New User Display Name shape, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award 2025 - This week in Orchard (24/10/2025)
Don't miss your chance to shape the conversation at the Orchard Harvest Conference 2025! It's also time to nominate exemplary community members for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award. This week's topics include introducing a new User Display Name shape and a new page in the documentation about the Archive Later feature.
Orchard Core updates
New User Display Name shape
The User Display Name shape has been introduced by Mike Alhayek to render a user's display name in a consistent and cache-friendly way. This is frequently used in admin content lists. To use this shape:
- Add the OrchardCore.DisplayManagement package to your project if you haven't already.
- In _ViewImports.cshtml, add: @addTagHelper *, OrchardCore.DisplayManagement
You can then display a user's name like this:
<user-display-name
user-name="@(contentItem.Author)"
title="@T["Author"].Value"
cache-id="user-display-name-author
display-type="@Model.Metadata.DisplayType" />This ensures user names are rendered consistently while leveraging Orchard Core's caching system for performance. You can see that we added additional HTML attributes, such as title, to show a tooltip for the username badge.
And we used this shape across Orchard Core, where we needed to display the username. One place to check this out is the Widgets and Layers page, which you can find under Design -> Widgets. If you set up your site using the Blog recipe, you will get a RawHtml widget called Footer in the Footer zone. You can see the usage of the new User Display Name shape in line 17 of the ContentsMeta_SummaryAdmin.cshtml file.
You can also see a cache ID parameter here, which is user-display-name-author. The reason for that is the new structural improvement to the dynamic caching system, which enables per-type cache contexts within ShapeMetadata. It means the caching system now supports multiple cache contexts per shape type, allowing more flexible and more accurate caching behavior. This is achieved by replacing the single _cacheContext field in ShapeMetadata with a dictionary _cacheContexts, keyed by the shape type. The Cache() and Cache(string cacheId) methods have been updated to manage and retrieve these contexts accordingly.
This change enables advanced scenarios, such as shape morphing, where a shape's type is temporarily changed during rendering. Each type can now maintain its own cache context. Thanks for this improvement for Georg von Kries!
Archive Later documentation
Hisham Bin Ateya added a new page to the documentation where you can read some lines about the Archive Later feature. The Archive Later feature lets you unpublish content items at a specified time.
If you would like to use this feature with your content type, you have to edit its definition by attaching the Archive Later Part to it. At the bottom of the content item editor, you will see a new input Tag Helper with the datetime-local input type. If you set the date and time here and hit the Archive Later button, the status of the current version will automatically change to draft when the time passes, using a background task. We also have a Cancel Archive Later button so we can cancel the archiving process. And in the SummaryAdmin list, you also had a small message showing the date and time when the content item will be archived.
We also have a module called Publish Later, which lets you schedule content items to be published at a specific future date and time. If you haven't heard about it, you can read about it along with a demo video in this post.
News from the community
Orchard Harvest 2025 Panel discussion
The Orchard Harvest 2025 conference will be held in Prague, and we look forward to seeing you all this autumn in the Czech Republic, in the heart of Europe. Our confirmed dates for this year are November 11th and 12th. Secure your tickets to the conference, taking place November 11-12, 2025, at the Botanique Hotel Prague, a modern hotel inspired by nature with a green approach, located in the city center.
Don't miss your chance to shape the conversation at the conference! Whether you're attending in person or not, you can still submit questions and topics for our upcoming panel discussion. Influence what our experts will discuss by getting involved here: https://forms.office.com/e/8BQ5WipCAJ.
In this section, we would like to discuss the most important and interesting topics that we don't have time for in busy business hours.
Please submit your questions in advance or bring surprise questions and engage with our expert panel.
Be sure to check out the updated official website of the conference for more information!
As we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will find every detail in this newsletter, too!
Don't miss the biggest Orchard Core event of the year!
Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award 2025
At the end of 2023, our good friend, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian, a truly extraordinary member of our community, unexpectedly passed away. To honor him, keep his memory alive, and foremost, inspire people to do good work for the community, we launched an award named after him for exceptional community members.
Every year, the community votes on who has done the most for Orchard Core. This can entail activities such as code contributions (including documentation), helping with issues and discussions, evangelization outreach, community management, or anything else. However, it needs to be public and tangible. It's your turn to nominate a community member! You will find this discussion in GitHub, where you can mention somebody who you think has done the most for Orchard Core, with a sentence explaining what they've done.
Nominations are open until the 29th at midnight, anywhere on Earth. After that, we'll vote on the nominees secretly. The winner is then announced at the Orchard Harvest conference on the 11th of November.
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