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

Content Tree Module, Orchard Core Admin UI experience renewal survey - This week in Orchard (06/06/2025)

This time, you can see a fascinating demo of the Content Tree Module! But first, let's look at our other topics, like adding GraphQL support for querying content items by status from the Content Picker Field, fixing binding form input in the Coming Soon theme, and improving the Register User Task. Don't forget to fill out our Orchard Core Admin UI experience renewal survey to help shape the future of Orchard Core!

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In honor of Jean-Thierry Kéchichian - This week in Orchard (05/01/2024)

In honor of Jean-Thierry Kéchichian With a heavy heart, we share in the sorrow as we remember our good friend, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian, a truly extraordinary member of our community who unexpectedly passed away on December 24, 2023. Let us recall the moments that brought smiles to our faces, the wisdom he shared, and the profound impact he had on us all. Let us express our sorrow and collectively pay tribute, to our Jean-Thierry. As we reflect on his life, please let us extend our love and support to his family. This issue is dedicated to sharing the stories, thoughts, and memories that touch our hearts. If you like to recall the moments that he brought smiles to your face, the wisdom he shared with you, or the profound impact he had on you, please leave your comment there. You can find a new page in the Orchard Core documentation called Honorable Members in honor of Jean-Thierry Kéchichian. Rest peacefully Jean Thierry Kéchichian. Your memory will forever inspire us.

Keyed services, Hastlayer.com is running on Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (29/12/2023)

Adding helpful methods for ContentPart, ContentType builders, and ContentItemExtensions, introducing keyed services, and a case study about modernizing and migrating Hastlayer.com to Orchard Core are the topics for the last week of this year. Let's check them out in detail! Orchard Core updates Adding helpful methods for ContentPart, ContentType builders and ContentItemExtensions This is about introducing several new useful methods and extension methods for Orchard Core to make the developer's life easier. Let's see the changes! New methods in ContentPartDefinitionBuilder ContentPartDefinitionBuilder WithField<TField>(string fieldName) ContentPartDefinitionBuilder WithField<TField>(string fieldName, Action<ContentPartFieldDefinitionBuilder> configuration) Task<ContentPartDefinitionBuilder> WithFieldAsync<TField>(string fieldName, Func<ContentPartFieldDefinitionBuilder, Task> configuration) New methods in ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder WithPart<TPart>() ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder WithPart<TPart>(string name) ContentTypeDefinitionBuilder WithPart<TPart>(string name, Action<ContentTypePartDefinitionBuilder> configuration) New extension methods in ContentItemExtensions bool TryGet<TPart>(this ContentItem contentItem, out TPart part) bool TryGet<TPart>(this ContentItem contentItem, string name, out TPart part) bool TryGet(this ContentItem contentItem, Type contentElementType, string name, out ContentElement part) New extension method in EntityExtensions bool TryGet<T>(this IEntity entity, out T aspect) But let's not just list these here, see a little example too! On this screen, you can see the migration of the SeoMetaPart where we configured this part and added some fields to it. You can see that this part contains a field called DefaultSocialImage and by using the OfType method, we can set the type of the field (MediaField in this case). But by using one of the new overloads of the WithField method, we don't need to use the OfType method, we can pass a typed value, the type of the field itself. Keyed services The recently released .NET 8 introduces keyed service dependency injection container support. Currently, we don't support it in Orchard Core and the goal of this feature is to allow us to use keyed services in Orchard. Here you can see that in this CloneSingleton extension method, we need to understand whether is it a keyed service or not, and based on the ServiceKey object (which gives the key of the services, if applicable) of the ServiceDescriptor (which describes the service with its service type, implementation, and lifetime) we can decide which overload of the ClonedSingletonDescriptor method do we need to call to add our service to the ServiceCollection. News from the community Case study: Hastlayer.com is running on Orchard Core The new website for Hastlayer, the .NET hardware accelerator originally built on Orchard 1, now runs on Orchard Core! Check out our case study here about the migration! We are happy with the results and the additions to our open-source modules, and stay tuned, as we keep the migrations rolling. This is an excellent time if you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to Orchard Core. 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. Contact us today, and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 484 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!

Introducing ConfigureAsync method, Security scanning with ZAP in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox - This week in Orchard (22/12/2023)

Introducing ConfigureAsync method and the IAsyncConfigureOptions interface, demo about Security scanning with ZAP in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox, and some photos of our Christmas event! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Introducing ConfigureAsync method In the Startup files, you can use the Configure method to configure the tenant pipeline. Now, if you implement the IAsyncStartup interface, you will be able to configure the tenant pipeline asynchronously by using the new ConfigureAsync method. This means the initialization of the tenants will be much faster in the future in a SaaS environment. Here, you can see an example of how to use this method in the Startup file of the Localization module, where we don't need to call the GetAwaiter() and the GetResult() methods when getting the default culture and the supported cultures. IAsyncConfigureOptions interface In this PR, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian introduced the IAsyncOptions and IAsyncConfigureOptions<TOptions> interfaces that can be used globally across your Orchard Core solution. The IAsyncConfigureOptions can be used to configure asynchronously a type of options just after a tenant container is created, and the IAsyncOptions marks a type of option intended to be registered as a singleton and configured asynchronously by an IAsyncConfigureOptions<TOptions> just after a tenant container is created. For example, here the BlobOptions will be registered once as a singleton and configured asynchronously once by BlobOptionsSetup.ConfigureAsync() just after a tenant container is created using this single line of code: services.Configure<BlobOptions, BlobOptionsSetup>(). Demos Security scanning with ZAP in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox Maybe you have already heard about the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox, our web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. We wrote about it several times here as well, first when we open-sourced it, when we added some Orchard Core Features tests to it when we added the automated monkey testing feature to it, and when we introduced the Visual verification testing. At the end of last year, we showed you the latest updates about integrating UI testing into Orchard Core and the way you can use WebApplicationFactory, a fake video capture source, or the interactive mode. This time, we will check out a slightly different topic, security scanning! Of course, security is important, you don't want your web app to be used for spamming or cryptocurrency mining, or you don't want your users' data to be lost or get into the hands of others. So, you want to secure your application. There are many layers to that, and many layers to enforcing or ensuring your application is secure including manual reviews and static code analysis. Another layer is penetration testing. It means that somebody going to your application and trying to break it in some way, get into it in a way that they shouldn't be able to. Pen testers use some tools, and one of the most widely used tools is the Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP). This is a very popular open-source project, which is a security scanner. It can check your application for security issues. This is a JAVA application, and it checks web apps for general web application security issues. It can do generally dangerous attacks, it can do that actively and passively, so let's see that in action and see how to automate those scans! The easiest way is to clone Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution. This Orchard Core Visual Studio solution contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries, containing our UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core, which contains a feature for ZAP. Here you can see quite detailed documentation about this but what's more important we also have some samples. Here, you can run ZAP with a DotNet API. It's just a simple scan but you can utilize the DotNet API more if you add some more configuration as you can see on the screen. This SecurityScanWithCustomConfigurationShouldPass method adds some configuration, like you can exclude URLs from the scan, disable rules for just a given URL, can authenticate and while we are talking about testing, you can also assert on the results. The results are not just available on a human-readable HTML report but also as a sarif-json which is a standard way of sharing such scan results. Do you want to know more about how to do an automated security scan of your Orchard Core app with ZAP? Check out our post in Orchard Dojo about it, and don't forget to head to YouTube for a recording to see how you can run these tests from Visual Studio! 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. We periodically have an event called RnDay: this is a few hour-long event where we share 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. We had our last RnDay for this year in the Loffice, which is a coworking and 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 can 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 Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 486 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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 a way to Remove User from a Role, Lombiq Hosting - Tenants Email Quota Management - This week in Orchard (15/12/2023)

New Get users by roles and Unassign users from roles activities, add async methods to ContentDefinitionManager to prevent possible thread starvation, and a demo about Lombiq's Tenants Email Quota Management module! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Add a way to Remove a User from a Role This change introduces two new activities that you can utilize when working with workflows. The first one is called Get users by roles. Here you can easily choose the roles to identify users by using the Roles check boxes. You can see that you can provide a key (Output Key Name) that will be used to store the user's ID in a list that you can use in an upcoming activity in your workflow. The second activity is the Unassign user from roles one. The Roles check box works the same and the UserName text box can be used to provide the user name of the user who you want to update. Here in this silly example, we hard-coded the admin user name but of course, you can use Liquid to have a flexible activity. Add Async method to ContentDefinitionManager to prevent possible thread starvation The idea here is to make all the IContentDefinitionManager methods async to prevent possible thread starvation. To avoid a breaking change, the old ones were marked as obsolete. Here is a list of interfaces that were modified: IStereotypeService IStereotypesProvider IRouteableContentTypeProvider IRouteableContentTypeCoordinator IContentDefinitionService IContentDefinitionManager IContentDefinitionService On this screen, you can see the updated IContentDefinitionManager interface, where the non-async methods were marked as obsolete with a warning message that these methods will be removed in the upcoming releases. So, when you update your solution to the latest Orchard Core version, don't be surprised when you see some warnings after you build your solution. Demos Lombiq Hosting - Tenants Email Quota Management This demo will be about a new Orchard Core module, part of our Hosting Tenants repository, that helps you manage email quotas. Hence the name Email quota management, which could be useful if you have a SaaS provider (like our SaaS provider, DotNest) and you would like to restrict the number of emails sent out per month per tenant only if the tenant is using your SMTP provider. Of course, you don't want to restrict those tenants who are using their own SMTP provider. To set the quota you can use the appsettings.json file or an environment variable. The default value here is 1000 emails per month. Now it's time to try out this project and see it in action! The easiest way is to clone Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution. This Orchard Core Visual Studio solution contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries, containing the Email quota management module too. First of all, you need to enable the Lombiq Hosting - Tenants Email Quota Management module under Configuration -> Features. After that, let's navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Email. And wow, you can see that we have already sent 997 emails out of 1000 this month. Yeah, we cheated a little bit and we already sent out some emails using workflows. In this case, the users who have site owner permission will receive an email when the tenant reaches 80% of the available email quota for this month. They will get another email if you exceed 90% of the email quota. When you reach your quota for this month, you will get a red notification that can be seen on every page in the admin UI. It means that you will not be able to send out more emails until next month. As always, if you would like to know more about this module, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 487 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!

Azure Email Communication Services feature, Shortcode for cache busting - This week in Orchard (08/12/2023)

Shortcode for cache busing, update the Admin Dashboard documentation, and a demo about the upcoming Azure Email Communication Services feature! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Update the Admin Dashboard documentation The documentation page for the Admin Dashboard has been updated with details about how to create custom widgets that you can add to the Admin Dashboard. You can also read about the customizable settings of these widgets and the options that you can use if you wish to modify the look of your widgets. Shortcode for cache busting There was no option to add a Shortcode for cache busting. For reference, you can add cache busting in a cshtml file like this: @Orchard.AssetUrl(assetPath: path, appendVersion: true). So, if somebody used an image in (for example) an HTML Body part, there was no way to add cache busting with a Shortcode. The goal of this improvement was to add a Shortcode that allows cache busting. The Shortcodes page of the documentation lists the available Shortcodes in Orchard Core. This contains the Demos Azure Email Communication Services feature Azure now has a new set of resources under the Communication Services (ACS) umbrella, Email Communication Services being one of them. This is a cheaper, Azure-native alternative to SendGrid. The primary way to use it is not through traditional SMTP-server configuration, but a connection string (of two components, endpoint, and access key) provided by the ACS resource, which allows access to the specific communication service resources attached to it (for example, an Email Communication Services instance). This requires a custom implementation to send emails using the corresponding SDK. OrchardCore.Email doesn't seem to support this scenario at its current state and needs a bit of refactoring (can take inspiration from the structure in O1 for better extensibility). Now let's see the current state of this feature that you can also check out in this PR! First, we need to enable the Azure Email Communication Services feature that configures email settings and a default email service based on (ACS) under the Configuration -> Features option from the admin UI. After that, you will find a new option under Configuration -> Settings -> Email, called Azure Email Settings. Here, you can see the Default Sender and the Connection String values. The Default Sender can be set up under the Email Settings menu item or use the appsettings.json file. The Connection String can be set up using the appsettings.json file. And if you are interested in how to use this feature from code, you can see a unit test for this in the AzureEmailServiceTests class. As always, if you would like to know more about this upcoming feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 487 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!

How to do a security scan of an Orchard Core app - Orchard Core Nuggets

You don't want malicious people to crack your web apps to use them for spamming, cryptocurrency mining, and spreading malware, nor do you want them to get access to your users' personal data (if you actually do want to cooperate with criminals, you don't need to read further). Thus, you want your app to be secure. One aspect of achieving this is to do penetration testing on your app. Thankfully, much of this can be automated, and with the help of Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core and Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) you can conveniently do this for your Orchard Core app. Let's see how! First, install v8.2.1-alpha.6.osoe-351 or greater of the UI Testing Toolbox from NuGet because that's the one that added security scanning. There are a couple of minor breaking changes that should affect nobody, really, in this, so it'll be part of the upcoming v.9.0.0 (but for that, we're waiting for Orchard Core 1.8). Set up UI testing as explained in the UI Testing Toolbox's documentation. While we're focusing on security scanning here, the UI Testing Toolbox can do a lot, and I really mean a lot more, including one-liners to test if the basic Orchard Core features still work in your app, or unleashing automated monkey testing to try to break your app. We never work on an Orchard Core app without its safety net! Add one or more test cases to run ZAP's security scan. Since all the configuration of ZAP is available to you, customization is unlimited, but to give you a glimpse, this is how a basic security scan that's already a good start would look like: [Fact] public Task BasicSecurityScanShouldPass() => ExecuteTestAfterSetupAsync(context => context.RunAndAssertBaselineSecurityScanAsync()); And that's it! OK, I might have omitted the last step here: 4. Fix all the security issues ZAP finds, because it'll definitely find at least a couple of them! This was just a short teaser, but be sure to check out the UI Testing Toolbox's security scanning documentation, because we tried to summarize everything necessary to get you going there, including samples that you can just copy-paste. Do you want to see security scanning in action? Check out the demo video too! Also, security starts with quality code. Check out our Lombiq .NET Analyzers project to get automated checks for your code too, including pointing out potential security issues even before running the app. 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!

Use shape when rendering HTTP errors to allow customization from the UI, Git-hg Mirror is running on Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (01/12/2023)

Use shape when rendering HTTP errors to allow customization from the UI, add extensions for IDisplayManager, and a case study about migrating Git-hg Mirror to Orchard Core are the topics for this week. Let's check them out in detail! Orchard Core updates Use shape when rendering HTTP errors to allow customization from the UI The idea here is that you might want to customize the error pages without having to create a theme. The way to do that is to create shapes. The reason you had to create a theme is these pages were used to be views, so you couldn't override them dynamically. Now (because they are shapes), you can create them in the admin UI and the theme. So, if you want to be able to override the error pages using the Templates feature, now you can do that. For example, if you want to customize the 404 page using Liquid templates, enable the Templates feature, add a template called HttpError__NotFound, and design it how you want it. In this case, we selected the Templates option under Design (enabled the Templates feature first) from the admin menu and clicked on the Add Template button. Here we named our template HttpError__NotFound and provided a sample content. After we clicked Save. The only thing left is to enter a random URL to check out the content of our custom 404 page. You can read more about this enhancement on the newly created Diagnostics page in the documentation. It's a breaking change because if you have customization before, now you have to rename the views or relocate them. This was also documented in the notes of the next Orchard Core release. Add extensions for IDisplayManager This introduces new extension methods for the IDisplayManager that displays a shape using TModel, meaning you don't have to do a new Navbar() for example, as you can see on the screen. The release notes of the next Orchard Core release have also been updated with these changes mentioning how you can add the Navbar shape into your front-end theme utilizing the new extensions. News from the community Case study: Git-hg Mirror is running on Orchard Core Our Git-hg Mirror service can sync between Git and Mercurial repositories, as well as two Git repos. Originally built on Orchard 1, now it runs on Orchard Core! Check out our case study here about the migration! We are happy with the results and the additions to our open-source modules, and stay tuned, as we keep the migrations rolling. If you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to Orchard 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 488 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!

Drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7, All users and Custom User Settings deployment steps - This week in Orchard (24/11/2023)

SMTP should send the email if the SSL certificate is invalid, new All users and Custom user settings deployment steps, and drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7 are the topics for this week. Let's check them out in detail! Orchard Core updates SMTP should send the email if the SSL certificate is invalid Mailkit supports sending emails when the server's SMTP certificate is invalid. Now this function is integrated into Orchard Core. You have the choice (with a check box from the mail server settings in the admin area) to be able to bypass the invalid or self-signed certificate. So, there is a new property called IgnoreInvalidSslCertificate that you can set to true in the settings, such that if the SMTP server certificate is not valid, then you might not care and just send the email anyway. To find this setting, don't forget to enable the Email feature. After that, you can navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Email, where you can find the Ignore Invalid SSL Certificate checkbox. All Users and Custom User Settings deployment steps Now, we have two new deployment steps to export every user and to export all, or specified custom user settings. These steps contain the user's name, user ID, email of the user, password hash, security stamp, phone number, and all the important things and the custom settings of the users. And it's safe because it's a password hash, and the data protection key that created this hash is secure. If you navigate to Configuration -> Import/Export -> Deployment Plans, you can create a new deployment plan. If you click the Manage Steps button, you will find the Add Step button, which helps you to add deployment steps to your plan. If you filter on the user keyword, you will find these new steps. Drop support for .NET 6 and .NET 7 The latest LTS version of one of the world's leading development platforms was released on November 14, 2023. And Orchard Core now supports .NET 8! It also means that the upcoming version of Orchard will not support .NET 6 and .NET 7. Our practice has always been to support the latest LTS version of .NET, and additionally, the latest version if it's different. Dropping older versions allows us to use new features from .NET 8, and drop packages that are not required anymore (like NewtonSoft.Json). It should be as easy as updating the target framework in the websites that decide to upgrade to the next Orchard Core version. If you head to the documentation of the upcoming Orchard Core release, you will notice this breaking change there as well. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 486 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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 a way to restart an instance of a workflow, Http Redirect to Form Location Task - This week in Orchard (17/11/2023)

Thumbnails for the media library, add a way to restart an instance of a workflow, and a demo about the Http Redirect to Form Location Task! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Thumbnails for the media library In the media library, there are new icons and thumbnails for well-known file types using Font Awesome icons. Here, you can see the assets provided by the Blog recipe. When you are uploading a PDF or an XLXS file, you can see the new icons instead of the old ones. Add a way to restart an instance of a workflow Sometimes, a workflow instance can fail for some reason, for example, we have a workflow that sends an email and fails. It would be helpful if we could restart the instance. This change adds a button next to the Delete button named Restart. This takes the current workflow state and restarts it. As you can see here, we have a workflow called test with one faulted instance. If we hit the Restart button near the faulted instance, it creates another instance that can run successfully. To do that, there is a new RestartWorkflowAsync method in the IWorkflowManager interface, which starts a new workflow using the specified workflow definition. Each type of activity can implement custom logic when a workflow instance has been restarted because sometimes it needs to load some extra state. This can be achieved by implementing the OnWorkflowRestartingAsync and OnWorkflowRestartedAsync methods. For example, the ContentActivity now stores the content item version ID of the content item that triggered the workflow. It means when you retrigger a workflow, you can use the same version of the content item that you were dealing with before. Demos Http Redirect to Form Location Task This feature allows you to be able to put a form on a page and then somehow redirect back to that same page where we came from using a workflow. We already have a workflow task that allows us to redirect the user to a specific location, which is great if you know where you want to go back to. Like, if you want to go back to the home page, then you can always redirect the users to the home page. But what if you want to reuse the same workflow for multiple forms (or reuse the same form on multiple pages) and then when the user submits that form, go back to where they submitted the form from? There is no way to do that right now and that's where this demo came from. How can we redirect the user back to the page where they came from? Now let's create two forms, called the Q&A form and Contact Us, it doesn't matter right now. The thing that matters is they are both using the same URL to submit the form. So, we will have one workflow that will do something, then it will redirect the user back to the source form. Here, you can notice a new checkbox called Save Form Location. If we want to redirect the user back to this form, it's required to put a tick into this checkbox to store the location of the form. It's time to create our workflow! Here, you can see that the starting task of our workflow is an Http Request Event, followed by a simple Notify Task. The last task is a new one, called Http Redirect To Form Location Task. The last remaining thing to do is to set up our activities. As you can see, the Http Request Event has a new textbox with a label Form Location. It serves as a key that will be added as an entry to the dictionary of re-hydrated values provided to the initiator of the workflow, the Output of the WorkflowContext. Meaning we store the location of the source form under this key in the dictionary. As you can see, we need to use this key for the Http Redirect To Form Location Task as well. In a nutshell, the Http Request Event stores the source form's URL in a Dictionary with the provided QAContactUsFormLocation key, and the Http Redirect To Form Location Task will read the entry from the dictionary where the key is QAContactUsFormLocation. It allows us to store the location of the source form. And as always, if you would like to know more about this new feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 485 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!

Introduce a new Navbar shape, Stimata Hotel is using Orchard Core - This week in Orchard (10/11/2023)

Introducing a new Navbar shape, centrally defining media resources, and the brand-new Orchard Core site of Stimata Hotel! Let's get right into the news! Orchard Core updates Introduce a new Navbar shape In the Admin theme, multiple shapes were injected in the Navbar space. We had a zone, that was called NavbarTop, we were injecting the user menu, and then we were injecting a shape for the links. We were creating three shapes, and instead, we now have a Navbar shape, which you can utilize in the Admin theme, in the Theme, and in your own theme. It allows you to utilize drivers to be able to add line items inside that Navbar shape. That makes things more dynamic. Like injecting a theme toggler, the icon that navigates you to the front-end site, the culture picker, etc., can be done by using the driver. You can read more about it by visiting the docs, and the change logs of the upcoming Orchard Core version are also updated to tell you some more details about it, for example, how you can add the Navbar shape into your own front-end theme and back-end theme. Centrally define media resources This change is about centrally defining media resources to avoid scattered file references. The script and the CSS files needed for the Media-related fields and parts (Html Body Part, Html Field, Markdown Body Part) were always injected in a way where we defined the source and the dependencies of the required resources. By adding these resources to the ResourceDefinition, we can easily inject them just by using their name. News from the community A new website using Orchard Core: Stimata Hotel Stimata Hotel is nestled in Flampouria, a charming coastal nook on the western side of Kythnos, captivating with its sandy beach and the mesmerizing sunset over the deep blue sea. Check out their brand-new, amazing-looking Orchard Core site here! 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. Ryan Drew Burnett started it, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier, it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Oh, and in case you haven't read our previous 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 484 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail 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!