This week we would like to show you two new Orchard Core demos: the user account activation and the new CORS module. But before that let's take a quick look at the newest features and improvements of Orchard Core! Finally, let's see what about the next Harvest? Orchard Core updates Add more Resources documentation The Resources page of the Orchard Core documentation has been improved a lot. Now on this page, you can find examples about how to register a named resource by implementing the IResourceManifestProvider interface, how to render your registered resources in the different sections of the page using Liquid or Razor and many more! Update the OpenID YesSql stores to execute a concurrency check on updates We have a new feature in YesSql when saving a session. Check out the following line: _session.Save(application, checkConcurrency: true); In the code snippet above, we would like to save the Open ID application and check that nothing has changed the application between it was loaded in this process and saved with the current changes. And if there is an issue, it will throw an exception when we call await _session.CommitAsync(). Then it will catch the ConcurrencyException saying something else changed the application while you were saving it so, please try it again. Fix issue with layers that can be drag and dropped to zones The targets for the zone dragging were too loose and then you could drag a widget to a layer or a layer to a widget. Now it's fixed. Fix regression for Tag Helpers not working There was an issue that some things were working in development mode and not in release mode. In development, Orchard Core finds the Tag Helpers because views are compiled at run time in the context of the application, while published .Views.dll files have been precompiled in the context of their related module or theme. In production, it will not work, because for example if you would like to use the ContentItemTagHelper, the reference was missing from one module to the OrchardCore.Contents module. Dean Marcussen created a new OrchardCore.Contents.TagHelpers project, that contains the Tag Helpers of the OrchardCore.Contents module. And now whenever we have Tag Helpers, we put them in their *.TagHelpers library. So, when our themes and other modules will need those Tag Helper, we can just reference this library and not the full module. In the _ViewImports.cshtml files where we are using the OrchardCore.Contents assembly to find Tag Helpers we need to look for the assembly named OrchardCore.Contents.TagHelpers. It should not break any websites if you are using Liquid, but if you are not using Liquid, it's possible that the site will be broke after this change, meaning the Tag Helpers won't be found and as we said, you need to change your _ViewImports.cshtml. In the future, we have to do the same for all of the Tag Helpers. Standard display option for each field If you want to add a Display option for a field that does not have a standard one, when you re-edit the settings and save, the new one will be selected as the default even if you don't want it. To solve this issue we added a Standard option for all the fields. Let's see the HtmlField.DisplayOption.cshtml file as an example. Sort Workflow instances Your Workflow could have several Workflow instances and if you have many of them, it could be hard to find the one you want. In the past, you had the option to filter the instances by their status (all, faulted, finished), and now there is a new option to sort these instances. You can sort them by the recently created or the least recently created. Simplify part settings retrieval for ContentPartDisplayDrivers In the ContentPartDisplayDrivers, we need to resolve the ContentDefinitionManager, query the type definition and then find the part that is named the same that we are using, take the first one and get the settings. But in the BuildPartEditorContext and UpdatePartEditorContext we already have the TypePartDefinition of the part that we are currently editing, so we can just get the settings from there. This change made the code simpler and technically faster. Just take a look at the changes in the AutoroutePartDisplay! Demos User Account Activation Currently, Orchard Core supports registration and approval or manual entry. What about having a way to have the option to invite users onto the platform and let them choose their password and then activate their account? Let's see a possible future release for this feature! Install your site and then enable the Users Registration feature. Now head to Security -> Settings -> Registration, where you will find a new option: Administrators can send an activation email to a user. Put a tick in this box and select the AllowRegistration from the select list. Now go to Security -> Users and hit the Add User button. Here you could see a new switch called Send Activation Email?. If you create this user with this switch enabled and hit Save, this user will get an email that email will contain an activation link. If the user clicks on this link, they can choose a password for the account. After they set the password their account is activated and they can log in to the site using the newly created password. To do that, you should disable the account of the user when creating it. But what's behind this feature? Create two new Workflows to send emails. Let's call the first one to UserAccountActivation and add the Account Activation event as the startup event for this Workflow. Then add a Send Email task that will send the email to the user. This email will contain the activation URL of the user. Create another Workflow that will send another email that tells the user that their account is activated. Let's call this Workflow UserAccountActivated. Here you could use the Account Activated event as the startup event and again, add a Send Email task. The feature will be improved in the future because as you can see, the Send Activation Email switch is not really about sending an email, it's just about rising an event, that you can use in your Workflows. Instead of this, we could have for example a user state (Needs Activation) similar to the IsDisabled switch. And that's not all! If you would like to know more about this feature, head to YouTube, where you can find the full demo about the user account activation! Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) module If you head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Cors Configuration module, you will find a new option under Configuration -> Settings, called Cors. If you navigate here you can add as many policies as you want using the Add a policy button. On this page, you can add the name of the policy, set that as the default policy and configure everything that you will need to enable CORS. If you are interested in the full demo, don't forget to check out the recording on YouTube! News from the community The possible date of the next Harvest We had two possible dates for the next Harvest: one in February and one in April. Now it looks like it won't happen in February, so the only option left is to do a Harvest in April. The possible days could be between 13 and 17 in April. We also have two possible locations, which are Nice and Miami. Stay tuned for more information about the next Harvest! Tell us about your .NET performance challenges! - Hastlayer developer survey Help us build the nerdiest .NET thing, Hastlayer: It turns performance-critical sections of .NET programs into computer chips! If you fill out our short questionnaire you can win a cool compute accelerator board worth $265! Check it out here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCIMkFNjqW2E1Pm4v3YMcflMNUOVlDNUE3MlpDS044VDI1OEFSMUgxUkxSTC4u The reason we're asking this is that we're building a .NET hardware accelerator, Hastlayer (https://github.com/Lombiq/Hastlayer-SDK it turns your program into a chip!) and want to better understand what other developers do. Thank you in advance! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 114 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

With many more features and updates, this week we check out the new headless recipe, the new jsonparse Liquid filter and the updates of the Orchard Core documentation. We show you a demo about the Sitemaps feature and write about when to ship version 1.0 of Orchard Core! Orchard Core updates Add Headless recipe Now you can find a new recipe called Headless. This is a new setup recipe that sets up a headless site that consists of CMS modules with GraphQL and OpenID. If you want to build a headless site, you will need to set up your site using this recipe. By the past, we were suggesting users do an empty site using the Blank recipe (empty.recipe.json) and then to enable OpenID and the needed modules. By using this recipe these modules are enabled by default. If you haven't seen it yet: there is a great detailed demo on YouTube about what will you get if you install your site using the Headless recipe. Documentation for recipes and starter themes included with Orchard Core Orchard Core is available for use via two different NuGet meta-packages: OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets You can also use several built-in themes: The Blog theme The Admin theme The Agency theme The Coming Soon theme The Theme And choose from different kind of recipes: Empty recipe Blog recipe Headless recipe Agency recipe Coming Soon recipe Saas recipe These themes and recipes include different configurations, different range of Content Types, Widgets and so on. There is a new getting started guide that lists what will you get if you install your site with one of the built-in recipes. If you are new to Orchard Core this guide will help you a lot to choose the recipe that fits the best for you. Fix previewing When you preview a content item we create a transient content item in the server-side memory and then we asked it to be rendered. Then we send the rendering to the client. That's how the preview feature works. Every time when you do a keystroke, we fake like it's a real content item, ask the server to create it in memory and to render it in HTML and send us back by the HTML. The issue was when we create it on the server-side it's like a real creation including indexing. Lucene will be like: there is a new content item to index, so let's index it! And then it will appear in the index, but it's just a preview. The idea is to find a way to mark it. A possible solution is to check the ID of the content item and if it's -1 (it's a logical value that we set for the content item to say it's transient), it's not a real content item, so just ignore it. Update "Creating a modular ASP.NET Core application" guide The section called Registering a custom route in the Creating a modular ASP.NET Core application is out of date with code generation templates and implementation since the upgrade to .Net Core 3.0. Generation templates create a Configure() method which accepts an IEndpointRouteBuilder (formerly IRouteBuilder), which does not have a MapAreaRoute() method. MapAreaControllerRoute() is the method to use here. Get draft content item by the alias Before we just indexed the published version of the aliases. If you are following the Creating a new decoupled CMS Website guide it tells you how to get a preview of a content item using an alias in a custom Razor Page. The issue is that it would not work if you were creating a new item and then previewing it, because there would be no published version of the content item, so it would not be able to find the content item by its alias. Now we are indexing the alias for both for the latest and published versions of a content item. The latest version can be the published one if there is no draft. Add jsonparse Liquid filter Let's say you would like to be able to pass a custom JSON using Liquid. Before that, we have to create a string separated by commas and then split it and then you will have an array. And then do it for each property you want, because you wanted to generate tables based on existing values you had. In the documentation, you can see an array of objects captured to a variable named someCollection. Using that, someCollection becomes a string variable that contains that JSON document. By calling the jsonparse using the someCollection you will get a JObject and then it can be iterated on and accessed by the key and value properties. This filter is enabled by default when you do Liquid. When to ship Orchard Core 1.0? We have issues labeled with P0 and P1. These issues should be fixed to ship version 1.0. We can't ship the new version without fixing these issues. The more the community works on these ones, the quicker we can release 1.0. Feel free to grab from these to be able to release sooner! Demos Sitemaps module revisited Let's set up a site using the Blog recipe. Then head to Configuration - > Features and enable the Sitemaps module. To use this module you need to set up the Base URL of your site under Configuration -> Settings -> General. After you have typed a fully qualified base URL of the web site, head to Configuration again, where you will see a new submenu called Sitemaps with two options: Sitemaps and Sitemap Index. Choose the Sitemaps one and click on the Add Sitemap button. Here you can see an Enabled checkbox, that gives you the ability to enable or disable your sitemap. If you uncheck this, you can disable the routing to the sitemap. If you are in the middle of constructing your sitemap or you don't want to publish it for some reason, you can uncheck this box. Give your sitemap a likable name and hit Create. Now you can add sources to your sitemap using the Add Source button. Here you can add Sitemap content types, that are entries for each one of the selected content types. Here you have the possibility to index all content types or just the selected ones. You can also limit the number of content items to provide from this source. Let's say we want to include the first 50000 blog posts to this sitemap source. After you hit Save, you can view your sitemap. To create a sitemap index, select the Sitemap Index option. Here you can set the URL of the sitemap index and the sitemaps this index contains. We have only one sitemap, so, select that one. When you enabled the Sitemaps feature, you could see another related one in the Features list, called Localized Content Items Sitemaps. If you enable this module and have localized content items, you can build localized content items sitemaps. Let's see how a sitemap like this looks like! Here you can see the language of the given content item inside the hreflang elements of the XHTML tags. The content with the primary culture of your site goes first, which is en-US in this case. In the screen below you can see a sitemap that contains one blog post, that has a Hungarian localization too. And that's not all! If you would like to know more about sitemaps, head to YouTube, where you can find the full demo about sitemaps! This feature is still under development, but you can check the PR here. News from the community Tell us about your .NET performance challenges! - Hastlayer developer survey Help us build the nerdiest .NET thing, Hastlayer: It turns performance-critical sections of .NET programs into computer chips! If you fill out our short questionnaire you can win a cool compute accelerator board worth $265! Check it out here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCIMkFNjqW2E1Pm4v3YMcflMNUOVlDNUE3MlpDS044VDI1OEFSMUgxUkxSTC4u The reason we're asking this is that we're building a .NET hardware accelerator, Hastlayer (https://github.com/Lombiq/Hastlayer-SDK it turns your program into a chip!) and want to better understand what other developers do. Thank you in advance! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 113 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Get ready for a deep dive! In our post, we will introduce the IScopedDitributedCache service and show how to use it in the RoleStore. And we are going to solve the mystery about do you need the Model prefix to access different kinds of properties of a model in Liquid and in Razor too? Orchard Core updates Document recipes new Lucene settings There is new documentation on the updated Lucene index settings. Now to create an index from a recipe, it's not just about passing the name of the analyzer. You have to provide the following: AnalyzerName: the name of the analyzer, that you want to use. IndexLatest: a boolean value that indicates that if you want to index the latest or just the published versions. IndexedContentTypes: the list of types you want to index. Re-use in some places the ContentItem Liquid property There was a change in the Liquid TemplateContext, that broke some properties, that are available in the templates. If your AliasPart, AutoroutePart or Workflows patterns don't work anymore, it's because of the previous change. Now, this issue has been fixed. For example in an Autoroute pattern that used to render the custom URL of the content type you could do something like: {{ ContentItem.DisplayText | slugify }} That will generate a nice text for your routes. But in some cases, you have to write {{ Model.ContentItem.DisplayText | slugify }}. Maybe using the Model prefix is collateral damage, but maybe it has a purpose. Anytime we have a Liquid template for a shape we do Model.ContentItem to get the ContentItem. In Razor everything is Model.Something. It has to be because in Razor we are doing C# and the current context is the page and the page is a class that doesn't have our properties like @ContentItem. So the only thing we could get is the @Model that is typed to the generic type of the RazorPage and Model will provide all the properties like the ContentItem. Because we do too much Razor, it could be possible that we reused this approach into some Liquid patterns. In Liquid it's not necessary to have the Model prefix. But it appears that there is already a way in Fluid to use a first-level model without a custom prefix (so we don't need a Model prefix), by setting the TemplateContext.Model property. In conclusion: in Liquid that is easier to write {{ ContentItem.DisplayText }}, you don't need the Model prefix. But in Razor, you have to use the Model prefix. Constraint admin controllers to mapped routes Since we can change the prefix of the admin route, we have to ensure that every admin controller's actions have the correct prefix to use. There is an implementation of the IActionConstraint, called AdminActionConstraint, that checks if we are in the admin and the route doesn't start with the admin URL prefix (_adminUrlPrefix), then it will create a warning log entry. So, the AdminActionConstraint applies a convention that restraints all AdminControllers or [Admin] controllers to use the mapped route only, and not the default route applied by MVC. Fix the recipes not found bug in the documentation We have a guide about how to create a new decoupled CMS Website using Orchard Core. It told you to add the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet package to your new ASP.NET Core project, because this package won't contain the themes. And when you do a decoupled CMS site you will don't need the themes, because you want to create your own front end. The issue is with this package on the master branch is that the setup doesn't contain any recipe in the RC1 version. The community fixed that bug for now, but it's just in the dev branch yet. So, if you follow the guide and you using the RC1 version of that package, when you arrive at the setup screen you will not be able to set up the site because there will be no recipe to choose from. Mitigation is to use the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, that contains all the themes and recipes. Of course, in this case, you will get several unwanted themes, but you will not be blocked to continue following the guide. So, it's not the perfect solution, but when there will be a new version of Orchard Core, we can rewrite this back to use the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet. There is also a hint about if you are using the nightly builds of Orchard Core then you should use the Core package instead. Creating IScopedDitributedCache The main goal is to increase the performance of Orchard Core and try to make it faster from time to time. To measure that, check the blog posts Liquid template page and start to remove everything from there. Just to see how fast could be the performance if we didn't render anything. Then start to remove stuff from the controller that displays content. For example, let's take a look at the ItemController. This is the controller, that renders content items by default. Take a closer look at the Display method of this controller! It first loads the content item. If it's not there, we return a 404. Then we check the ViewContent permission for this content item for the current user. We return Forbid if they authenticated but don't have the proper permission, or return Challange if the user is anonymous. Now let's build the display! That will build a shape containing all the part shapes and everything for this content item. So, it will render the display of this content item and we send this shape to a view that will just call Display of the shape. That's what we do in this method. The thing that made it slow actually is that one which checks the permissions, the _authorizationService.AuthorizeAsync. The user is anonymous and checking that the anonymous users could see something was the bottleneck of the performance. For each display of the site, there would be a database query just to authorize the anonymous user to be able to see something. This is actually a regression. Once you remove this code the controller will be much faster. An authenticated user would have added Claims cached in the User object. But in the case of an anonymous user, nothing was cached. Each request for an anonymous user would ask the permission for the anonymous user from the RoleStore. The RoleStore would do a query all the time. There is a new service, called ScopedDistributedCache. The idea is to use a distributed cache, such that we would store the Roles document in memory if we have a single node or in a store that is shared across every node if you have multiple nodes. Scoped means if you do multiple queries on the same cache entry for the same request, then we will load it from the DistributedCache only once. That will be much faster if you have multiple queries. You can see the usage of the ScopedDistributedCache in the RoleStore. Instead of injecting the IMemoryCache (that puts everything in the memory that shared by all the request) here comes the IScopedDitributedCache. The code is much simpler with that: you just pass it an object. Check the GetRolesAsync and the UpdateRolesAsync methods of the RoleStore. Demos Make lists sortable with ordering setting Let's say you have a site that you set up using the Blog recipe. In that recipe you can find a Blog content type, that is used as a container of the Blog Post content items. To behave the Blog content type this way, you need to add the ListPart to it, which will add the list behavior. Here you could see a new option before the Contained Content Types list, called Enable Ordering. If you check this option you will enable the manual ordering of the items. Let's put a tick here! Now head to the Content -> Content Items page and select the one named Blog (or just simply hit Blog from the menu). Here you can see the list of the blog posts contained in this blog content item. Let's add more posts to it to see the power of this new feature! By using a simple drag and drop, you can set the order of the different items and save it on the fly. Check out the following GIF to see how the reordering works! This feature is under development, but you can find the code in this pull request. And don't forget to watch the recording about this demo, where you can also hear an informative discussion about some interesting questions to solve, for example, what about reordering content items that have a published and a draft version too? News from the community New Orchard Core site: Buzz Interactive Buzz believes that great digital products are built on intelligent strategy and outstanding technical abilities. They partner with vibrant clients and help them create future-proof platforms for web, app, and VR. And they use Orchard Core for their site! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Tell us about your .NET performance challenges! - Hastlayer developer survey Help us build the nerdiest .NET thing, Hastlayer: It turns performance-critical sections of .NET programs into computer chips! If you fill out our short questionnaire you can win a cool compute accelerator board worth $265! Check it out here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wt6elek45kStyIVVO-uCIMkFNjqW2E1Pm4v3YMcflMNUOVlDNUE3MlpDS044VDI1OEFSMUgxUkxSTC4u The reason we're asking this is that we're building a .NET hardware accelerator, Hastlayer (https://github.com/Lombiq/Hastlayer-SDK it turns your program into a chip!) and want to better understand what other developers do. Thank you in advance! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 113 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Updated Trumbowyg plugin, configure your Azure Blob and Data Protection with Liquid and many more improvements are waiting for you in our upcoming post. Did we forget to mention that Orchard Core is now on the Area 51 site of Stack Exchange? Orchard Core updates Upgrade to ASP.NET 3.1.0 Orchard Core now using the v3.1.0 of the ASP.NET Core framework. This version is included in Visual Studio 16.4.0, so if you are using at least this version, you can build your own solution using Orchard Core. Here you can read a great article about the new features of this release. Validate Site Settings BaseUrl property You can set up the BaseUrl of your site under the Configuration -> Settings -> General on the dashboard. If you enter a URL, which is a not fully qualified URL, you will get a validation error. So, here you need to enter an absolute URL. Template Azure Blob and Data Protection blob configuration with Liquid You can customize the base path of the Blob Storage for media, for data protection and also for the container that you want to use. These can use a template in Liquid. If you have some custom rules to name your container or the base path, then you can define it this way. You can have access to the ShellSettings and the ContainerName properties. This will give you all the flexibility you need for instance to use the same container for all your tenants and then use a custom folder for each tenant. Or a custom container for every tenant and then the same path. You can also ask for the container to be created and it will be done when the tenant is started. You can read more about this feature in the documentation. Trumbowyg 2.21.0 and resizimg plugin Orchard Core using Trumbowyg, a lightweight WYSIWYG editor, that makes easier to edit your HTML content. Thanks to Antoine Griffard, Orchard Core now using version 2.2.10, including the resizimg plugin. For instance, when you set the Trumbowyg as the editor type of your HtmlBodyPart and insert a media with URL, you can just simply set the size of the image with a friendly user interface. Use GetLanguageDirection method everwhere When you check the content of the OrchardCore.Localization.Abstractions module, you will find a GetLanguageDirection extension method in the LanguageDirection static class. This method is used to get the language direction for a given culture. So, if we have an extension method like this, let's use it everywhere in the code. For example, check the code of the CultureDir extension method in the RazorHelperExtensions class, where you can see an example usage of the GetLanguageDirection method. Fix localization accessors names In ASP.NET Core we have many ways to use localization. The IStringLocalizer interface represents a service that provides localized strings and the IHtmlLocalizer interface provides localized HTML content. In Orchard Core, we used T, S, H, TS and TH, so it's time to unify these names and avoid the confusion. From now in the source code, the S will be used for the IStringLocalizer and the H will be used for IHtmlLocalizer. When localizing the views, the name T will be used like before. Scoped Liquid TemplateContext The goal was to improve perf on the Liquid rendering because we were creating a new TemplateContext and resolving all the services for each template. Here the idea is to create a shared Liquid TemplateContext only once per scope for perf, on which we do once a shared contextualization and then a specific contextualization before each rendering. Shared contextualization is done once per scope: add scoped services in ambient values, call Liquid handlers to add more ambient/scope values and access strategies, add all scoped Liquid filters. Specific contextualization before each rendering: e.g contextualize the localizer with the current view context, update the specific model value and its access strategy. And there are many places where we add a ContentItem value to the Liquid scope, we could remove them because now most of the time it is already accessible through Model.ContentItem. Here you can see that there is no need to create a new TemplateContext and add the ContentItem and the Model to it, it's enough to just simply pass the MarkdownBodyPartViewModel. News from the community Orchard Core on Stack Exchange Area 51 Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone, where users come together to build new Q&A sites. New site ideas are proposed, discussed, and the best go on to beta. There is a request on Stack Exchange to create a custom community for Orchard Core. If you want to create a community you have to push for an idea and people need to approve and follow that idea. For this, it's needed more people to join and every person can vote for 5 questions and create 5 questions so, the community can continue on to the next stage. If you are interested in, check the FAQ of the Area 51 site and feel free to join the proposal! Orchard Nuggets: How to use Orchard Core without the sample themes? Try to reference the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet package instead of the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets in your ASP.NET Core web application, that will only add the TheAdmin theme to your solution. In our third Orchard Nuggets post, we show you the differences between these two packages! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 112 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Try to reference the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets NuGet package instead of the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets in your ASP.NET Core web application, that will only add the TheAdmin theme to your solution. Orchard Core has many built-in themes that can be useful, for instance, if you are searching for a way about how to override your templates using Liquid or Razor. By checking the code of these templates you can see the different custom Liquid helpers and Razor tag helpers in action. But if you would like to deploy your application it could be unnecessary to add these themes to your solution. The Getting started with Orchard Core as a NuGet package page of the Orchard Core documentation mentioned to reference the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package. However, if you reference the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets you can modify your Startup.cs file the same way, but when you set up your application, you will only be able to use the Blank site recipe, that allows you to set up your site with additional pre-configured options, features, and settings out of the box. Head to the bottom of the content of the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets.csproj file, where you can see that only the TheAdmin theme is referenced. And the only difference is that the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets referencing the themes also among with the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Core.Targets project. This way you would get a smaller solution without the themes and have a smaller and faster-deployed app to your server with the complete CMS functionality! Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

Happy new year everyone! There was no meeting this week, but in the first post of 2020, we would like to give you a nice overview of the latest improvements of Orchard Core, including the ConsoleLog helper, updated documentation, the new look and feel of our weekly blog post and newsletter and many more! Orchard Core updates ConsoleLog Razor helper and Liquid filter Sometimes you may struggle to get the correct placement or the available alternates of a shape. From now there is a shape dumper to try and see what was going on. Dean Marcussen adapted the dumper to use the ConsoleLog, so when you dump ZoneHolding, you see the holding zone, then another log with all the items in it, with their alternates (as they are calculated at execution time). Let's say you rewrite the Content-BlogPost.liquid to Content-BlogPost.cshtml. In this case, you can use the ConsoleLog Razor helper in the following way: @Orchard.ConsoleLog((object)Model) Then hit F12 if you are using Google Chrome and check the content of the console. The ConsoleLog extension method can be used to dump data from well-known properties, or objects serializable to JSON to the browser console. But if you prefer Liquid instead of Razor, you can use the console_log Liquid filter that will do the same for you in Liquid! Check out the documentation for more info about these new features! Thanks to this new shape dump feature you can construct your Orchard Core site faster and easier! Register User class as an accessible Liquid member Let's say you want to get the User fields from a Liquid template when you are using the UserCreated event of a Workflow. To do that, it's required to make this class an available one from Liquid. Else the only value accessible is the Workflow.Input.User which returns the username. If you check the content of the UserLiquidTemplateEventHandler class, you will see that the User class has been registered. Handle error while rendering resources When using the ResourcesTagHelper and referencing a non-existing resource, it breaks page rendering with the following error: Error 500 : InvalidOperationException: Could not find a resource of type 'X' named 'Y' with version 'Z'. It should log an error, but not break the rendering. To do not break the rendering, the Process method of the ResourcesTagHelper now catches the exception if any and creates a log entry instead of breaking the rendering. Clarify getting started and update for .NET Core 3 in the documentation The Getting Started page of the documentation is one of the most important parts of the Orchard Core documentation where you can see how you can add the Orchard Core NuGet packages to your .NET Core web application. Now this page got some more details about how to create your empty .NET Core web application, how to use the dev packages of Orchard Core and so on. Cloning removed LocalizationSet When cloning a content item that has a LocalizationSet, a duplicate entry of a language was created. That's because the LocalizationSet was not being cleared when cloning so a duplicate entry would be created for a locale. The fix was to remove the LocalizationSet when cloning in the CloningAsync method of the LocalizationPartHandler. Here you can see that the LocalizationSet of the cloned part will get an empty string value. Added IsSectionDefined method Let's say you are using RenderSection to render a zone in a view and you want to render certain HTML elements before and after rendering the zone, only if the zone is available. First, you can call IsSectionDefined to verify if the zone is present as follows: @if (IsSectionDefined("News")){ <div class="news"> @await RenderSectionAsync("News", required: false) </div>} But it was throwing the following exception. InvalidOperationException: IsSectionDefined invocation in '/Areas/XXX/Views/XXX.cshtml' is invalid. IsSectionDefined can only be called from a layout page. The fix for this issue was to add the IsSectionDefined method to the RazorPage abstract class. News from the community Improving our This week in Orchard newsletter We published our first This week in Orchard post on the 20th of June, 2018 and since then we wrote 75 posts, 76 with this one :). Our goal is with the series is to give you valuable news and demos about the happenings around Orchard and Orchard Core every week. To do it we improve the posts from time to time and from this year we would like to introduce a new pack of changesets. Last month we created a poll on Twitter and asked you: would you like keywords about highlights in the title of This week in Orchard blog posts and newsletter subjects? We had 10 votes and everyone agreed that this would help to search, so from now, we changed the title in this way. And that's not everything about the title. Regarding the current date, we used the following format: mm/dd/yyyy. From this year we will use the following format: dd/mm/yyyy, which is a more international way to represent the date. We also changed the structure of the posts a little bit. Let's see the old way: On Orchard 1.x: contained everything that is related to Orchard 1.x. On Orchard Core: contained everything that is related to Orchard Core like the new features, bug fixes, new websites built with Orchard Core. Demos: this section was inside the On Orchard Core section and contained demos about Orchard Core. If there were demos about Orchard 1.x, the On Orchard 1.x also had this section. On Lombiq: news from Lombiq. And now let's see the structure that we use from this year: On Orchard 1.x: new features and news around Orchard 1.x, but the demos will be in a separate place together with Orchard Core demos. Orchard Core updates: bug fixes, new features of Orchard Core. Demos: here come the demos of Orchard 1.x and Orchard Core. News from the community: new websites, news about the Harvest, blog posts about Orchard Core, news from Lombiq, everything that is not related to the code itself. And if you are subscribed to our newsletter you will see that we created a new template for our emails that looks nicer and easier to read. We hope you will like our improvements! Feel free to contact us and share your thoughts about the current improvements or add your own ideas that could help us to make This week in Orchard better! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 112 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

New deployment step for Open ID Server, a new multi-tenant platform built with Orchard Core and a very interesting demo about a custom admin tree module with taxonomy terms menu are waiting for you among other exciting news in this year's last This week in Orchard post! On Orchard Core Allow replacing a Liquid filter Orchard Core has several built-in Liquid filters. You can make your own Liquid filter if you implement the ILiquidFilter interface. However, it could be a valid use case if you would like to change the behavior of one of the predefined built-in filters and replace it with your own one. When registering a Liquid Filter to the service container, you have to do it in the ConfigureServices method of your Startup.cs file: public override void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services){ services.AddLiquidFilter<BuildDisplayFilter>("shape_build_display"); services.AddLiquidFilter<ContentItemFilter>("content_item_id");} Here you can see how to register the shape_build_display and content_item_id filters. But let's have a closer look at that AddLiquidFilter extension method! public static IServiceCollection AddLiquidFilter<T>(this IServiceCollection services, string name) where T : class, ILiquidFilter{ services.Configure<LiquidOptions>(options => options.FilterRegistrations.Add(name, typeof(T))); services.AddScoped<T>(); return services;} You could see that every time when you call AddLiquidFilter it adds your filter to the FilterRegistrations Dictionary. To be able to override an existing Liquid filter with your own, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian had to change this extension method a little bit and instead of adding the new filter to this Dictionary, just overwrite an existing one. public static IServiceCollection AddLiquidFilter<T>(this IServiceCollection services, string name) where T : class, ILiquidFilter{ services.Configure<LiquidOptions>(options => options.FilterRegistrations[name] = typeof(T)); services.AddScoped<T>(); return services;} Delete role should warn the user if the role has associated users Let's create a custom role and let's name it Blogger. Now let's create a new user and add the Blogger role to it. Now go back to the Roles page and delete the Blogger role. If you hit the Delete button you will see a warning message, that says this role is associated to existing user(s). Prefix resource manager definitions for sample themes When you would like to register your resource using the ResourceManifest, you have to do something similar: manifest .DefineScript("vendor-bootstrap") .SetDependencies("vendor-jQuery") .SetUrl("~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js", "~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdn("https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js", "https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdnIntegrity("sha384-JjSmVgy...", "sha384-rkSXwmdF/9eRLkw/gNZG+1...") .SetVersion("4.3.1"); But what if you want to register Bootstrap again in your custom theme? You can do that of course, but when there are multiple resources with the same name, the resource manager takes the one with the highest version. // Use the highest version of all matchesif (resource == null || (resourceDefinition.Version != null && new Version(resource.Version) < version)){ resource = resourceDefinition;} To make things easier every predefined resource in the themes available in Orchard Core now has prefixes, which is the name of the theme. As you can see in the following code snippet, we registered the script for Bootstrap in the Blog theme with the name: TheBlogTheme-vendor-bootstrap. manifest .DefineScript("TheBlogTheme-vendor-bootstrap") .SetDependencies("TheBlogTheme-vendor-jQuery") .SetUrl("~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js", "~/TheBlogTheme/vendor/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdn("https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js", "https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.js") .SetCdnIntegrity("sha384-JjSmV6OrQ6VrjIEaF...", "sha384-rkSGcqMuXXwmdF/9eRLkw/gNZG+1zYut...") .SetVersion("4.3.1"); Deployment step for Open ID Server Head to Configuration -> Features and enable the OpenID Authorization Server module. Then you will get a new OpenID Connect option under the Security menu, where you can set up the authorization server, application, and scopes. If you set up the server in a way (the way how it's not important right now) you can import the settings of your server if you create a new deployment plan under Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans. If you select the OpenID Server step, that will export all the Open ID Server settings. Just execute the deployment plan locally. After if you open the Recipe.json file in the zip you will find a section called OpenIdServer in the steps section. "steps": [ { "name": "OpenIdServer", "OpenIdServer": { "AccessTokenFormat": 0, "Authority": null, "CertificateStoreLocation": null, "CertificateStoreName": null, "CertificateThumbprint": null, "AuthorizationEndpointPath": "/connect/authorize", "LogoutEndpointPath": "/connect/logout", "TokenEndpointPath": "/connect/token", "UserinfoEndpointPath": "/connect/userinfo", "GrantTypes": [ "authorization_code", "refresh_token" ], "UseRollingTokens": false } }] In the specific content type list only allow the creation of the new content item of the selected type In the admin page, you have a Content Types submenu under the Content menu, where you can list all of the content items. If you click on one of those (for example the Article) there was a green New button where you can create any type of content item that is creatable. Now with a new improvement, the UI responds to the type of the selected content type and (if the Content Type is marked as creatable) you can create only a new content item of the selected type. Here you could see the green button has a text: New Article. New multi-tenant Orchard Core platform GovBuilt has over 30 years of government software experience. They worked with government employees, contractors, and citizens to build a best-in-class online solution that streamlines the permitting and licensing process. They offer a GovBuilt Platform built for Government. And they are using Orchard Core to build their solution! They have several tenants, and https://pottcounty.govbuilt.com/ is one of that! Demos Custom Admin Tree module with taxonomy terms menu You can find a new module in this repository called ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.AdminTree and a new theme here, called ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.Themes. If you clone these repositories and add them to your Orchard Core solution you will see a new module under Configuration -> Fetaures called ThisNetWorks Admin Tree Menus. ThisNetWorks Admin Tree module displays content items based on a URL tree or taxonomy structure. This module presents a taxonomy and it's associated terms in a tree menu. The primary purpose of this menu is intended to provide a way to manage complex taxonomies, in combination with a navigation system that makes manages those terms, and content items easier. Let's enable this feature! Now go Design -> Themes and make the ThisNetWorks Admin Theme as the current theme. This adapts the default admin theme to support the menu's on the left sidebar to include clickable entries on tree nodes (i.e. nodes that contain child items can also contain a link to an entry). To be able to test the current capabilities of this solution quickly, you can use a recipe (Configuration -> Recipes) called Categories, that contains sample content items and taxonomy for a taxonomy menu tree. After you run this recipe you should see the following admin menu structure. Here you can see a Categories option with several sub-items. Categories is a taxonomy with the Category term content type and this admin menu shows you the structure of the Categories taxonomy in a clickable way. For example, if you select Motorbike, the site lists you all the content items that have this taxonomy and the category of that is Motorbike. If you click on the blue Create Leaf Article button you can create a content item that has a permalink and the Categories taxonomy will be set to Motorbike by default. Let's see what will happen if you click on the View button near the Articles content item, that is the root term content item of the Categories taxonomy. As you can see, users in the front-end can navigate between the different levels of terms and when navigating between the different content items, you can use different kinds of badges to show the terms and of course, the URL reflects this change as well. This feature is under development and we hope that this will be part of Orchard Core soon! If you are interested in this demo don't forget to check this video on YouTube! On Lombiq Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 108 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

Custom parameters support in recipes, new Retrieve Content task, improved Roles UI, a new post about Orchard Core, demos about the Open Tags and the headless recipe for Orchard Core! Should I continue? Many news is waiting for you in our current post and for closing, we would like to show you some nice pics about our Christmas event! On Orchard Core Custom parameters support in recipes From now you can set custom parameters in the appsettings.json file that can be passed and used in a recipe. As you can see in the documentation, you can access a parameter value like [js: configuration('CustomParameterKey')]. For this, there is a new ConfigurationMethodProvider that receives the ShellSettings and retrieve the value to replace by ShellSettings.ShellConfiguration["CustomPropertyKey"]. Add version and target framework variables in .props Hisham Bin Ateya refactored the Dependencies.AspNetCore.props file and created a new variable named AspNetCoreTargetFramework, which contains netcoreapp3.0. Now when there will be updates on ASP.NET Core we just only need to pick this up more easily. This will simplify the process when we need to update the AspNetCore version. Here is a snippet from the Dependencies.AspNetCore.props file: <Project> <PropertyGroup> <AspNetCoreVersion>3.0.0</AspNetCoreVersion> <AspNetCoreTargetFramework>netcoreapp3.0</AspNetCoreTargetFramework> </PropertyGroup> <ItemGroup> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.AzureAD.UI" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Facebook" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> <PackageManagement Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.Google" Version="$(AspNetCoreVersion)" /> ... </ItemGroup></Project> And here is a snippet from one of the modules where we use the AspNetCoreTargetFramework variable: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Razor"> <PropertyGroup> <TargetFramework>$(AspNetCoreTargetFramework)</TargetFramework> <AddRazorSupportForMvc>true</AddRazorSupportForMvc> </PropertyGroup> ...</Project> New Retrieve Content workflow task There is a new task called Retrieve Content that tries and evaluates a content item ID from a JavaScript expression if provided. Let's see a sample workflow that has this new task in it. Here we have an HTTP Request Event as a start activity that creates a blog post that has a DisplayText: My blog post using the Create Content Task when someone invokes the URL with a GET method. The Create Content Task sets the WorkflowExecutionContext.CorrelationId (the correlation ID can be used to resume workflows that are associated with specific objects, such as content items) with the newly created content item's ID. As we mentioned, the Retrieve Content Task accepts a JavaScript expression, so here we used the correlationId() method to get the ID. The Retrieve Content Task returns the content item by it's ID and sets the WorkflowExecutionContext.LastResult with the retrieved content item. Now by adding a Notify Task, we can use a Liquid expression to display the DisplayText property of the newly created blog post content item. Finally, make a redirect to the admin page using an HTTP Redirect Task to see the displayed notification. Using custom admin URLs There is a new AdminOptions defined in the OrchardCore.Admin.Abstractions module. It tries to configure the prefix of the admin URL from the configuration and then it's creating a property called AdminUrlPrefix that is by default admin. You can change the prefix for all the admin pages. All you need to do is to add the following section to appsettings.json inside the section called OrchardCore: "OrchardCore.Admin": { "AdminUrlPrefix": "dashboard"} When you are creating a route to your AdminController, don't forget to change the route template of your controller to use this prefix like in the following snippet, which code can be found in the OrchardCore.AdminMenu module. public override void Configure(IApplicationBuilder builder, IEndpointRouteBuilder routes, IServiceProvider serviceProvider){ // Menu var menuControllerName = typeof(MenuController).ControllerName(); routes.MapAreaControllerRoute( name: "AdminMenuList", areaName: "OrchardCore.AdminMenu", pattern: _adminOptions.AdminUrlPrefix + "/AdminMenu/List", defaults: new { controller = menuControllerName, action = nameof(MenuController.List) } ); ...} Roles UI and default description We have role descriptions, but the default roles don't have any descriptions. This opens a great opportunity to improve the UI of the index and the edit pages of the Roles. In the index page, you can find the description of every role under its name and the Search box with a new UI. When you add a new role you can set its name and description. And when you edit an existing one, you can also edit its description. Here you can also find some hints about what is the difference between the Allow and Effective permissions. New post: Lucene, GraphQL and Orchard Core Sipke Schoorstra has published a nice article again in medium.com to guide people on how to implement Search using Orchard Core, Lucene and GraphQL. Read his interesting and easy to follow article about how to enable Lucene, set up a Lucene Query and consume the available APIs from Postman using Lucene and GraphQL, allowing us to use a consistent API from our applications. Demos Orchard Core headless recipe The idea of the headless recipe is to provide a recipe that sets up GraphQL, queries, and everything that has an API interface and restrict the interface down a little bit. The recipe has no home page, so when you set up your site using the recipe, you will see the login page first. And in the admin page, you will see only those options in the menu, that are related to the API interfaces. You can also watch a great detailed demo on YouTube about what will you get if you install your site using the headless recipe! Orchard Core Open Tags Last month you could see a great demo about how to work with tags using taxonomies in Orchard Core. Here we mentioned that when you add a taxonomy field to a content type with a Tags editor type and you type something in the field, you can't create a new tag that should be added to the list of tags, because that feature was under development that time. Now thanks to Dean Marcussen this is not an issue anymore. Let's see how he solved this problem! We have a site with the Blog recipe installed. Add a taxonomy field called Tags to the Blog Post content type using a Tags taxonomy with a Tag content type that has just a simple Title Part. Here use the Tags editor type with the Tags display mode. And here you could notice a new checkbox, called Open. As the hint says, if you put a tick here, you can create tags inline when editing or creating blog posts. Put a tick here and let's edit the predefined blog post! When typing something in the Tags editor and hit enter (or just click on it), you can add new tags to the Tags taxonomy and to this blog post as well. If you edit the Tags taxonomy using the dashboard you will see that the new tag has been created and the title of that tag is the value that we have just entered when editing the given blog post. If you checked the editor of the blog post well you could see that there is a section called Category with two radio buttons. But what are these for? The Category is also a taxonomy field added to the blog post with the standard editor and display mode. It uses the Categories taxonomy with the Category content type as the term. But this time the content type that is used as a term is not just about having a Title Part, but it also has a Text Field with an Icon picker editor. This means when you add Category term content types to the Categories taxonomy you can also set an icon for this term. And if you override this shape using a Liquid template or a Razor view, you can display the Font Awesome icon near the name of the term! You can also watch a nice demo on YouTube about the Open Tags for Orchard Core! On Lombiq Orchard Nuggets: How to use the same version of Orchard Core NuGet packages in every project across my solution? You have your own ASP.NET Core project that using Orchard Core NuGet packages, but every time when you update them you have to do it one-by-one across the whole solution? In our second Orchard Nuggets post, we show you a way how to update the packages easily! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! 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. We periodically have an event called RnDay: this is a few hours long event where we share with each other what we recently worked on and what we plan to do. E.g. if we recently finished a project then the project's team members demo what they've done. Last week we had our last RnDay for this year in the Loffice Budapest, which is a coworking office with an event space where we held this event. And at the end of the day, we visited a nearby restaurant to have dinner together. We would like to thank you all for reading our posts and making the Orchard community stronger together with us! We hope that we could give you valuable news and demos about the happenings around Orchard and Orchard Core from time to time by reading our posts and of course the This week in Orchard newsletter. We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas with some photos of our latest event! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 109 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

You have your own ASP.NET Core project that using Orchard Core NuGet packages, but every time when you update them you have to do it one-by-one across the whole solution? Wouldn't it be easier to just update the package versions in one place? Then you may need to have a Directory.Build.targets file to define the versions! MSBuild projects that use the standard build process (importing Microsoft.Common.props and Microsoft.Common.targets) have several extensibility hooks that you can use to customize your build process. Directory.Build.targets is imported from Microsoft.Common.targets after importing .targets files from NuGet packages. So, it can override properties and targets defined in most of the build logic, but sometimes you may need to customize the project file after the final import. Without going into too much detail, Directory.Build.targets can be used to provide customizations to project files located under a certain directory, this means that if you create such a file at the root of your solution, it would normally be able to customize all the .csproj files in your solution as they would exist in the child directories. Let's see a small example! Imagine you have an ASP.NET Core web application with a MyAwesomeWebApp.Web.csproj file. If you referenced Orchard Core in this project, your file contains a similar section: <ItemGroup> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.Logging.NLog" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /></ItemGroup> I assume you also have some custom modules and themes in your solution. The .csproj file of your module (MyAwesomeModule.csproj) could contain a section like: <ItemGroup> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.ResourceManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.DisplayManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.Module.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /></ItemGroup> where the OrchardCore.Module.Targets is mandatory if it is a module. Imagine that your theme (MyAwesomeTheme.csproj of course) has the following: <ItemGroup> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.Theme.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.DisplayManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.ResourceManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /></ItemGroup> You can see that we referenced OrchardCore.DisplayManagement and OrchardCore.ResourceManagement packages multiple times. If there will be a new release of Orchard Core we have to make sure that we use the same versions of every package across the whole solution. And if we have several projects we have to change the version numbers in every project one by one. To solve this issue add a Directory.Build.targets file at the root of your solution. We set the version in this file and specify how each <PackageReference /> should be updated by MSBuild. Note that here we have to use Update instead of Include. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <ItemGroup> <!-- Implicit Package References --> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.DisplayManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.Logging.NLog" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.Module.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.ResourceManagement" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> <PackageReference Update="OrchardCore.Theme.Targets" Version="1.0.0-rc1-10106" /> </ItemGroup></Project> Now let's rewrite the content of all the .csproj files and see the result of the MyAwesomeTheme.csproj for an example! The Include attribute specifies the package ID and the Version attribute specifies the version of the package to restore. But as you can see here the only change we did is to remove the Version attribute. <ItemGroup> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.Theme.Targets" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.DisplayManagement" /> <PackageReference Include="OrchardCore.ResourceManagement" /></ItemGroup> Now nothing will stop you from easily update the Orchard Core NuGet packages of your ASP.NET Core website! Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!

Improving user management by having a way to log in users without password during external login and be able to disable users in Orchard Core. Brand new look for the Flow editor UI and fix the accessibility issues in your Orchard Core site using Accessibility Insights for Web! Oh, and our improved Avatars Orchard module is waiting for you in our post! On Orchard Core External Login registration without password Navigate to Login Settings page by heading to Security -> Settings -> Login from the admin UI. Here you will see a brand new page with several options. Let's see what are these for! Use external provider for login: if only one external provider is defined and this option is checked, the external provider is automatically challenged. Disable local password login: prevents users from logging in with their local credentials. Only external providers are displayed in the login screen unless the above option is set. Use a script to set user roles based on external provider claims: if checked, the above handlers are not invoked and instead the script executes. Here we have to mention the IExternalLoginEventHandler interface, with the UpdateRoles and GenerateUserName methods. Any module can define logic to perform the mapping and generate usernames. And take a look at the UserLoggedInEvent workflow event too! The event is triggered after the above logic and provides the username, the roles, the login provider and the external claims as Input. If the login was for the local users, the login provider and the external claims are null. If you enable the Users Registration module you can find a Registration Settings page under Security -> Settings -> Registration. Let's see what you can set on this page! Configure users registration: define if new users are allowed to register. Use a script to generate userName based on external provider claims: if not selected, when a new user is registering, the registered IExternalLoginEventHandlers are invoked in order to provide a username. If more than one handlers are defined, the first one wins. If you use a script to generate the userName, the above handlers are not triggered. Do not ask username: if checked, no user name is requested in the registration form. Do not ask email address: if checked, no email address is requested in the registration form. Do not create local password: if checked, no password is requested in the registration form. If all of the above is true, no registration form is displayed to the user. Disable a user account Now you have the ability to disable a user account. When you navigate to Security -> Users and hit Edit near one of the users, you will see a new Is enabled? switch that you can uncheck to disable the given account. Now when you list the users you will see a little red badge with a Disabled text near the user that is disabled. But what that really mean? With a disabled account, users can' log in to the site. If they want to log in they will face the following error message. New blog post: Orchard Core, Open ID, and GraphQL Sipke Schoorstra published a new blog post about how to invoke Orchard Core’s GraphQL API endpoint using Postman. His objectives are to: Expose a GraphQL endpoint from Orchard to allow content querying. Invoke the GraphQL endpoint from a client application. This could be plain vanilla JS, Angular, React, Blazor, and so on. He's just gonna use Postman to try out the GraphQL endpoint. Once that works, he can do it from any other client application. Read his post for a long and interesting journey to learn about these features! New Orchard Core site Borne out of a passion for travel, and a belief that bridging cultures can only happen with global mobility, flyEgypt started operations in 2015 as a small but ambitious charter airline. Their website is now live, including a comprehensive help center and online booking and payment functionality. And they are using Orchard Core! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Demos Flow editor UI improvements Set up your site using the Blog recipe. This recipe contains a Page content type with an attached Flow Part. Let's create a new page using the admin UI. Here you will see a brand new UI when editing the Flow Part of the page. You will see a blue line with a plus sign and an arrow of the center of it. Clicking on these you can add new widgets to your Flow Part by choosing them from the context menu. If you hover over your newly added widget you can set the alignment and the percentage of the item just like you can do it before. If you add a new widget that can contain other items (for example a Container) you can hover over the body of the widget and use the blue line inside it to populate it with other new content! You can also watch a great detailed demo on YouTube about the Flow editor UI improvements. Find and fix the accessibility issues in your Orchard Core site using Accessibility Insights for Web Accessibility Insights for Web is an extension for Chrome and Microsoft Edge Insider that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues in web apps and sites. The tool supports two primary scenarios: FastPass is a lightweight, two-step process that helps developers identify common, high-impact accessibility issues in less than five minutes. Automated checks: the tool automatically checks for compliance with approximately 50 accessibility requirements. Tab stops: the tool provides clear instructions and a visual helper that makes it easy to identify critical accessibility issues related to keyboard access, such as missing tab stops, keyboard traps, and incorrect tab order. Assessment allows anyone with HTML skills to verify that a web app or web site is compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. Automated checks: the tool automatically checks for compliance with approximately 50 accessibility requirements. Manual tests: the tool provides step-by-step instructions, examples, and how-to-fix guidance for approximately 20 tests; many tests are "assisted", which means that the tool identifies the test instances or provides a visual helper. If you add this extension to Google Chrome, you will see a new dark blue heart icon with a magnifying glass at the right top corner of your browser. If you click on it and select the FastPass option, you can check for common issues of accessibility. If you try it on the admin page, you will see some red exclamation marks that show you some common accessibility problems such as missing or invalid properties. For example, you could see a message that Buttons must have a discernible text. If you click on one of those red exclamation marks you will get a longer explanation of what is the issue with the given item. It says fix one of the following from the list and there are many ways to fix the issue. The issue is that we have a little expand here, which is a button without a text. If there is a button without a text, people with disabilities would not be able to see what the button does, so we need to fix that. Let's use the aria-label attribute to fix the issue. <button class="btn-nostyle" aria-label="expand"> <span class="collapse-icon"> ... </span></button> By going through these failures you can detect and fix the accessibility problems on your site. You can also watch a great detailed demo on YouTube about how to use the Accessibility Insight for Web in your Orchard Core application. On Lombiq The first Orchard Nuggets post Instead of lengthy tutorials short question-based blog posts on Orchard Dojo about solving specific Orchard problems can be very useful for community members as a learning resource. An Orchard Nuggets blogpost's topic is a single question on how to achieve something in Orchard (be it 1.x or Core) and it focuses solely on an answer to this question. The topic can be not just about development questions but user-facing features too. In our first post, we wrote about how to register your content part in the service container. We have many topics to write about but we are happy if you'd have questions about Orchard and Orchard Core that we can write about! Improving our Avatars Orchard module The aim of our Avatars Orchard module is to bring avatars to the platform. This week we have added two new features to this module: Piedone.Avatars.Blogs: adds Avatars to Blog Posts in Detail view. Piedone.Avatars.Comments: adds Avatars to comments from logged in users. If you enable both of them, the Avatar Part will automatically be attached to the Blog Post and Comment content types to present the avatar of the author user if any. We updated this module in Orchard Dojo too, if you check the screen of the first Orchard Nuggets post you will now see the name of the author and the avatar of the author under the title of the blog post. Thanks for the great contribution to Gábor Pór from Lombiq Technologies! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 108 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!