows users to create custom admin menus in the Admin UI. If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, you will notice that it provides an admin menu by default, which you can see under Tools -> Admin Menus.

Hisham Bin Ateya shows the new feature here, which is about having a way to localize admin menus as well. To test this quickly, make sure your site supports at least two cultures under Settings -> Localization -> Cultures. It's also recommended to enable the Admin Culture Picker feature under Tools -> Features, which provides a culture picker shape for the admin area.

Now, thanks to the Dynamic Translations feature and this addition, we can easily translate admin menus by going to Settings -> Localization -> Dynamic Translations. Here, you can select the Admin Menus under the Category drop-down and add translations to the available admin menus on your site, as well as to their admin menu nodes. Let's add the Hungarian translations to these!

Now let's head to Tools -> Admin Menus and use the admin culture picker to switch to Hungarian. And as you can see, all of the nodes will display in the selected culture for which we have added translations.

If you want to see this feature in action, head to YouTube for a recording!

MCP Prompts and MCP Resources support

Last year, we wrote about the MCP Client features that you can use to connect your application to remote MCP servers using standard HTTP requests and to connect your application to MCP servers running locally, typically in containers.

Now let's talk about MCP Servers! The MCP Server Feature allows your Orchard Core application to expose its AI tools and capabilities to external MCP clients. This feature supports the SSE transport type, enabling real-time communication.

First of all, you need to clone the CrestApps - Orchard Core repository, which contains the Artificial Intelligence Suite, which is a comprehensive and extensible AI ecosystem built on Orchard Core, designed to unify and streamline AI integration and management.

Now we can go to Tools -> Features to enable the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server feature. This time, we will focus on MCP Prompts and Resources, which we will find in the admin UI under Artificial Intelligence -> Model Context Protocol -> Prompts/Resources. Under the Prompts one, you can use the UI to add MCP Server prompts. Here you can see that we added an MCP Prompt named analytics.user.activity that returns a detailed activity report for a specific user within a given date range. And you can see that we defined some arguments as well, such as the user's unique identifier and the maximum number of records to return.

You can add MCP Server resources by hitting the Resources option on the menu. If you click the Add Resource button, you'll see a modal where you can choose from the available resource types.

For this demo, we selected the Recipe Step Schema, which provides a JSON schema for a specific recipe step.

The repository contains an Aspire app called CrestApps.Aspire.AppHost. If you run this application, it provides a sample app called McpClientSample that helps you to see what's available on your server. This sample app connects to the MCP server hosted by CrestApps.OrchardCore.Cms.Web and demonstrates listing tools, prompts, and resources.

If you hit Go to Tools in the navigation tabs, that will list all the MCP tools exposed by the MCP server and invoke them with custom arguments.

If you select Go to Prompts, the sample app will list all MCP prompts and retrieve each prompt's details. Here, you can see that the top two are the ones that we defined via the UI. The rest of those are coming from the Agent Skills project. If you haven't heard about it, we wrote about this project a few weeks ago.

And if you click on Resources, the app will list concrete MCP resources with fixed URIs and read their content directly. All of these, again, come from the Agent Skills project.

Lastly, there is a Resource Templates option where you can browse parameterized resource templates, fill in variables, and read content. Here you can see the one that we defined earlier in the UI with a parameter. Here is our RecipeStep resource. If we provide a value for stepName (such as feature), you will actually get information about that feature. So, it just gives you information about the recipe step.

And that's not all of it! As always, if you want to see more, head to YouTube for a recording by Mike Alhayek!

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 Location

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. The first step was to assess the potential interest and what would be needed. We created a survey, and now we have the results! Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received many responses, which have helped us get a better idea of the right place and time. It seems that most respondents are open to an in-person conference this year, with the USA receiving the most votes for location, followed by Europe and Canada, though the differences in votes were small. But a significant portion of respondents expressed reluctance to attend in the US; half of the 32 respondents did not want to go to the US, and some provided comments to that effect.

After Las Vegas in 2024 and Prague in 2025, the 2026 conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada. Why Vancouver? A few simple reasons:

• Last year was Europe, so repeating it would have locked out many attendees on the other side of the ocean.
• As we mentioned, compared to a US location, we heard more explicit pushback this time, while Canada remained a broadly acceptable option.
• Vancouver offers the best possible "in-between" choice: reachable from both North America and Europe and still a fresh destination for most of the community.

So if you are building on Orchard Core, contributing to it, or evaluating it for your next platform, this is your chance to connect directly with maintainers, contributors, and fellow teams using Orchard in production.

We'll share dates and venue soon. For now, you can already start planning for 2026 September in Vancouver.

If you're considering attending, what would make Vancouver a "must go" for you: session topics, workshops, or community time? Please share your thoughts with us under this discussion.

And as always, as we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 422 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Data Protection guide

Thanks to Laode Muhammad Al Fatih, there is now a new guide that provides information on implementing data protection in Orchard Core applications, particularly in multi-tenant and load-balanced environments. The guide also explains when you should use Distributed Data Protection and what providers do that.

For detailed information about implementing data protection with Azure Blob Storage, including configuration options and Liquid templating, see the following page.

For detailed information on implementing data protection with Redis, including configuration options and persistence considerations, see this page.

Configurable EasyMDE editor settings to Markdown WYSIWYG editors

Currently, the EasyMDE editor used by the Markdown Field and Body Part is not customisable. The toolbar buttons, spell checker, and other editor options are hardcoded, meaning site administrators have no way to tailor the editing experience to their needs, for example, removing unused toolbar buttons, enabling the spell checker, or adjusting other EasyMDE configuration options. This contrasts with the HTML Body Part's Trumbowyg editor, which already supports configurable options via a settings panel.

Nick Jackson added the same level of configurability to both Markdown WYSIWYG editors. That means there is a new settings panel with a CodeMirror textarea for customizing EasyMDE editor options on both the Markdown Field and the MarkdownBody Part when using the WYSIWYG editor. The custom options are validated as valid JavaScript objects using Acornima. Toolbar button names are automatically mapped to their full definitions from mdeToolbar, preserving media/shortcode integration, and empty/null options fall back to the default toolbar configuration.

To try this out, let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. The Blog recipe provides us a Blog Post content type which has a MarkdownBody Part attached. Head to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types and edit the content definition of the Blog Post content type. If we hit Edit near the attached MarkdownBody Part, we will see a textarea, where we can provide the editor options for the WYSIWYG editor. Let's say we wanted a very simple editor with just some basic options: undo/redo, text formatting, and the ability to insert Shortcodes and Images from the Media Library.

If we hit Save, we can go to the Blog option on the menu and edit our predefined blog post. And as you can see, the MarkdownBody text area will only show the buttons on the toolbar that we have previously defined.

Demos

Bulk option for attaching the Localization Part to content types

After enabling the Content Localization feature, users must manually add the Localization Part to each content type they want to localize. This is not immediately obvious and can lead to confusion. Once the user enables the Content Localization feature, they would expect that localization to work on content types. But they discover that they need to manually edit each content type and attach the Localization Part. Users should be guided on what to do next after enabling the Content Localization feature, or have an easier way to enable localization for multiple content types.

In this demo, Hisham Bin Ateya provides a solution to that: a bulk attachment option. If you check out this PR, you will see that he provided a settings page that lists all content types with checkboxes and allows users to add and remove the Localization Part to multiple content types at once. Now let's see this in action quickly!

First, make sure you have enabled the Content Localization module under Tools -> Features. After, you will see a new option in the menu under Settings -> Localization, called Content Localization. On this page, users can select multiple content types at once. We can say that we want to attach the Localization Part to the Article, Blog Post, and Page content types. Once you hit Save at the bottom of the page, the Localization Part will be attached to the content types you have selected. If you deselect a content type from this list, the Localization Part will be removed from that content type.

And as always, if you want to see this feature in action, head to YouTube for a recording!

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 Location

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. The first step was to assess the potential interest and what would be needed. We created a survey, and now we have the results! Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received many responses, which have helped us get a better idea of the right place and time. It seems that most respondents are open to an in-person conference this year, with the USA receiving the most votes for location, followed by Europe and Canada, though the differences in votes were small. But a significant portion of respondents expressed reluctance to attend in the US; half of the 32 respondents did not want to go to the US, and some provided comments to that effect.

After Las Vegas in 2024 and Prague in 2025, the 2026 conference will take place in Vancouver, Canada. Why Vancouver? A few simple reasons:

• Last year was Europe, so repeating it would have locked out many attendees on the other side of the ocean.
• As we mentioned, compared to a US location, we heard more explicit pushback this time, while Canada remained a broadly acceptable option.
• Vancouver offers the best possible "in-between" choice: reachable from both North America and Europe and still a fresh destination for most of the community.

So if you are building on Orchard Core, contributing to it, or evaluating it for your next platform, this is your chance to connect directly with maintainers, contributors, and fellow teams using Orchard in production.

We'll share dates and venue soon. For now, you can already start planning for 2026 September in Vancouver.

If you're considering attending, what would make Vancouver a "must go" for you: session topics, workshops, or community time? Please share your thoughts with us under this discussion.

And as always, as we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 423 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Available Storage Indicator for the Media Library

The idea behind this new addition is to somehow notify the user about the free space available on the local file system when storing media items. Your site can contain multiple items in the Media Library, and it's best to track available storage space directly in the admin UI.

Thanks to Sára El-Saig from Lombiq, the Media Library screen now includes an Available Storage indicator. If the media items are stored on the local file system, it automatically shows the free disk space on the drive used for storage. The available storage is checked when uploading or copying files in the media store, providing a more informative warning when space is exhausted. If you enter the admin area of Orchard Core and select the Library submenu under Media, you will see the available storage indicator in the top-right corner. As you can see, we currently have 362.28 GB of free space on the local file system.

But it's just applies when you are storing your media items on the local file system. If you use a different underlying file store (e.g., Azure Blob Storage, Amazon AWS) or want to enforce additional storage constraints (e.g., usage quotas), that's also possible. To do that, you need to create a new event handler that implements IMediaEventHandler.MediaPermittedStorageAsync(MediaPermittedStorageContext) method. Note that if you want to use multiple event handlers, you should update the PermittedStorage value using the MediaPermittedStorageContext.Constrain(long) method rather than manually editing the PermittedStorage value.

Anchor Tag Helper documentation

We have had an Anchor Tag Helper for a while in Orchard Core, but the documentation was a bit outdated, as it only documented the <img> Tag Helpers, not the one for <a> tags. Manuel Tamayo Montero added some lines to the documentation to help developers use it.

Please don't forget that when using tag helpers in Razor, you must take a direct reference to the OrchardCore.Media NuGet package in each theme or module that uses the Tag Helpers.

Demos

AI-driven theme editor on the admin UI

Márk Bartha from Lombiq started building a proof of concept for an admin UI-based theme editor with AI integration. If you want custom themes, you have the option to host your theme in the Media Library using the Media Theme feature for Orchard Core. It would be great if we could edit this theme right from the admin UI. Normally, you can edit templates using the Templates feature, but since it's in the Media Library, you don't have the option for that. This feature is to solve this problem.

Here you can see a sample project from a conference site with some dummy data. This editor UI shows the Media Theme folder from the Media Library. Here you can see the templates and all the assets used. You can edit them just as you would in your IDE. Of course, you can also create new templates right from this IDE. After you provide a name for the template and click Save, the template will be saved, and the specified shape will become active. And it applies to any other allowed file types, not just to templates.

He also started to integrate AI into this editor. If you click on the AI button between Delete and Shortcuts, a new Theme Editor AI section will open where you can enter prompts, like "Please implement the detail and summary shapes of the Talk content type". Here, you can see the capabilities defined for the created profile, ThemeEditor.OpenAI, where you can see what features the AI can access.

So, it can act as an agent, create or edit files, and you can review the changes. You don't need to accept these changes right away; they will be persisted in the DB. And once you review them, you can hit the Apply button. It means that these files will also be available in this IDE, and you can save them; the changes will be applied automatically.

As with Copilot, you can include specific files in the context and add content types. Once you execute a new follow-up prompt, it will include all these and give you access to them as well.

And that's still not all of it! If you want to learn more about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording!

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 survey results

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. The first step was to assess the potential interest and what would be needed. We created a survey, and now we have the results! Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received many responses, which have helped us get a better idea of the right place and time. Please keep in mind that these are just preliminary results and haven't led to any specific outcomes yet.

It seems that most respondents are open to an in-person conference this year, with the USA receiving the most votes for location, followed by Europe and Canada, though the differences in votes were small. But a significant portion of respondents expressed reluctance to attend in the US; half of the 32 respondents did not want to go to the US, and some provided comments to that effect.

During our weekly meeting, some attendees suggested that future surveys should list specific cities rather than countries to avoid ambiguity, as the size of the US and Canada makes country-level choices insufficient for planning. So, we discussed potentially creating a new questionnaire listing a limited set of candidate cities in Canada, North America, and Europe, allowing participants to rank their preferences to achieve a more democratic and actionable outcome. Whatever the next step will be, as we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 424 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Obsolete synchronous CustomSettingsService.GetSettingsType method

Georg von Kries updated CustomSettingsDisplayDriver to use the asynchronous GetSettingsTypeAsync method instead of the synchronous GetSettingsType in both the EditAsync and UpdateAsync methods. He also updated CustomSettingsService.GetSettingsAsync(string settingsTypeName, Action isNew) to use await GetSettingsTypeAsync instead of the synchronous version, and refactored the return pattern to be fully async.

And finally, he marked CustomSettingsService.GetSettingsType as obsolete, with a message directing users to use GetSettingsTypeAsync instead. This change improves performance by avoiding blocking calls and prepares the codebase for the future removal of the synchronous API.

Refactor ShapeResult for less allocations

This is about having an optimized storage for display type locations. Instead of always allocating the _otherLocations dictionary for display type/location pairs, the code now stores up to two pairs in dedicated fields (_firstDisplayType, _firstLocation, _secondDisplayType, _secondLocation) before falling back to a dictionary for additional pairs. This reduces memory allocations for common cases with only one or two display types.

As you can see in the screen below, there is a Location(string displayType, string location) method. Inside that method, we checked the value of the _otherLocations dictionary. If _otherLocations has no value, let's update it and use the provided location. Otherwise, if this is the _firstDisplayType, then we don't need to create a dictionary. We save the display type allocation again. If there is a first display type, then maybe it's the second one. So, still no dictionary. Otherwise, let's create a new dictionary with the first, with the second, and with the custom display type. It means converting the properties for the first and the second location into the _otherLocations dictionary and resetting the _firstDisplayType, _firstLocation, _secondDisplayType, and _secondLocation fields.

Georg von Kries also refactored fluent API methods (e.g., Prefix, Location, Displaying, Processing, Name, Differentiator, OnGroup, Cache, RenderWhen) to appear before the core implementation logic, improving code organization and discoverability.

Demos

CrestApps Agent Skills

In the Model Context Protocol Server (MCP), the server provides tools, such as actions. It can also serve prompts, like the things you can reuse, and also something called resources. It means the MCP can provide resources, can provide tools, and prompts. You can ask MCP to provide you with a document, for example, and that would be a resource that it could use. For more information about the MCP integration with Orchard Core, check out our blog post from last year.

So, how can we take skills and provide them as part of the MCP server's resources? It means that if someone wants to connect to the MCP server, they will have access to all these skills and the resources to define their modules.

Mike Alhayek created a new repository called CrestApps.AgentSkills that contains shared AI agent skills and MCP tooling for .NET applications and Orchard Core-based projects. There are three parts to this project:

• CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp: Provides a reusable MCP skill engine for any .NET app without building custom parsers/providers.
• CrestApps.AgentSkills.OrchardCore: Used for Orchard Core local development by copying skills to .agents/skills.
• CrestApps.AgentSkills.Mcp.OrchardCore: Exposes Orchard Core skills as MCP prompts and MCP resources at runtime.

Another project inside is a non-packagable skill repository that serves as the single source of truth for all agent skills in this solution. As you can see, it contains a bunch of Orchard-related skills. This package is intended for local development. Once installed in your web project, it automatically provides a wide range of Orchard Core skills out of the box. After installation, you should see an .agents folder at your solution root. As long as you keep the NuGet package up to date, you'll always get the latest Orchard Core skills, and your agent will automatically discover them.

If you want to learn more, check out this blog post from Mike about this ecosystem for more details! And as always, don't forget to head to YouTube for a recording!

And while we are speaking about skills, if you remember, we showed our agent skills for Orchard Core that can also help you with many Orchard Core-related tasks, such as implementing appropriate shape templates with correct alternates. If you haven't heard about it yet, check out this post, where you can also see a demo of the Lombiq Orchard Core Agent Skills project!

And that's still not all of it! Last week, we mentioned that Sébastien Ros also had the idea of adding Agent Skills to Orchard Core, primarily for developers. The goal is that when you clone Orchard, you will have access to these skills. You can read about those new skills here.

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 survey results

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. The first step was to assess the potential interest and what would be needed. We created a survey, and now we have the results! Thank you for your feedback so far regarding Orchard Harvest! We have received many responses, which have helped us get a better idea of the right place and time. Please keep in mind that these are just preliminary results and haven't led to any specific outcomes yet.

It seems that most respondents are open to an in-person conference this year, with the USA receiving the most votes for location, followed by Europe and Canada, though the differences in votes were small. But a significant portion of respondents expressed reluctance to attend in the US; half of the 32 respondents did not want to go to the US, and some provided comments to that effect.

During our weekly meeting, some attendees suggested that future surveys should list specific cities rather than countries to avoid ambiguity, as the size of the US and Canada makes country-level choices insufficient for planning. So, we discussed potentially creating a new questionnaire listing a limited set of candidate cities in Canada, North America, and Europe, allowing participants to rank their preferences to achieve a more democratic and actionable outcome. Whatever the next step will be, as we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will also find every detail in this newsletter.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 423 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Orchard Core - Agent Skills

The idea here was to have Agent Skills inside Orchard Core, primarily for developers. That's the reason why it's in the .agents/skills folder. The goal is that when you clone Orchard, you will have access to these skills. The new skills are:

• orchardcore-module-creator: Creates new Orchard Core modules with proper structure, manifest, startup, and patterns. Use when the user needs to create a new module, add content parts, fields, drivers, handlers, or admin functionality.
• orchardcore-tester: Tests Orchard Core CMS features through browser automation. Use when the user needs to build, run, set up, or test Orchard Core functionality, including admin features, content management, media library, and module testing.
• orchardcore-theme-creator: Creates new Orchard Core themes with proper structure, manifest, layouts, and assets. Use when the user needs to create a new theme, customize layouts, or set up frontend assets.

This will be automatically loaded, for example, by Copilot, when developing on Orchard Core. Thanks to Sébastien Ros for the contribution!

If you remember, last week we showed our agent skills for Orchard Core that can also help you with many Orchard Core-related tasks, such as implementing appropriate shape templates with correct alternates. If you haven't heard about it yet, check out our post from last week, where you can also see a demo of the Lombiq Orchard Core Agent Skills project! Don't forget to share your experience, feedback, and contributions so we can keep refining the skills in the open and roll improvements back based on real project usage.

Implement Result pattern

We used to use a pattern that returns an object containing messages regarding error or success messages. For example, the EmailResult class was used to represent the result of sending an email, and the SmsResult class was used to represent the result of sending an SMS. These classes have been replaced by Result, which provides a more consistent and flexible way to handle operation results.

So, Hisham Bin Ateya introduced a lightweight Result pattern to represent operation outcomes without throwing exceptions for control flow. The new Result and Result<T> types indicate success/failure and may carry zero or more ResultError entries (supporting LocalizedString for localized messages).

Demos

Enhanced Blocks Editor for content creators

If you remember, Nick Jackson introduced a new block-style editor for Flow Part and Bag Part that provides a modern, visual content type picker with thumbnail previews, category filtering, and search functionality. This enhances the content-editing experience by allowing editors to browse and select content types more intuitively. If you haven't heard about it, check out our corresponding post with it, along with a demo. This feature was just merged to the main branch of Orchard Core a few weeks ago, but improvements are already coming!

He started his demonstration by showing the ability to insert blocks at any position within the Bag Part using a plus icon, similar to the Flow Part, eliminating the need to add blocks only at the end and then rearrange them.

The demo included new options to duplicate a block within the same page and to copy a block from one page to another, streamlining content creation and reducing repetitive manual entry. You can do this by right-clicking the block header and selecting Copy or Duplicate from the contextual menu.

The Duplicate feature duplicates the selected block directly beneath it, creating an exact clone.

If you want to copy a block from one page to another, you have to select the Copy option from the contextual menu. This feature provides you with two ways to insert your block. The first one is using the Paste Block button under the blocks. It will add the block at the end of the list. Or if we click on the plus icon and select the Paste Block option, it will copy that block at the selected location (CTA (Call to Action) here is the name of the block we want to copy).

Now, let's see the concept of Global Blocks, which are content items that can be referenced across multiple pages. Editing a Global Block updates all instances, and users can detach it to create an independent copy for further customization. If you want to create a Global Block based on your block, you need to select the Convert to Global Block option from the contextual menu. It will open up a modal where you can set a descriptive name for your Global Block.

But how to use this Global Block? If you remember, there was a Global Block button at the bottom of the Bag Part and Flow Part editor. If you click that, we get a little modal window that lists all the available Global Blocks in the system. Here you have a search feature to find your Global Block by name, and if you hit the Add button, the Global Block will be inserted into the editor.

If you want to edit your Global Block, you can do it in two ways. First, you can hit the Edit button within the editor of your Flow Part or Bag Part, which will redirect you to the editor of the selected Global Block. The other way is to select the new Global Blocks option under the Blocks menu. This page shows you all of the available Global Blocks you have defined in Orchard Core. And of course, you can create new Global Blocks here by selecting the New Global Block button, and hitting the Edit button will allow you to edit the selected Global Block.

And it's still just the surface! Head to YouTube for a recording to see more, including the technical structure behind Global Blocks, like handling of content item references, and the use of local storage and custom controllers for copy-paste operations!

News from the community

Last call: Orchard Harvest 2026 survey

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. Last time, it was held in Prague, and for this year, we're planning to bring it to North America.

We would like to understand what actually matters to the Orchard Core community:

• What's your travel budget reality?
• Which locations and dates work best with your schedule?
• What conference format gets you the most value?

If you've ever attended Harvest, thought about attending, or are just active in the Orchard Core community, your answers would really help us shape the event. You can fill out the questionnaire here until March 9th!

We're committed to making Orchard Harvest accessible and valuable for as many community members as possible. Thanks for helping us!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 424 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Allow "mailto" and "tel" links in HTML sanitizer configuration

Imagine you have a Link Field where you want to enter a value like mailto:someone@example.com. But the field validation rejects it as an invalid URL, even though mailto: is a valid and commonly used URI scheme for links. So, the Link Field should accept mailto: URLs and treat them as valid links, allowing the content item to be saved. And this is caused by HTML sanitization because the HTML Sanitizer in Orchard Core does not allow mailto: by default.

So, the fix here, by Georg von Kries, is to add mailto: and even tel: to the list of allowed URL schemes in the HTML sanitizer, enabling support for email links and phone numbers in sanitized HTML content.

Allow override Reverse Proxy from configuration

You can configure the reverse proxy settings from the admin UI by navigating to Settings -> Reverse Proxy (if you have enabled the Reverse Proxy Configuration feature under Tools -> Features, of course). The following settings are available:

• X-Forwarded-For: Enables forwarding of the client IP address.
• X-Forwarded-Host: Enables forwarding of the original host requested by the client.
• X-Forwarded-Proto: Enables forwarding of the protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) used by the client.

These settings are stored in the site configuration and can be managed per tenant.

And from now on, you can use configuration values from appsettings.json to configure reverse proxy settings by calling the ConfigureReverseProxySettings() extension method on OrchardCoreBuilder when initializing the app. Check out the Reverse Proxy module's documentation to see the configuration options and configuration precedence, keeping in mind security and multi-tenant considerations. Thanks for the contributions from Georg von Kries and Hisham Bin Ateya!

Demos

Lombiq Orchard Core Agent Skills

We would like to show you our agent skills for Orchard Core (a simple, open format for giving agents new capabilities and expertise) that can help you with many Orchard Core-related tasks, such as implementing appropriate shape templates with correct alternates. It can update recipes and even create workflows for you. So, there are a lot of features in our repository, as you can see in the screen below, too!

In this demo, Márk Bartha from Lombiq shows you how he re-implemented his own personal website using agents, but agents still can't really implement Orchard Core shapes/recipes/etc. reliably. One reason is that the documentation is still not ideal for them to consume and learn from. An option would be to let the agent explore the Orchard Core source itself and figure things out, but that would require a lot of context.

How about recreating the documentation brick by brick and optimizing it for agents? Well, that's what you will find in this solution. The heart of this solution is this TASK-MAP.md file.

This is something the agent must read and consume continuously. It provides agents with a map of scenario types the user might request. Like, create content type/part/field definitions, or use particular templates to create shapes and things like these. It can even connect to a SQLite database to retrieve content items, so you can export them to recipes without using deployment plans.

The way Márk built this is that he told the agent to implement an actual task, discover all related information (like all the Liquid filters), and put everything into an agent-optimized Markdown template. The same goes for every other piece of knowledge he needed to develop his personal site, such as Bag Parts and Flow Parts.

Are you curious about how Márk built his personal website that is completely generated by AI? And the showcase of our Lombiq Tailwind Agent Skills repository, which contains agent skills for Tailwind v4 development tasks? Then head to YouTube for a demo!

Share your experience, feedback, and contributions so we can keep refining the skills in the open and roll improvements back based on real project usage.

News from the community

Orchard Harvest 2026 survey

After last year, the Orchard Harvest Conference will be held again in 2026. Last time, it was held in Prague, and for this year, we're planning to bring it to North America.

To make that decision with real community input, we've put together a short questionnaire about where you'd be interested in attending Orchard Harvest in principle, and what you'd need to make it work (location, travel, budget, etc.).

If you've ever attended Harvest, thought about attending, or are just active in the Orchard Core community, your answers would really help us shape the event. You can fill out the questionnaire here.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 425 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Dynamic Cache Options documentation

The Orchard Core documentation has been updated by Hisham Bin Ateya with some lines about the Cache Options. If you navigate to Settings -> General on the admin UI and select the Cache tab, you will see four options that can be configured for Dynamic Cache:

• From environment: Enables the Dynamic Cache feature in the Production ASP.NET Core environment.
• Enabled: Enables the Dynamic Cache feature.
• Disabled: Disables the Dynamic Cache feature.
• Enabled with cache debug mode: Enables the Dynamic Cache feature and activates debug mode, which logs the cache context metadata on the page as HTML comments. This is useful for troubleshooting cache-related issues.

New Content Manager Delete behavior

Let's say you have some content items in your system that admins must never delete (e.g., because they have a specific status). But if you navigate to Content -> Content Items and bulk delete these content items, you can't easily prevent it for a specific content item. Until now!

As you can see, the IContentManager.RemoveAsync() method now supports cancelable deletes and returns a bool indicating whether the delete operation actually occurred or was cancelled by a handler. This means that if the content handler for your content sets the RemoveContentContext.Cancel property to true, Orchard will cancel the deletion of your content item. Thanks for your first contribution, Shivam Pandey!

Demos

Secrets module

The Secrets module provides a secure, centralized way to store and manage sensitive data, including passwords, API keys, connection strings, and certificates. It addresses common challenges in managing secrets across development, staging, and production environments.

Managing sensitive configuration in web applications presents several challenges, which can be solved by using the module that provides. Some of these challenges are:

• Encrypted Storage: Storing passwords and API keys in appsettings.json or environment variables can lead to accidental exposure through source control, logs, or configuration dumps. All secrets are encrypted using ASP.NET Core Data Protection before being stored in the database.
• Deployment Support: When using deployment plans or recipes to set up new tenants, secrets cannot be included directly, as this compromises security. This module provides deployment support for exporting secret metadata (not values) and importing secrets from environment variables during setup.
• Centralized Management: Different environments (development, staging, production) often need different secrets, making configuration management complex. Using this module, you can use a single admin UI to view, create, update, and delete all secrets.

To enable the module, head to Tools -> Features and enable the Secrets feature (if you want to use Azure Key Vault to store and retrieve secrets, enable the Secrets - Azure Key Vault feature too). After, you can navigate to Settings -> Security -> Secrets to open the secrets management page. This page displays all stored secrets, including their names, types, stores, and last updated dates. Clicking on the Add Secret button lets you choose the type of secret.

Every UI here is dynamic, every secret type is extensible, and you can define the editor for every single type. Here, we selected the Text Secret type to store a secret called SmtpPassword in the Database. The database store uses ASP.NET Core Data Protection to encrypt secrets before storing them.

Secrets can have an optional expiration date. Its purpose is to track when secrets should be rotated or renewed. Expected secrets continue to work; the expiration does not automatically disable them, but on the secrets management page, you will see visual indicators in the form of badges:

• Expired secrets show a red Expired badge.
• Secrets expiring within 30 days show a yellow Expiring badge.
• The secrets list highlights expired/expiring secrets with colored backgrounds.

And as you can see here, we set the expiration date to next Monday, which is within 30 days, which is why you can see the yellow Expiring badge.

Now it's time to try out our secret! We called our secret SmtpPassword, so we will use it to set up our SMTP Provider! Before doing that, we have to make sure that the SMTP Email Provider and the SMTP Email Secrets features are enabled. The first provides an email service provider that uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and the second allows us to store SMTP credentials as secrets rather than in settings. Go to Settings -> Communication -> Email and click the SMTP tab. Put a tick in the Enable SMTP Provider checkbox and in the Require credentials one. To authenticate, you need to provide a username and a password. And as you can see in the screen below, now you don't have to type the password here; instead, you can use a dropdown to set the password from the secrets we set on the secrets management page previously.

And as always, if you want to see this feature in action, head to YouTube for a demo by Sébastien Ros!

News from the community

Lombiq GitHub Actions v4.2.0

The Lombiq GitHub Actions project contains extensions that make a lot of things very easy in an Orchard Core or an Orchard Core-based project. If you don't know GitHub Actions or aren't entirely clear with the terminology, GitHub actions are GitHub's automation platform or CI/CD platform. Orchard Core, of course, also uses it to run various builds. And how you define a pipeline is by creating workflows and/or composite actions. Workflows are what actually run, and actions are things you can add on your own; these are things workflows can call. A workflow is kind of like a program, and an action is like a library your program calls into. And of course, actions can be third-party as well. The point here is that you can use GitHub actions to automate a lot of things, like .NET builds, running tests, and doing various verifications on a pull request, and you can also do all kinds of modularization between these builds.

Under this project, we have workflows and actions. Workflows that you can call from your own workflows. Pretty much like one-liners, for example, to run the .NET build and execute a test. Actions are the building blocks you can use if you just want something specific. And we have quite a lot of actions and workflows here.

This week, we released the latest version of GitHub Actions, with several new additions and improvements, like:

• The Elasticsearch setup step broke on GitHub-hosted runners. This release adds a reimplemented step that works in the same way but is compatible with the current runner images, too. If you have used Elasticsearch for UI testing before, we recommend that you update to this release ASAP.
• New Asset Linting workflow.
• Indicate if a PR has breaking changes and generate CompatibilitySuppressions.xml file files.
• Action/workflow to automatically open a PR.

Visit the Lombiq GitHub Actions repository and check out the new release for all the goodies!

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DisplayedAs was renamed to WithDisplayName, and Named was renamed to WithName for consistency

When you define the type definition for your content type, you can define its Technical Name and Display Name using the ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder. You can also attach content parts to it, add various settings, and more. Most method names in ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder start with the word With, which means "define my content type with this name, with this part, etc." But that was not the case when you defined the Name and the Display Name. From now on, Hisham Bin Ateya was renamed the DisplayedAs method to WithDisplayName, and the Named method to WithName for consistency. We kept the old Named and DisplayAs methods for now, but we marked them as obsolete ones.

Refactor IContentDefinitionService for improved modularity and design

The IContentDefinitionService interface was moved from the OrchardCore.ContentTypes module to OrchardCore.ContentTypes.Abstractions: the ContentDefinitionService doesn't implement any methods that return view models. So, this interface was not just moved; it was also updated to remove all methods for manipulating or creating view models. These methods were moved to the AdminController itself, which needs the view models, so it uses the ContentDefinitionManager directly and creates its own view models from the business data. And we also have documentation for the IContentDefinitionService interface.

Demos

Dynamic Translations

The Data Localization module provides a database-backed localization system for translating dynamic content that cannot be handled by static PO files, such as:

• Content Type and Content Field display names.
• Permission names and descriptions.
• Any custom dynamic strings via ILocalizationDataProvider.

To enable this module, go to Tools -> Features and enable the Data Localization module. It means that you will find a new Dynamic Translations option in Settings -> Localization. For each of these data-localizable items, we have a translation editor. This editor displays all translatable strings grouped by category:

• Culture Selector: Choose which culture to edit translations for.
• Search: Filter strings by original text or translation.
• Category Filter: Focus on a specific category.
• Auto-save: Toggle automatic saving (enabled by default, saves after 2 seconds of inactivity).
• Save Button: Manually save all changes.

Our demo site supports two cultures: English and Hungarian. We selected the Hungarian culture using the culture selector and filtered for the Content Types category. We already started providing translations for Content Type strings. As you can see, we translated 6 of the 16 strings.

We keep the Auto-save checkbox checked, which means the site automatically saves our modifications without needing to click the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

If we switch to Hungarian, we could see the UI and the data in Hungarian (but we have no Hungarian PO files). If we click the New button to create new content items based on existing content types, we can see the translated names of those content types. The Taxonomy is there because we haven't translated it.

If we go back to the Dynamic Translations page, we will find a button labeled Statistics at the bottom that opens the statistics dashboard. The statistics dashboard shows translation completion progress:

• Overall Progress: Total translation progress across all cultures.
• By Culture: Progress bar and completion count for each supported culture.
• By Category: Detailed breakdown per category for a selected culture.

Progress bars are color-coded:

• Green (≥75%): Good progress.
• Yellow (25-74%): In progress.
• Red (<25%): Needs attention.

Here you can see that we translated 6 strings of 226, and all 6 are under the Content Types category.

And as always, if you want to see this new feature in action, head to YouTube for a recording by Sébastien Ros!

News from the community

Modernizing a legacy Orchard 1 site

Last month, we rebuilt hajosnep.hu, Hungary's oldest maritime history association's website, with Orchard Core on DotNest, improving design, usability, and maintainability. Check out our case study to learn why modernization was important, the technical details (including the use of Lombiq's DotNest Core SDK for theme development), the key challenges and solutions, and the future plans.

The renewed hajosnep.hu website now provides a modern, mobile-friendly platform for the association to share content, engage with the community, and showcase Hungary's maritime history. The site is fully maintainable, accessible, and prepared for future multilingual expansion, ensuring it can evolve alongside the association's needs for years to come.

If you are considering a website renewal or migration, especially on Orchard Core or DotNest, this project demonstrates how a robust theme foundation and an automated asset pipeline can help modernize even complex legacy sites in a maintainable and future-proof way.

If you’d like to build something similar, you can create your own Orchard Core site on DotNest and start experimenting right away. As Orchard Core grows in popularity, so does our experience with it. If you'd like to take advantage of the platform's various improvements, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 425 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Replace dynamic ContentCard shapes with strongly typed shapes

The dynamic shape creation using _shapeFactory.New.ContentCard(...) has been replaced with strongly typed shapes, using CreateAsync<T> to improve performance and type safety. It means new shape classes in the OrchardCore.ContentTypes.Abstractions library:

• ContentCardShape - encapsulates all ContentCard properties
• ContentCardFieldsEditShape - for ContentCard_Fields_Edit shape
• ContentCardFrameShape - for ContentCard_Frame wrapper shape

Here you can see an example of the updated shape creation pattern for both the controllers and the views:

To see a real-life example, here you can see using the new strongly typed shape when working with Bag Parts.

Update UserDisplayName shape documentation

The UserDisplayName shape provides a flexible way to display user information throughout Orchard Core, particularly in admin lists. This shape is commonly used when displaying content authors, audit trail users, or any user reference. The updated Templates page in the Orchard Core documentation describes how to create the UserDisplayName shape, with customization examples in both Razor and Liquid. You can also see how to access the full user object with custom properties and content parts, how to display the full name instead of the username, or how to create a user-specific template for a particular username.

You can also read about how to use the new users_by_name filter here, which loads one or more user objects from the database by username(s). The username is automatically normalized before querying.

Demos

IntelliSense for recipes

Recipes are a powerful thing in Orchard Core. It allows you to do a lot with just JSON. It's more powerful now that we have AI! So, we can just have AI-generated recipes and execute them, and things can get done. However, there are a few issues with our current recipe setup. One is that you can't register recipes the way you register a service; they have to be files, and you can't create a recipe from code, for example.

The other issue is that we just don't have a way to control the schema. We currently have no way to ask the AI to provide us with really good recipes because the recipe structure is unknown. We have documentations and AI utilizes those documents, but we don't have everything documented.

If we have a JSON schema for the recipes, we can do a lot more things with it. For example, we can try unifying the recipe and the deployment. It means that if we change the recipe's structure or schema, it will affect both the recipe and the deployment, allowing us to export and import structured data.

Mike Alhayek tried to ask the AI to do things for us and to change how recipes are handled in the code. Here you can find the PR for this feature.

Now let's navigate to the admin UI and enable the View Or Download Content As JSON feature under Tools -> Features. After, we can navigate to Tools -> Deployments and select the JSON Import option from the menu. Here, you will notice IntelliSense. This, by itself, adds a lot of value from a UI perspective when you get that IntelliSense.

And we still have a lot to cover! If you want to know more details about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording!

News from the community

Orchard Core Commerce 3.1

Orchard Core Commerce is an Orchard Core port and partial rewrite of the open-source Nwazet Commerce module that was built for Orchard CMS 1.x. Nwazet Commerce was initially built in 2012 by Bertrand Le Roy, loosely based on a commerce sample by Sipke Shoorstra. The initial goal of Nwazet Commerce was to power the website of the hardware startup Nwazet. While Nwazet is no longer operating, the Nwazet Commerce project continued and was further developed by a group of passionate contributors who use the platform for their own and their customers' websites.

Like Orchard, Nwazet Commerce was built with extensibility in mind and, as such, includes its own extensions (typical examples include local tax and shipping modules). It's also a pure, idiomatic Orchard.

Orchard Core represents a major evolution of the Orchard design principles and is sufficiently different that running Nwazet Commerce on it will necessitate significant work. As such, the community decided that starting from a blank slate was the best approach, so they will port Nwazet Commerce piece by piece, carefully applying Orchard Core's new design principles. The community also decided to adopt a new name that will shed its now-obsolete origins and establish our ambition for the module to become the go-to commerce module for Orchard Core.

Back in 2022, we published a demo that showed the module's current state. A few months later, we reached another milestone when we completed the basic implementation of the Stripe Payment integration (without taxation, shipping, etc.). Stripe is a payment service provider that business owners can use to accept dozens of payment methods, from credit cards to buy-now, pay-later services. Stripe Payments handles the steps between a customer providing their card information and learning that their payment has been accepted.

As you may know, Lombiq provides stewardship for the Orchard Core Commerce module. That means that we do code reviews and work on features and fixes. At the beginning of 2023, we released the 1.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! You can read some of the key features of the release in this post. You can easily try it out by cloning this repo and building and running the OrchardCore.Commerce.Web project. Thanks to Auto Setup, the site will be set up with the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe. Afterward, go to the dashboard using the credentials admin and Password1!, then go to Content -> Content Items to create your first Product.

At the beginning of 2025, we released the 3.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module, which was a major version increment due to some breaking changes, so watch out! One of the breaking changes was that we dropped Newtonsoft.Json support, replaced the IPayment interface, and now services and modules use Payment directly, which was also moved into the OrchardCore.Commerce.Abstractions library.

Last week, we released version 3.1 of the module, the final release for Orchard Core 2.x. The next release will depend on Orchard Core 3.0. We now have a new feature, Orchard Core Commerce - Subscription, with basic support for subscription-type products. Currently, it's only for Stripe, which natively supports this payment model. We have also added minimal APIs for some shopping cart and payment activities.

Check out the full list of changes here!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 426 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Remove default implementations from interfaces and obsolete members for Orchard Core 3.0

We addressed the breaking changes introduced in previous versions and removed all members that were obsolete in those versions. It means removing default implementations from interfaces and obsolete members in preparation for Orchard 3.0.

Starting with Orchard Core 3.0, several interfaces, classes, default implementations, and extension methods have been removed. If you check out the release notes of Orchard Core 3.0, you will find a list of the removed code.

Agent Guidelines for Orchard Core

Sébastien Ros added a new MD file at the root of the Orchard Core repository that explains to LLMs how to build, test, and run Orchard. This document provides comprehensive guidelines for LLM agents working with the Orchard Core codebase, covering building, testing, and creating new features. It describes how to create a module or theme by showcasing its structure and how to register services using dependency injection in the startup file. It includes functional tests, how they are organized and working, so we can ask them to create functional tests too. And many more!

News from the community

Shoogr case study: A stunning, high-converting marketing website with lead magnets on DotNest

High-converting marketing website with lead magnets on Orchard Core?

Meet Shoogr, a modern marketing website built for Hungarian marketing strategist and coach Sugár Judit, developed by Márk Bartha. Designed with Magic Patterns, brought to life with Orchard Core, and hosted on DotNest for seamless performance.

Learn how easily you can launch a beautiful, SEO-ready, and conversion-focused Orchard Core website on DotNest. Thanks to Orchard Core's modularity and DotNest's managed hosting, Judit now has a website that's easy to update, scalable for future needs, and perfectly aligned with her brand. Read the full case study here!

If you’d like to build something similar, you can create your own Orchard Core site on DotNest and start experimenting right away. As Orchard Core grows in popularity, so does our experience with it. If you'd like to take advantage of the platform's various improvements, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 426 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add ShapeResult.Cache() docs

ShapeResult.Cache() is a simple way to cache shapes created from drivers. It uses Dynamic Cache in a similar way as ShapeMetadata.Cache() does, but unlike that, it's not documented and, most likely related to that, is also underutilized (only the Notifications project uses it).

From now on, you will find some lines about how to use the ShapeResult.Cache() method in the documentation of the Dynamic Cache module, thanks to Hisham Bin Ateya!

Migrate Media and Resources modules from Gulp to the asset manager pipeline

Orchard Core included a processing pipeline for client-side assets (typically scripts and stylesheets), which was used to perform front-end development workflow tasks such as transpilation, minification, and bundling in both core projects and extensions (i.e., modules and themes).

The client-side asset pipeline was powered by Gulp, a popular open-source task runner built on Node.js that automates a wide variety of tasks in a development workflow.

From now on, the Gulp pipeline is removed and can no longer be executed. The goal of this change is to migrate the Media and Resources modules to the new asset manager pipeline and remove the entire Gulp infrastructure. This means you will not find a gulpfile.js file, as we will no longer need Gulp. Sébastien Ros also removed 19 Gulp dependencies, Gulp scripts, and integration. Instead, you will find an Assets.json file in the Media module and in the Resources module to support the new pipeline.

The migration involved updating asset actions to use environment variables to pass large lists of files, and addressing command-line argument length limitations, particularly in Windows CI environments. It means that all modules now use the modern asset manager pipeline exclusively.

You will find everything you need to know about using the Assets Manager in this updated guide from the Orchard Core documentation.

Demos

AI Chat Interactions module

At the beginning of last year, we mentioned a new module created by Mike Alhayek, which is an implementation of AI that allows you to interact with any AI model. He worked extensively on that solution and, from time to time, added many new features, which we mentioned here and here. After that, we highlighted the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Client and Model Context Protocol (Local MCP) Client features, as well as the Orchard Core AI Agent feature. And last time, you could read about the AI Data Source Management feature. Here is the GitHub repository for this project, along with its corresponding NuGet package.

There have been many changes since the AI Data Source Management feature was introduced; the AI Suite now includes 23 features! The one we will check out today is the AI Chat Interactions module, which provides a playground where you can create a chat instance, configure it however you want, and chat with that AI model. Here you can find several new features that enable ad-hoc AI chat interactions.

After enabling these features, you will see a new option under Artificial Intelligence, called Chat Interactions. If you click on the New Chat button on that screen, you can add a new interaction. After that, you can select whichever provider you want to use. In our case, we selected the Azure OpenAI one.

And as you see, the playground is ready. The Title is a descriptive name for this chat interaction. It helps you identify and find this conversation in your history. You can select the AI model to use for this chat interaction from the Deployment drop-down. If not selected, the default deployment will be used. The System instructions text area provides the AI with instructions on how to behave, what role to play, and what style to use in its responses. This is the "persona" or "context" that guides all AI responses.

If you enable the Orchard Core AI Agent feature, you can use natural language to run tasks, manage content, interact with Orchard Core features, and do much more with integrated AI-powered tools. And that's the one that provides you with the Tools tab here. If you want to create content, you can say, "Create a Blog post for me about a specific topic".

If you have the AI Chat Interactions - Documents feature enabled, it extends ad-hoc AI chat interactions by allowing you to upload documents and chat about them. Under the Documents tab, you can attach any document you want and chat about it. If you have a bunch of files you want to run analytics on or ask a bunch of questions on, you can just drag and drop them here.

And that's not all of it! To learn more about this module, watch a YouTube recording! And guess what! This feature has evolved so much since this original demo!

With document attachments, Chat Interactions goes far beyond basic RAG. It understands intent, making responses smarter, more accurate, and far more useful. What can you do today?

• Upload an Excel file and ask questions about the data.
• Summarize, aggregate, or analyze spreadsheets.
• Attach reports, project plans, or business documents.
• Ask for meaningful summaries, insights, trends, or key takeaways.

Think of it as having an intelligent analyst right inside the chat. The possibilities are endless. And the best part is all of this power is already available!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 428 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Content life cycle docs

When you are a newcomer in Orchard Core, it could be challenging to understand how the content life cycle works in the content management system. You know that your content item can have different versions like Draft, Published, Unpublished, but what are the differences between these content item versions?

Hisham Bin Ateya has added some lines to the Orchard Core documentation to help you understand the content life cycle in Orchard Core.

Use SLNX file format

For years, we have been using Visual Studio's solution file (*.SLN) format, and while it's a core part of Orchard Core's project organization, the experience hasn't always been smooth. Whether you've been modifying, maintaining, or resolving merge conflicts, it often feels more like a hassle than it should.

Microsoft made several improvements with the new solution file format to enhance the experience. These changes include a more readable, editable structure, the use of XML, and the preservation of whitespace and comments for better organization. The new format is minimalistic, optimizing performance for faster load times and reducing merge conflicts in version control. It also ensures compatibility with older Visual Studio versions and aligns with certain MSBuild conventions for smoother integration with other tools.

Thanks to Antoine Griffard, Orchard Core now uses this simpler XML format for the solution file.

News from the community

Orchard 1.11 Released

The wait is over: version 1.11 of Orchard CMS (the legacy version of Orchard) is finally here with more than 650 changes from 100+ contributors! You only had to wait 2 months short of 10 years since 1.10, but it was worth it! :)

Check out the release notes for the breaking changes, bugfixes, new features, and the performance improvements! Thanks to all of the contributors who made this release happen! Update your project now for better performance, security, and usability, or upgrade to Orchard Core for even more awesomeness!

We have a fair amount of experience with migrating different sites from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core. For example, we migrated Folkways. We also had the chance to apply our knowledge on our main site, Orchard Dojo, Hastlayer, and DotNest. There was a good reason to migrate: Orchard Core offers better performance, modularity, and development experience than Orchard 1.

As Orchard Core grows in popularity, so does our experience with it. If you'd like to take advantage of the platform's various improvements, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 430 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add Placeholder setting to Fields

This feature adds a Placeholder option to the Fields settings, allowing admins to specify a placeholder that appears in the editor UI when content authors enter text. The placeholder improves the editor experience by giving content authors contextual guidance when entering text values.

You can set the Placeholder when editing the following Content Fields:

• Content Picker Field
• Text Field
• User Picker Field
• YouTube Field
• Taxonomy Field

But you can set the placeholder text for the Title Part, too.

Here, we have a site set up with the Blog recipe, which includes a predefined content type called Blog Post. We said we want to display a placeholder for the Title Part and the Text Field called Subtitle. To set this up for the Text Field, we simply navigated to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types and clicked Edit next to the Blog Post content type. After we edited the Subtitle field, where we entered the "The subtitle of the blog post." text into the new Placeholder text box under the Hint text area. We did the same for the Title Part.

And now, if we create a new Blog Post content item, you will see that the greyish placeholder text is inside the Title and Subtitle text boxes. Thank you, Plamco, for your first contribution!

Adding docs page about contributing to orchardcore.net

Yes, you heard it right: Orchard Core's official website is open source, which means you can contribute to it too! Zoltán Lehóczky added a page that helps you start and explains what you can contribute. Check out this page for more details!

News from the community

.NET Foundation most active community projects 2025

Shaun Walker shared this image on X that shows the most active community projects based on the number of pull requests, commits, and new contributors.

As you can see, Orchard has 851 pull requests in 2025, which is great, but Orchard has 772 commits, which is weird. Why do we have more pull requests than commits? Do we close that many pull requests? The reason for that could be that we have some mini PRs created by Renovate.

And we haven't talked about which projects use squash and merge and which don't. But it's still nice to see Orchard in the top 10 for many years now! And don't forget about the fact that Orchard Core recently reached 8000 (7990 currently to be precise) stars on GitHub! If you haven't done it yet, star the Orchard Core repository to help us reach 8k stars!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 430 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the Orchard community informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Move GetAllCulturesAndAliases to the default implementation

Previously, the ILocalizationService interface had a static default method, GetAllCulturesAndAliases(), that returned a list of all cultures available in the system along with their aliases. Hisham Bin Ateya replaced this method with an instance method, allowing developers to customize the implementation rather than rely on the default one.

Here you can see the changes to the ILocalizationService interface, including the new GetAllCulturesAndAliases() method, which you can override in your own ILocalizationService implementation so it can be configured (e.g., to add new cultures).

Add missing docs for the Setup module

When you begin with an empty site, a start screen lets you set parameters such as the Title, the selected database, and the recipe used to generate the site. This is done by the Setup module, which is creating the application's setup experience.

To make this happen, we have three interfaces with their default implementations: ISetupEventHandler, ISetupService, and ISetupUserIdGenerator. And from now on, you will find documentation for all of these interfaces and the default implementations added by Hisham Bin Ateya.

Demos

Block Content Type Picker for Flow Part and Bag Part

If you followed our posts over the last two weeks, you could see the progress of the Block Content Type Picker for Flow Part and Bag Part. In case not, here is the first part and here is the second one.

And now there is a PR for this feature developed by Nick Jackson, which introduces a new block-style editor for Flow Part and Bag Part that provides a modern, visual content type picker with thumbnail previews, category filtering, and search functionality. This enhances the content editing experience by allowing editors to browse and select content types more intuitively.

Let's check out this PR and set up our site using the Blog recipe. We have a Page content type by default, which has a Flow Part attached. If we navigate to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types and edit the definition of the attached Flow Part of the Page content type, we can set the editor type to Blocks. We also edited the definition of one of our predefined widgets: the Blockquote widget. As you can see, we set its Category to Quotes, added a Description, and used the path to an uploaded image in the Media Library as the Thumbnail, naming it quote-hover.webp.

And now, if we create a new Page and go to add a new widget to its Flow Part, the Select Widget modal opens, where you can filter by the Quotes category, and there is our Blockquote widget with the description and the thumbnail we set up previously.

Now let's see the Block Content Type Picker for the Bag Part! For that, we created a new content type called Landing Page, and we attached the Title Part and the Bag Part to it. If we edit the definition of the Bag Part and set the editor type to Blocks, we can set a custom text for the Add button and a custom title for the content type picker modal.

After, we navigated to Content -> Content Items and created a new Landing Page content item. As you can see in the screen below, the text on the button under the Bag section reads "Add Elements," and the title of the modal is "Select Element."

Here you can see that we configured our content types with a category and a thumbnail using the admin UI, but you can do the same programmatically using migrations. You can also use migrations to enable the blocks editor for a Flow or a Bag Part. Furthermore, the default values for category and thumbnail can be configured in appsettings.json using ContentTypesOptions:

{
  "OrchardCore": {
    "OrchardCore_ContentTypes": {
      "DefaultThumbnailPath": "~/OrchardCore.ContentTypes/placeholder.png",
      "DefaultCategory": "Content"
    }
  }
}

And that's still not all of it! If you would like to see a demo of the recent changes, head to YouTube for a recording!

News from the community

Christmas in Lombiq

Sometimes we do stuff. Together. Not (just) in front of computer screens. These are some usual events in Lombiq that are all announced and arranged in advance. At the end of every year, we have an event called RnDay: a few-hour-long event where we share what we have recently worked on and what we plan to do. For example, if we recently finished a project, then the project's team members demo what they've done. We had our RnDay this year at Kubik, a coworking and event space where we held it. And at the end of the day, we visited a nearby restaurant to have dinner together. RnDay is a small tradition that reminds us how much progress can happen in a year.

Thank you for reading our posts and strengthening the Orchard community with us! We hope to give you occasional updates and demos on what's happening around Orchard and Orchard Core by reading our posts and, of course, the This Week in Orchard newsletter. We wish everyone a Merry Christmas, along with some photos from our latest event!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 432 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the community around Orchard informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Fix pluralization for pagers with 0 or 1 item

Antoine Griffard changed the first parameter of many @T.Plural() methods. Ex: 1 item has to be changed to {0} item because, in languages like French, if there are 0 items, it will display the localization of 1 item instead of replacing the count with 0 or 1. Some of these are inside an if condition like this:

@if (Model.Models.Count > 0)

So, the 0 case won't occur, but others, like Menus, Content items, and Audit Trails, aren't inside this kind of .Count > 0 condition.

Unfortunately, the correct translations will only be effective when the strings are updated and translated in Crowdin, then published in OrchardCore.Translations.

Add Delete and Unpublish buttons to the content editor

This is about improving the built-in editor's base functionality by adding additional action buttons. Now we have an Unpublish and Delete action button (where applicable) to the content item editor (for existing items, i.e., not when creating one), similarly to what we have in Orchard 1.

If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, you will get one predefined Blog Post content item. If you edit that blog post and scroll down to the bottom of the editor, you will see the new buttons there. And you can see the yellow Unpublish button here too because this content item is published.

Demos

Blocks editor for the Bag Part improvements

In the previous part of this demo, you could see that every content type that could be added as a block had the Block Part attached. And for that part, you can set the content type's category and its thumbnail. Now, these settings have been moved to the content type definition of the content type settings, as we have for the Stereotype.

So, if we navigate to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types and edit any of our content types, you will see the Category and Thumbnail text boxes under the Stereotype one, where you can set the category and the thumbnail of the content type. In this example, we set the category of the Blockquote content type to Demo.

Now, if we create a new content item of a content type that has a Bag Part attached (or edit an existing one) and click the Add Item button, we will see our Blockquote content type and the Demo category appear in the list.

And as always, if you are interested in the current state of the Blocks editor, head to YouTube for a recording!

News from the community

New websites using Orchard Core

Show Orchard is an Orchard Core (and Orchard 1) showcase, displaying only the best Orchard Core-powered sites from around the web. And we have added several new sites recently to Show Orchard, let's see some of these!

• The mission of Daimler Truck is to steer worldwide logistics of spare parts and provide customer services for important customers of Daimler Truck.
• BOX NOW is a hybrid logistics and tech company that offers smart parcel delivery solutions to all consumers. They envision to become the most preferred parcel delivery solution and the leader in last-mile industry.
• Bel Fuse Inc. specializes in the design, manufacturing, and marketing of products that empower electronic systems. With over 75 years in the industry, Bel has established itself as a leader in custom solutions.
• The vision of U.S. Air Force Academy Association & Foundation is to be an Association & Foundation of influence and impact, supporting the Academy's mission of developing leaders for the nation and providing a lifetime of service to the Long Blue Line.
• The Chinese Room is an award-winning game development studio based in Brighton, UK. Since 2012, the studio has built a reputation for innovative first-person gaming.
• With an uncompromising focus on delivering investment and wealth management solutions, Manning & Napier provides evolving, modern strategies that will enable people and organizations to achieve their financial goals.

If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Oh, and in case you haven't read that post yet, Show Orchard is now running on Orchard Core! Here's the case study about how we migrated it from Orchard 1!

If you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to DotNest Core, this is an excellent time. Should you have any questions or encounter challenges, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We're always ready to bring our expertise to your unique project needs. Get in touch with us today, and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better!

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 433 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the community around Orchard informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Add an option for inherited text alignment in the Flow Part

When nesting multiple widgets, you need to align each one by hand if you want to deviate from the default (justify). If the container widget is set to text-align:left, the inner widgets should follow that unless otherwise stated. To solve this, Redzep Redžepi added a 5th alignment option (inherit) that can be selected as the new default for widgets. Widgets with that align setting should inherit the text-align value from their parent widget (or their parents' parents in case of multiple-level nesting).

Now check this out quickly! If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, you will get a Page content type by default, which has the Flow Part attached. Let's create a new Page! As you can see, we added a Container widget, and inside it, a Blockquote widget. When setting up our Blockquote widget, we now have a new alignment option that inherits the parent's alignment in flow widgets. So, in this case, if the Container is centered, the alignment of our Blockquote will be centered as well.

There is also an option to set the default alignment in the Flow Part settings. It means if you navigate to Design -> Content Definition -> Content Types -> Page and hit Edit near the Flow Part, you will see a drop-down with the label What default alignment should be used?, where you can select the default alignment for the widgets inside this Flow Part.

Prioritize format over quality in the ResizeUrlFilter

When you process media files, like formatting them in a way (change quality, size, background color, etc.), you can do it by using a query string. The issue is that these parameters are defined in the query string, and you can't apply all these commands in any order because the order matter. And apparently, formatting before changing the quality or changing the quality before formatting matters what you get in the end. This change makes the order deterministic: whatever you set in the query string, it will always run in the same order.

This introduces a new MediaCommands class to centralize and standardize the handling of media command parameters (such as width, height, format, etc.) across the media module. The change replaces previous ad-hoc dictionary usage for query string parameters with this new abstraction, resulting in more maintainable, less error-prone code. Several filters, services, and shortcode providers have been updated to use MediaCommands.

Demos

Blocks editor for the Bag Part

The goal of this change is to make it easier for content editors to add widgets to a page in the Bag Part, which can be very difficult in some cases, by using the standard picker, which is just a simple drop-down list. Which is fine if you have a few widgets, but with many, it's not easy to select which one you want to add.

Here, Nick Jackson introduced the definition of blocks because blocks can describe more sections of a page. This approach gives content editors a better way to see which blocks they are adding to a page. It means a visual picker, which is a new editor for the Bag Part called Blocks. What it does is replace the drop-down with a button labeled Add Block. If you click that button, a modal opens showing all available blocks in the system, along with a visual of what they would look like when added to the page.

Every content type that could be added as a block has the Block Part attached. Here you can set the block's category and the preview image URL.

The Bag Part itself has an editor type of Blocks, and the Stereotype of the content types that this bag can contain is set to Block.

And that's not all of it! If you want to see more about this upcoming feature, head to YouTube for a demo!

News from the community

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 433 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to keep the community around Orchard informed about the latest news on the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will receive an email whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including 'This Week in Orchard', of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!