Our blog contains the activity stream of Orchard Dojo: general news, new resources or tutorials are announced here.

Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting: "Record persisting advices": checklist if you want to store something in a low-level (non-content part) record "Adding empty part to type fails": always create a driver for your part "Records only in Models namespace: good?": remember to put your records under the Models namespace "Indices with SchemaBuilder": you can add database indices from migrations, but only from AlterTable

Forum favourites: model editors with shapes, accessing a shape's generated html and accessing content fields programmatically

Forum topics from the Orchard discussion board that we found interesting: "Passing my own data types to a view": using form field html helpers with dynamic models and in alternates defined with the shape attribute "Dynamically built html with Clay": capturing the generated html coming from a shape "How to access fields of a content item again?": ways of accessing a content field's value by using dynamic or statically typed extension methods

Projector in-depth at Harvest

As you surely know, Projector is the built-in Orchard module that you can use to query content items in many customizable ways. Getting a grasp of Projector is not easy at first however. In the following video, recorded at the first Orchard Harvest conference in 2012 Bertrand Le Roy explains not only how to use Projector but also sheds some light on the programmatic techniques behind it.

Dependencies for themes

It's not obvious that themes can have dependencies in the same way modules do - here's a blog post about this.

Some clarification regarding injected dependencies

Dependency injection through constructor injection is a technique used throughout Orchard: you can't really write an Orchard module without injecting some services. Dependency inection and the special kind of dependencies, event handlers are explained in the Orchard Docs.

Orchard Dojo opened!

What Orchard missed till now is a place where the various pieces of knowledge related to it are stored in a structured, accessible form. We aim to provide a solution for this with Orchard Dojo: a website dedicated to learning Orchard. On Orchard Dojo we want to gather all the information related to Orchard in a well-structured and well-presented form so nothing worth while gets lost. We also created the Orchard Dojo Library, a nice big package of various Orchard goodies, including development guidelines and best practices, a wiki, Visual Studio code snippets and more. Also with Orchard Dojo we'd like to bring our Orchard trainings what we've done through Orchard Hungary to the next level. We really hope you'll learn a lot on Orchard Dojo!

A small Orchard API reference: Orchard Cheatsheet

The Orchard Cheatsheet is a nice little API reference for some lesser known objects, made by Orchard's lead developer, Sebastien Ros. The cheatsheet's list only contains elements of the API that are accessible from (sometimes very specific) shape templates (well, ExtensionDescriptor seems to be an exception), but e.g. WorkContext is something you definitely encounter elsewhere too.

Orchard extensibility explained - aka why Orchard's flexible content model rocks

Bertrand Le Roy's not-so-recent article "Orchard Extensibility" in MSDN Magazine explains the various aspects of - surprise - extending Orchard. The article mainly covers Orchard's content model, its concepts and flexibility: something we all love in Orchard. Bertrand also lists some other important parts of the Orchard API, all worth knowing.

"Writing an Orchard Webshop Module from scratch" module development tutorial

"Writing an Orchard Webshop Module from scratch" is an excellent, 11-part (planned for 15) tutorial on Orchard module development by Sipke Schoorstra. Everyone who has ever written at least a short tutorial will feel what amount of work such a series contains: not surprisingly it's well worth reading, even for ones already somewhat familiar with Orchard module development.

Performance-tuning modules you should know about

These modules are really useful if you want to squeeze out the performance of your Orchard website: Mini Profiler for profiling Orchard.Caching for a wide variety of caching solutions Cache for output caching (included in Orchard as of Orchard 1.7) Combinator for bundling and minifying static resources (stylesheets, scripts)

Privacy consent

Our blog contains the activity stream of Orchard Dojo: general news, new resources or tutorials are announced here.