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!

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!

Make UserMenu and LoginMenu extensible to using drivers, add media file settings for allowed file types, and a blog post about Lombiq’s Journey with WTW’s Client Portal! Let's see the details in our post! Orchard Core updates Make UserMenu and LoginMenu extensible to using drivers Currently, there is no easy way to extend or inject items in UserMenu and LoginMenu. This is because all items in there are hard coded. If you remember, a few weeks ago we talked about the User Display Name and the User Avatar features, and in the recording, Mike Alhayek showed how difficult it is to change the UserMenu or LoginMenu shapes. The suggestion was to make these shapes extensible. From now on, to inject new menu items in either the LoginMenu or UserMenu you can implement and register an implementation of DisplayDriver<UserMenu>. The Detail display type is used to create the front-end menu, whereas the DetailAdmin is used to create the admin menu. Here you can see screenshots from TheTheme theme and from TheAdmin theme. As you can see, every menu item has its own shape which makes extending the items of these menus way more flexible. Add media file settings for allowed file types Currently, when using Media Field, there is no way to restrict which file types can be used. Any extension that is uploaded can be selected. This works great for the most part. But what if you want to allow specific types? For example, creating a slide show of some sort. You should not be able to select non-image files for a slide show. Having a way to specify image extensions will help in this case. And here comes the new settings! Here, you can see that we have a content type called Slide Show Item. This content type has a Media Field attached, called Pictures. If you edit the Pictures Media field, you have a way to set the allowed media types (image types for our case) by using the image types checkbox which helps you to select all the file extensions with the "image" type. With the help of this friendly UI, you can easily say that you only allow users to upload images using the Pictures Media Field. Note the list of the extensions here comes from existing MediaOptions. News from the community Lombiq’s Journey with WTW’s Client Portal WTW is a multinational company providing services, such as insurance brokerage, risk management, and human resources consulting. Recently we implemented a specialized Orchard Core Client Portal for them. It was an exciting project, and we delivered it on time. While the final steps on the rest of the architecture are being completed, the whole portal is gradually being rolled out to users during the summer of 2023. If you are interested in the details, check out this case study for more! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 499 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 support for multiple media files in Elasticsearch and support more searchable file types in Elasticsearch! Let's see the details in our post and jump into a discussion about having a community manager! Orchard Core updates Add support for multiple media files in Elasticsearch We support searching PDF files in Elasticsearch. We do this by reading the text of the PDF file found in Media Field and saving the text from the PDF file into a custom index in Elasticsearch. This is great, because now anytime a user searches for a text found in the PDF file, we return the content items where the PDF belongs. The problem is that we only store the text of the first attached PDF file, not all of it. The solution is when trying to index a Text/String-based field, we should add all the values to the same index key. This will allow the content of multiple files to be indexed as expected. Support more searchable file types in Elasticsearch And while we are talking about improving Elasticsearch, here comes another goodie again by Mike Alhayek! Until this improvement, we only supported searching in PDF files in Elasticsearch, but we should be able to search .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .ppt, .pptx. We can easily use Open XML SDK to add this support. The Open XML SDK provides tools for working with Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. If you navigate to Configuration -> Features, you will find a new feature called Media Indexing, which extends the media indexing capability to also encompass searching within files with the following extensions .txt, .md, .docx, and .pptx. If you check the files under the Indexing folder of the OrchardCore.Media library, you will find three new ones called PresentationDocumentMediaFileTextProvider, TextMediaFileTextProvider, and WordDocumentMediaFileTextProvider allowing you to index the content of the mentioned file types. News from the community Having a community manager The community had a discussion last week about having a community manager. There is no person in the Orchard world who would pretty much deal with marketing and design for Orchard, like doing that for a product. Things that a marketing manager or a product owner or something like that does for a paid product. Orchard Core is not like that but for open-source projects and communities, a community manager is the person who does such things. Get the word out, and evangelize Orchard, not just in word-of-mouth but in a systematic way. Make marketing in general and shepherd the project, so it follows the requirements and the needs of the community, and the manager responds to what happens in the world and does things that developers don't really like to do. Let's have this discussion in detail! Do you agree, do you have people you think would be suitable? What do you think about this? Chime into the following discussion and tell us your opinion! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 521 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!

Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries, enhance the Search module and UI, and a demo about the System Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Ensure the Background tasks name is visible for old entries In a recent change to the background tasks, a title was added to the background tasks. This works great for entries that have not been saved into the database. However, for entries that are already saved in the database, we do not have a title to show so it leads to no name being displayed on the UI. Since the title is not an editable field, we should always set the title to the default settings when showing tasks on the UI. Enhance the Search module and UI Currently, we have two different SearchController. Each one handles its own search provider, Lucence and Elasticsearch. We should be able to combine these two into one and place it on the Search module since that module's sole purpose is to export a front-end UI for the search. Also, we should add a setting to change the placeholder for the search bar. Additionally, we should have a Search Form widget that would allow the user to add a search widget. So, this update contains the following enhancements: Remove the SearchController from both Elasticsearch and the Lucene module. We now have one common SearchController in the Search module. The new controller now returns a shape instead of a view model which allows the user to override the default views. Adds settings to allow the user to define a title for the search page and also a placeholder text for the search bar. Add a Search widget that a user can add to their site. The default widget will direct the user to the /search route. Allow the user to optionally pass the index name in the route value. For example, /search/index-name the index-name is an optional value, and when it is not provided, the default index is used. Let's see some of the improvements mentioned in action! For this demonstration, we set up our site using the Blog recipe, and to be able to test the enhanced Search module, we have to enable the Search module itself and one search provider, which will be Lucene, for example. Now, we need to create a Lucene index under Search -> Indexing -> Lucene Indices. Here we added the name BlogPosts and included the Blog Post content type to the index. After that, we navigated to Search -> Settings -> Lucene and selected the BlogPosts search index as the default index to use for the search page and put a tick into the "Allow Lucene queries in search form" checkbox. Now we have a simple search set up, let's see the new Search Widget in action! We decided to place this widget on the home page. The predefined Blog content item is the home page in this recipe, so we edited the content definition of the Blog content type by adding a Flow Part to it. By having a Flow Part, we can add the new Search Form widget to the Blog content item. Here we can add some placeholder text if we want and can define the index name. Now it's time to utilize our widget! If we navigate to the home page of our site, we will see our Search Form widget. Let's type something and hit the Search button. As you can see, it lists our test posts which contain the "post" word. And you may notice the index name in the URL too (BlogPosts). If we had multiple indices, we can replace the BlogPosts one with any other existing index and that would mean that we search for something based on the content of that index. Remove .tiff from the supported images array Most modern web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, do not support the display of TIFF images natively on web pages. This is because TIFF files are typically very large in size and may take a long time to load. If you check out the MediaOrchardHelperExtensions class, you will see that the .tiff is now missing from the _imageExtensions. Demos System Module For this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by the community members who love Orchard Core. This will encourage all the passionate developers to build modules that aren't included in Orchard Core. Such modules may be necessary for the community or essential for any sort of CMS. This repository contains several modules, this time we will check out the one called System Module, which provides information about the currently running application; it can display the available system updates and put your site in maintenance mode while you upgrade. If you run this repository and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the "system" word. This will list the following features: System, System Maintenance, and System Updates. Enable them all! Now you will find a new option on the menu called System. Click on the Info under System! This page lists several useful information, like the ASP.NET Core Version, the OS Version, the Tenants, the enabled features, and so on. But you can find another option under System, called Updates. On this page, you can make sure that you are using the latest version of Orchard Core. If you are using the latest one (1.5 currently), you will see a "You're all up to date!" text, meaning there is no newer version of Orchard Core. And the third thing is the Maintenance mode. You can enable this mode by navigating to Configuration -> Settings -> System -> Maintenance and putting a tick into the "Allow maintenance mode" checkbox. If you do that and navigate to the front end of your site, you will see the page which shows you that the site is currently offline for maintenance. And as always, if you would like to learn more about this module, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 430 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!

Adding Description to Content Types, Amazon Media Storage feature updates, and making media library upload size limit error message more detailed. Check out our current post to read about the details! Orchard Core updates Add Description to Content Types If you navigate to the admin UI of Orchard Core and head to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Parts and create or edit a Content Part, you have the option to optionally provide a description for the part. And Orchard Core displays this description on the page that lists Content Parts. And from now you can add descriptions to Content Types too! Amazon S3 media options update Neglectedvalue changed the custom AwsStorageOptions to AWSOptions provided by the AWS team. AWSOptions are more flexible and provide more ways to interact with AWS infrastructure: A huge piece of code(registration of the IAmazonS3 client) was removed and changed to a single call services.AddAWSService<IAmazonS3>(options); ClientFactory now allows using the common AWS credentials mechanism. Documentation was also updated. This change will also introduce many breaking changes: the OrchardCore_Media_AmazonS3 config section was changed: RegionEndpoint was renamed to Region and extracted from the Credentials section to the root section of OrchardCore_Media_AmazonS3, AccessKeyId was renamed to AccessKey, ProfileName was renamed to Profile. You will find these breaking changes in the documentation of the next Orchard Core release. Making media library upload size limit error messages more detailed It's not a bug, but rather an enhancement. When uploading to the media library a file larger than MaxFileSize, the error message isn't user-friendly, it just says 'Error: error'. You can quickly reproduce this by turning on the Media feature and uploading a file larger than MaxFileSize. From now on, the error message is more detailed, as you can see on the screen above. Thanks to Zoltán Máté from Lombiq for his first contribution! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 291 subscribers! 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 is 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 Orchard meeting!

Adding WebP to Media Profile Options, fixing that Sitemap DateTime format should be ISO 8601 compliant, and updating the Scripting docs to reflect the correct way to use IScriptingManager and IScriptingEngine! Check out our current post to read about the details! Orchard Core updates Add WebP to Media Profile options WebP is an image file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency. Google announced the WebP format in September 2010 and released the first version of its supporting library in April 2018. And from now you can select the WebP when adding a new Media Profile! To try that out, simply navigate to the admin UI of Orchard and find Configuration -> Media -> Media Profiles. Here you can add a new Media Profile or edit the existing ones. And the editor contains a dropdown where you can select the format for the processed image (a default value means a format command will not be applied). And from now, you can see that the list contains the WebP as well. Don't forget to check out the docs to know more about Media and Media Profiles! Sitemap DateTime format should be ISO 8601 compliant When formatting DateTime, sitemap source builders use the current culture instead of an invariant one. Here are the steps to reproduce the behavior: Change default culture to fi or fi-FI. Create a sitemap and add content to it. As a result, the formatted DateTime in the sitemap uses a period as a separator instead of a colon as you can see on the screen. Now, this has been fixed to use a colon as a separator instead of a period. Update the Scripting docs to reflect the correct way to use IScriptingManager and IScriptingEngine The scripting module provides an API allowing you to evaluate custom scripts in different languages. The example in the docs on how to evaluate code by executing some script using the IScriptingManager did not work. In the past, the example shows this way to get the current date using script. var scriptingManager = serviceProvider.GetService<IScriptingManager>();var date = scriptingManager.Evaluate("js: new Date().toISOString()"); However, the IScriptingManager does not expose a method that accepts string only. The goal here is to update the example to something like: var scriptingManager = serviceProvider.GetService<IScriptingManager>();var engine = scriptingManager.GetScriptingEngine("js");var scope = engine.CreateScope(_scriptingManager.GlobalMethodProviders.SelectMany(x => x.GetMethods()), serviceProvider, null, null);var date = engine.Evaluate("js: new Date().toISOString()"); If you open up the page from the docs about the Scripting module, you will find an updated example code that describes the correct way how to execute a script by using the IScriptingManager interface. News from the community Updated Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions is an Orchard Core CMS Visual Studio solution. It contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries, like the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox or the Training Demo module that guides you to become an Orchard Core developer. And from now, this solution with all the extensions inside is updated for Orchard Core 1.4.! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 287 subscribers! 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 is 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 Orchard meeting!

New Amazon Media Storage feature that enables support for storing assets in Amazon S3 Bucket, a demo about the new Localization Matrix feature, and many more! Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Amazon S3 Media Storage support The Amazon Media Storage feature enables support for storing assets in Amazon S3 Bucket. The feature replaces the default App_Data file-based media store with an Amazon Media Storage Provider. Media is still served by the Orchard Core website, and the Media Cache module takes responsibility for fetching media, on the fly, from the Amazon S3 Bucket. This allows the Amazon Media Storage feature to support image resizing on the fly through integration with ImageSharp.Web. The URL generated by the AssetUrl helpers points to the Orchard Core website. You can also find documentation about what configuration values are used by default and can be customized. In the docs, you can also read about the S3 Bucket policies, how to configure a bucket per tenant or how to configure a single bucket, with a base folder per tenant, and many more. Auto register IDisplayManager<T> for T on AddTheming In Orchard Core, to add a display manager, we configure services for each type as below eg, services.AddScoped<IDisplayManager<MenuItem>, DisplayManager<MenuItem>>();services.AddScoped<IDisplayManager<User>, DisplayManager<User>>(); It seems redundant code to resolve services for DisplayManager for a given type. Orchard builder should register generic display manager resolver as below, similar to what it's already done for Documents here. So, from now, instead of registering all the implementations of IDisplayManager<T>, there is a generic registration which is in the OrchardCoreBuilderExtensions.cs. So, anytime you resolve a generic IDisplayManager, you will get the DisplayManager of this time. Demos Content Localization module Hisham Bin Ateya has an organization on GitHub called OrchardCore Contrib with a couple of projects under it. The OrchardCoreContrib.Modules repository contains several modules. If you remember, you could also see a demo about the Swagger module made by Hisham, as well. This time we will check out how you can use the Content Localization Module. The point here is that this module provides easy integration. So, if you add the OrchardCoreContrib.ContentLocalization NuGet package to your Orchard Core host project, you are good to go. The module provides features for localizing content with one feature in it, called Localization Matrix, that shows a matrix for localized content per culture. Just head to the admin UI of Orchard Core and search for the matrix word in the Configuration -> Features screen. To be able to see the goal of this feature, we need to do some preparations first. That means, we need to have a content type with the Localization Part attached. We set up our site using the Blog recipe, so we just navigate to Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types and edit the Blog Post one. And under Parts, we add the Localization Part to it. And don't forget to have at least two cultures that are supported by the site (Configuration -> Settings -> Localization -> Cultures). Now, let's create another localized version for the built-in post, and let's create a new blog post as well with only one localization. Here come our blog post content items. Now let's see the new feature in action. If you navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Localization -> Localization Matrix, you will see the new page added by this feature. This page shows you an overview of which content items are there in the system that is localizable (have Localization Part attached) and which versions they have. As you can see, we have the Hungarian and the US localization for the built-in blog post. But the blog post with the title Missing localization only has a US version but no Hungarian version. And as always, if you would like to know more about this feature, head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Core Commerce MVP planning and survey A few weeks ago, you could see a nice demo about the Orchard Core Commerce module. And in that blog post, we also mentioned that Lombiq provides stewardship for this module. That actually means that we will do code reviews and work on features and fixes. To have that, Márk Bartha (who is the project leader from our side) started this thread and added this survey. This is about asking the community what the most important features for you would be in an Orchard Core-based e-commerce solution. If you do e-commerce or if you have an opinion about e-commerce, please share your opinion here. The point of this is to try to do not all the things but focus on what is really needed first. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 279 subscribers! 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 is 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 Orchard meeting!

Huge YesSql updates, new cache failover and shared options, Media Library improvements, and a new site running on Orchard Core! Do you want to know more? Then don't forget to check out our current post! Orchard Core updates YesSql updates YesSql has updates for the following drivers: MySqlConnector 2.0, Npgsql 6.0, Microsoft.Data.Sqlite 6.0. The Npgsql 6.0 has breaking changes in terms of date and time serialization. The breaking change is in the way it handles time stamps and date-time storage and the type of column that it stores them into. The Microsoft.Data.Sqlite is on 6.0, which contains the SQLite Connection Pooling, so it's pooling SQLite connections now. If we check out the benchmarks for MVC, where Orchard is one of them, and it's running the About page on SQLite, and you can see that on both Windows and Linux it goes up from around 5000 requests per second to 16000 requests per second and also the latency went down. Removed beforeFolderAdded to stop multiple calls to fetch folders When you click OK on the new Media Folder name dialog, the first thing it does after creating the new folder emits beforeFolderAdded which loads the folder we are currently on. Then it emits the folderAdded, which selects the new folder (triggering a load of the new folder through the watcher). It appears that both requests are in flight at the same time, and we are seeing that occasionally the beforeFolderAdded request comes in last and then makes it appear as if the new folder has all the contents of the previously selected folder. bus.$on('addFolder', function (target, folder) { if (self.model == target) {bus.$emit('beforeFolderAdded', self.model); if (self.children !== null) { self.children.push(folder); } folder.parent = self.model; bus.$emit('folderAdded', folder); }}); So, when we create a folder, we fire the beforeFolderAdded then folderAdded both of which load contents of a folder, but there is no guarantee on the order these calls will resolve in. Occasionally, we are seeing the first call to the original folder come in second, and the new folder appears to be populated with images already. Cache Failover and Shared options Sometimes the Redis server is not available because there could be timeouts for example. What do you serve when Redis is down, and it's part of your system. Do you serve something or just wait and try again? You could say that if the cache fails then go to the database and return something from there. But at the same time, it can also be dangerous because you could expose yourself to put your site down. If you expect not to do a lot of database stuff because you have a caching layer, you can put your site down. The DefaultDynamicCacheService uses the IMemoryCache to at least prevent something if Redis is down. For example, cache the id of a requested document locally so that the memory cache is used during the FailoverRetryLatency, which is a configuration value that has a 30 seconds value by default. News from the community Dixin's Blog is running on Orchard Core If you navigate to https://weblogs.asp.net/dixin, you will find a blog that contains several interesting posts about .NET, Windows, and many more. The site is using Orchard Core, and as you may notice, it's very fast, no matter how much content it has on it. Lombiq Gulp Extensions with Stylelint Our Gulp Extensions project now also provides Sass SCSS linting with Stylelint! To use it in your Gulp JS SCSS build pipeline, just configure the corresponding SCSS targets Gulp task. Read more about how you can do that here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 232 subscribers! 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 is 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!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 1.1 is now available! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core and see a demo about a great third-party Orchard Core module that provides a dynamic styling content field for Orchard Core! Let's get started! Orchard Core updates Add Media background checkerboard pattern for transparent images Let's say that you have a site set up with the Blog recipe and you want to change the Banner Image of the predefined blog post. It's a possible scenario that you upload a PNG or a GIF file that has transparency. But the transparency of the selected image couldn't be easily seen because the admin theme has no support to show that the given image has a transparent background. To fix this issue, now you will have a background checkerboard to easily see the transparent parts of the image, that works in dark mode too. Here you can see that we uploaded and selected an Orchard Core logo that has a transparent background. Add Total support for Lucene API queries The change is just to return whatever the query object is returned from the query API, and it might contain more than what the interface exposes, which is just the items. For instance, Lucene can return the number, the total items. SQL won't do that because that's too costly. Demos Dynamic style Content Field The ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.Styles module provides a dynamic styling Content Field for Orchard Core. The repository contains a sample project which includes custom configurations for the CKEditor toolbar. In this demo, we will clone the mentioned repository and run the solution inside. Set up your site using the Styles sample recipe that allows you to set up your site with additional pre-configured options, features, and settings out of the box. First of all, let's navigate to Design -> Style Schemas. A style schema defines how the Styles field will be edited, and which components will be available. Open up the one called H2 Color. As you can see here, we defined a component schema. At its most basic a schema entry must contain a reference to a Vuejs component and the description of how to render its entry as CSS. The renderer can be either a renderer name, e.g., "renderer": "CssSizeEntry" or a LiquidJS template for more complex schemas. Here the template says that set the color of the h2 tags to the #8bc34a hex value. Before moving forward, let's check out the content definition of the Style Guide content type that comes from the Styles sample recipe as well (Content -> Content Definition -> Content Types -> Style Guide). As you may notice, this content type has three Style fields attached. Now let's focus on the one with the display name Heading 2. Every Style field can have a selected style schema (H2 Color in this case), or you can select the Custom schema option from the drop-down to say I don't want to use a given style schema, I would like to define the schema here for this Style field. Now check out the predefined Style Guide content item. As you can see here, we have an h2 tag with the heading 2 text. And because we attached the H2 Color style schema with the Heading 2 Style field, when we render the content of this content item, the color of the text inside the h2 tag will be using the #8bc34a hex value. You can find other style schemas on the site, like the Css Variables one. Here you can see a range of CSS vars for the site. The BorderRadius adds rounded corners to the given elements. Here you can see we defined the value of the radius using rem. If you scroll back to the Style Guide content item, you will see that here we defined a my-sites-button class with a border value. The border-radius: var(--border-radius); means to use the defined BorderRadius value from a style schema. And here, you can see the usage of other variables from the style schemas like the button-background-color-hex, where you can easily say button-background-color-rgb as well if you defined the rgb value too. Here button is the name of the component, background-color is the name of the schema with a predefined hex and rgb colors. Now, if you open up the Style Guide content item, you will see something like this. Here you can see the color of heading 2, the border-radius of the buttons, and every other style that we defined using style schemas and attached them to our content type by using content fields. If you check out the README.md file of the repository, you will find nice, detailed documentation about the properties that you can use inside the schemas. And as always, you can find a recording about this module on YouTube to see this feature in action! News from the community Orchard Core 1.1 Orchard Core 1.1 is released! If you open up nuget.org and search for the OrchardCore.Application.Cms.Targets package, you will find the newest released version of Orchard Core! Upgrade your solution to 1.1 now! Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat or use the Discussions on GitHub and ask questions! Reusable tests in Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox The Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox is a web UI testing toolbox mostly for Orchard Core applications. Everything you need to do UI testing with Selenium for an Orchard app is here. UI Testing here is an automation that clicks through the web application in a browser. One of the most popular frameworks for that is Selenium, which does exactly that. You get an API to instruct a browser, and every major browser is supported. This UI Testing Toolbox provides a lot of features on top of Selenium for Orchard Core. Basically allowing you to UI test an Orchard Core application in a safe and parallelized way providing a lot of helpers, a lot of higher-level APIs allowing you to test your application with SQLite, with SQL Server with local media storage, or with Azure Blob Storage. And you can have a test e-mail sent with a local SMTP server too. Everything just works. Check out the highlights of the Readme.md file of this repository to see all of the features! We had a demo about the UI Testing Toolbox a few weeks ago. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this This week in Orchard post! And the UI Testing Toolbox just got something very useful: Reusable tests to check that basic Orchard Core features work, like login, registration, and content management. Make sure your Orchard app's basics work! Check out the sample here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 231 subscribers! 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 is 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!