This week, Mike Alhayek shows how to use Copilot directly inside Orchard Core!

But before that, check out some code where you can see that, starting now, Orchard supports static data migration methods, and suppressions are no longer required for migration steps that don't use instance state.

Welcome the first contribution from Jack Liu, who made the pagination of the List Part configurable to decide whether to show a full pager with page numbers or just the arrows to navigate to the previous and next pages.

Do you know that since 2013, we've been working with Óbuda University in a hands-on way to teach web development? If you are interested in our Orchard Core courses at the university, check out our post on our site!

As we mentioned, we started publishing last year's Harvest recordings to YouTube. Check them out for some inspiration, and don't forget to apply to be a speaker for this year's Harvest by the 5th of May, midnight, anywhere on Earth!

Ready to explore? Let's dive in!

This week in Orchard, we've got some exciting updates you won't want to miss!

Mike Alhayek showcases Knowledge Base Indexing, which automatically chunks, embeds, and indexes source documents into a unified AI Knowledge Base index for efficient vector search.

Hisham Bin Ateya introduces the new OrchardCore.ContentFields.Core module. You can now use content fields without pulling in the entire ContentFields module.

Thanks to Georg von Kries, Orchard Core now leverages source generators to boost performance by generating code at compile time and reducing reflection on critical paths.

And don't miss our RESCON case study, highlighting how we supported the builders of Ontario.

Ready to explore? Let's dive in!

This week, you can see a demo of the CrestApps.AgentSkills ecosystem by Mike Alhayek, which provides a clean, layered architecture for defining, organizing, and exposing AI skills in .NET, with first-class support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Orchard Core.

But before that, let us quickly mention how Georg von Kries refactored Orchard Core's code to optimize storage for display type locations, or how he obsoleted the synchronous CustomSettingsService.GetSettingsType method to improve performance by avoiding blocking calls, and to prepare the codebase for the future removal of the synchronous API.

Thank you for filling out the Orchard Harvest 2026 survey! Check out our post for the results and the future plans regarding Harvest!

This week, we mention the refactored IContentDefinitionService, allowing other modules to use content definition operations without referencing the entire ContentTypes module. See a demo of the Translation Editor that allows you to translate dynamic strings via the admin UI! And finally, check out a case study about how we rebuilt hajosnep.hu, Hungary's oldest maritime history association's website, with Orchard Core on DotNest!

This week's topics include adding ShapeResult.Cache() docs, and migrating Media and Resources modules from Gulp to asset manager pipeline, and a demo of the AI Chat Interactions module! Let's just get right into the news!

The wait is over: version 1.11 of Orchard CMS is finally here! In this post, we will cover everything you need to know about this release, including the improvements to Orchard Core, such as adding content lifecycle docs and using the SLNX solution file format. Without further ado, let's dive in!

Our last post of this year concerns moving GetAllCulturesAndAliases to the default implementation and adding missing docs for the Setup module. Don't forget to check out a demo about the Block Content Type Picker for Flow Part and Bag Part! We also want to share some photos of our Christmas event. Thank you all for reading our posts and for making the Orchard community stronger! See you next year!

After renewing and migrating lombiq.com to Orchard Core, our next bigger target was Orchard Dojo. Orchard Dojo was actually created before lombiq.com, so it was even older, but not by much. With our new experiences from migrating lombiq.com, we started working on Dojo.

A common question during Orchard Core development, something that came up again recently, is how to display something within the context of an Orchard page when that piece of data comes from your module? How can you "inject" something into the Orchard layout when you want to display e.g. a list of products retrieved from an external API? There are a couple of ways to do this depending on what exactly you need. All are fairly straightforward so let's see a quick rundown! Creating a whole page from you module If you want a whole page served by just your module then it's really simple: Create a module, add a controller as you'd do in standard ASP.NET Core MVC, make an action produce a view and that's it! The view will be wrapped into the Orchard layout so the theme you've selected will be visible around it: The basic styling will be there, the header and menu, any widgets you have put onto layers... Our Training Demo module has a simple sample exactly for this, just check it out and you'll see what we're talking about. The above screenshot comes from our Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution BTW. Creating a widget Widgets (see official docs) are basically little boxes of content or other functionality that you can put anywhere on the site. For example, an infobox about the site, a search box, a recent articles box, a footer can all be widgets. You can use them in two ways: Add a widget to a content item with Flow Part: Flow Part can be used to build flexible layouts out of various widgets, including nesting them (like putting widgets into a Container Widget). When you set up Orchard with the built-in Agency recipe and theme then you'll get a Page content type that has Flow Part out of the box: You can get the same content type from our Helpful Extensions Orchard Core module too. Another option to use widgets is to put them onto a layer, a sort of container of widgets. There you can place the widget into a global zone, an area of the Orchard layout, like the header, footer, or sidebars. The widgets on a layer will be displayed whenever the layer rule of that layer matches (you can think of it as a logic expression producing a boolean value), like on every page except the home page or on every page but only for authenticated visitors. For more info check out the docs. OK, but how can you create a widget? A widget is just a content item whose content type has its stereotype set as "Widget". You can change this value from the admin from under Content / Content Definitions and also from code. So, basically, the task is to create a content part of yours that'll display the data you want to show from its driver, then create a widget content type where that part is attached. Seems like a lot? It isn't, check out the relevant content part development tutorial again from the Training Demo, including creating a widget. Injecting a shape into the layout This can be a lot easier than developing a widget but also less flexible to use. You can also write your own code in a template (like a cshtml Razor file) and inject that into the Orchard layout directly. You can see an example of injecting a shape in the Training Demo module too. Displaying a shape from a Liquid Widget The Liquid Widget is a widget that can render a piece of Liquid markup. While there is such a widget in the Agency theme and you can throw it together from the admin quickly too the Helpful Libraries module has it built-in as well. With this widget and Orchard's pretty advanced Liquid support you can of course just write Liquid directly. However, for more complex apps maintaining templates editable from the admin quickly becomes an issue so we'd recommend keeping code in your modules and themes. The good news is that once you have a piece of Razor code in a cshtml template (or Liquid in a .liquid template) then you can just display it from a Liquid Widget! For example, if you have a WeatherData.cshtml template fetching some weather information from an external API then you can display it from a Liquid Widget, and thus use it just as any widget with this little piece of code: {% shape "WeatherData" %} There's more to it, check out the docs on the shape Liquid tag. Conclusion Pretty much that's it. There are other ways too but these are the most straightforward and most flexible ones. Do you have another technique you'd like others to know? Add below in the comments! 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!

So you heard about how fancy Owin is, with all of its loosely-coupled thingies? Well, it's now in Orchard: as you may have heard on this week's Community Meeting, you can now write Owin Middlewares in the Orchard-y way. Let's see how! We won't discuss how Owin works or what a middleware is, so if you don't know these yet, check out the linked meeting video. Also, make sure to grab the latest source from the 1.x branch of Orchard's repository because only the upcoming 1.9 version will have Owin support. First you'll need to get familiar with the IOwinMiddlewareProvider interface. Middleware providers are injected services that return a collection of OwinMiddlewareRegistration objects. The latter ones contain the actual middlewares, i.e. those delegates that will run when the Owin pipeline is executed. This all is where the magic happens: you need to implement IOwinMiddlewareProvider and inside your implementation create OwinMiddlewareRegistration instances. See the following example: public class OwinMiddleware : IOwinMiddlewareProvider { // Mostly you'll only need the WCA, see below why. private readonly IWorkContextAccessor _wca; // Or use Work<T> injections, also see below for the explanation. private readonly Work<ISiteService> _siteServiceWork; public ILogger Logger { get; set; } public OwinMiddleware( IWorkContextAccessor wca, Work<ISiteService> siteServiceWork) { _wca = wca; _siteServiceWork = siteServiceWork; Logger = NullLogger.Instance; } public IEnumerable<OwinMiddlewareRegistration> GetOwinMiddlewares() { return new[] { // Although we only construct a single OwinMiddlewareRegistration here, you could return multiple ones of course. new OwinMiddlewareRegistration { // The priority value decides the order of OwinMiddlewareRegistrations. I.e. "0" will run before "10", but registrations // without a priority value will run before the ones that have it set. // Note that this priority notation is the same as the one for shape placement (so you can e.g. use ":before"). Priority = "50", // This is the delegate that sets up middlewares. Configure = app => // This delegate is the actual middleware. // Make sure to add using Owin; otherwise you won't get why the following line won't compile. // The context is the Owin context, something similar to HttpContext; the next delegate is the next middleware // in the pipeline. // Note that you could write multiple configuration steps here, not just this one. app.Use(async (context, next) => { // Note that although your IOwinMiddlewareProvider behaves like an ordinay Orchard dependency, the middleware // delegate lives on its own and will run detached from the provider! Because of this you'll need to either // access the Work Context as we do here, or inject your dependencies as Work<TDependency> objects. If you // build multiple middlewares with many dependencies here, doing the following is a better choice. var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); // But this would be an alternative: var siteSettings = _siteServiceWork.Value.GetSiteSettings(); var clock = workContext.Resolve<IClock>(); var requestStart = clock.UtcNow; // We let the next middleware run, but this is not mandatory: if this middleware would return a cached page // for example then we could just leave this out. await next.Invoke(); // Think twice when wrapping this call into a try-catch: here you'd catch all exceptions that would normally // result in a 404 or an 503, so it's maybe better to always let them bubble up. But keep in mind that any // uncaught exception here in your code will result in a YSOD. var requestDuration = clock.UtcNow - requestStart; // No need to use the ugly HttpContext, because we have OwinContext! var url = context.Request.Uri; // OK, but what if we _really_ need something from HttpContext? if (context.Environment.ContainsKey("System.Web.HttpContextBase")) // This is Orchard, so should be true... { var httpContext = context.Environment["System.Web.HttpContextBase"] as System.Web.HttpContextBase; if (httpContext != null) { // Voilá, we have the ugly HttpContext again! Like RouteData: var routeDataValues = httpContext.Request.RequestContext.RouteData.Values; // ...you know what to do. } } Logger.Information("The request to " + url + " on the site " + siteSettings.SiteName + " had taken " + requestDuration + "time."); // You see, we've done something useful! }) } }; } } Oh, and you'll see inline documentation for all the Owin interfaces :-). Also this sample will be part of the Training Demo module. Happy Owin'!