See how we replaced the dynamic ContentCard shapes with strongly typed shapes to enhance Orchard Core development! Take a look at the updated documentation for the UserDisplayName shape if you struggled to display user information in your custom format. You could also see a demo about how to expose recipe step metadata and JSON schemas, enabling IDE autocompletion, AI tooling integration, and recipe validation. Oh, and have we mentioned that Orchard Core Commerce has just got a fresh new release?

This week's topics include displaying a badge when a user is locked out, renaming the ResetIndexProfile and RebuildIndexProfile recipe steps, and enhancing documentation for the indexing module. And have we mentioned that we've released a new version of our Orchard Visual Studio Extension, which now includes support for Razor Pages to the Dependency Injector?

This week's topics are migrating the OpenID module to OpenIddict 6, adding Recipe Roles permission behavior, and we will mention our latest Orchard Nuggets post, where you can learn how to add media management to an ASP.NET Core app. Without further ado, let's dive in!

New NamedRecipeStepHandler base class and users with permission can disable Two-Factor Authentication are the topics for this week. Don't forget to check out our newest Orchard Nuggets post about how to add an audit trail to an ASP.NET Core app! Let's see the details!

Don't configure JsonOptions by default, and introducing DeploymentSourceBase to simplify DeploymentSource are the topics for this week. All of the recordings of Orchard Harvest 2024 are up on YouTube! Check out our post for the details!

Allow any user to manage two-factor authentication, show recipe error instead of throwing an exception, and a demo about Dynamic index tables are the topics for the week. You can still apply to speak at Harvest 2024 and share your insights on Orchard Core's future, CMS roles, AI tools, cloud integrations, and more! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Allow any user to manage two-factor authentication Two-factor authentication (2FA) is now available for all users. Previously, only users with permission to access the admin area could set up their 2FA methods, although all users could still use 2FA if it was set up by an admin. To enable this change, the method IsRequiredAsync() in both the ITwoFactorAuthenticationHandlerCoordinator and ITwoFactorAuthenticationHandler interfaces has been updated to IsRequiredAsync(IUser user). Summary of changes The feature OrchardCore.Users.EmailConfirmation was removed. This feature was recently added and was enabled by dependency only. Its services have been moved up to the OrchardCore.Users feature since it is a core functional and needed by OrchardCore.Users. Using the 2FA email method now requires email confirmation using the existing email confirmation process. As mentioned, the method IsRequiredAsync() in both the ITwoFactorAuthenticationHandlerCoordinator and ITwoFactorAuthenticationHandler was changed to IsRequiredAsync(IUser user). OK, so, what does it look like in action? First of all, you have to make sure that you have at least one two-factor authentication method enabled. To do that, you have to navigate to Configuration -> Features and enable the regarding features. We enabled two modules: Two-Factor Authenticator App Method: Provides users with a two-factor authentication method through any Authentication App. Two-Factor Email Method: Provides users with a two-factor authentication method through an Email service. Orchard Core provides a third two-factor authentication method through an SMS service but these two will be enough for demonstration. After that, we need to have a user without any special roles. We created a user under Security -> Users, where we used John as the user's name. Make sure that this user is enabled to be able to log in as John. The last thing we have to do is to make sure that the Default Theme is the current site theme because that theme renders the navbar by default and includes the dropdown with the Security-related settings. And as you can see in the screen below, we logged in as John. If you click Security on the dropdown menu that we mentioned earlier, you may notice that John can enable the two-factor authentication by adding one of the below two-factor methods. The SMS is not here, because we have only enabled the App Method and the Email Method features. Show recipe error instead of throwing an exception Currently, when importing a recipe and something goes throw, implementations of IRecipeStepHandler or IRecipeEventHandler will throw exceptions to report errors if something fails to import. In a production environment, the user gets a white page, which leaves them lost on what had happened. This is no longer the recommended approach for error reporting. Now, to handle errors, we have introduced a new property named Errors in the RecipeExecutionContext. This property allows you to log errors instead of throwing exceptions. These errors should be localized and must not contain any sensitive data, as they are visible to the end user. Exceptions are still used for logging additional information, but these are not shown to the end user. Additionally, if an error occurs, a new custom exception, RecipeExecutionException, is thrown. Let's say you want to import a deployment package or import JSON from text. Assume that the JSON contains some errors in both cases. Here, you can see that Orchard Core shows the error to the user so they have feedback instead of dumping an exception or a white page. And the same applies if you want to execute a recipe that contains errors. Demos Dynamic Index Tables When using YesSql index tables, you have to build these index tables using code. This solution provides you with a way to build index tables without the need to write code. Using the admin UI, you can select the content type you want to index and you can add the table columns using a nice UI. You can also use a script to execute to build the column value mapping. Here, you can return how you wanted to be your content item indexed. In the screen below, you can see the index table for the content type called Comic Book. In the Map Script editor, we defined what we should need to return when retrieving the values inside the DisplayText, IssueVolumeNumber, and ReleaseDate columns. After that, if you do a SELECT * query for this index table, you may notice that the table contains the columns defined in the previous step. And it's just the top of everything this feature offers. If you are curious about the details, check out this demo video on YouTube for more! News from the community Orchard Harvest 2024 date and location Get ready to power up your Orchard skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! Join us on September 12th-13th at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in lively Las Vegas for two days packed with learning, coding, and community fun. What can you expect at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024? Hands-On Workshops: Elevate your coding game with interactive sessions led by industry experts. Insider Insights: Learn best practices, advanced techniques, and real-world insights from qualified developers. Global Connections: Connect with fellow enthusiasts, exchange ideas, and forge meaningful relationships within the Orchard community. Special Perks: Participants get exclusive discounts on accommodations at the Orleans Hotel and Casino. Can't wait until September? Check out recordings from last year's special online Orchard Harvest on our YouTube channel here. Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? Reserve your spot today and take advantage of early-bird pricing at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024. We also opened the registration form for the speakers: https://forms.office.com/e/fewh7hh20d This year's leading themes: Leading up to a v3.0, what will the future Orchard Core look like? What's the role of a CMS nowadays (with the decoupled/headless operating models, and AI development tools) Explore some advanced topics such as Shapes, Placements, Cloud Integrations, Performance, module extensibility, etc. Showcases on implementing Orchard Core in action. We've extended the sign-up period by another 2 weeks, so if you haven't signed up yet, you can still sign up now! Apply to be a speaker until the 29th of June, midnight Anywhere on Earth! We'll notify you whether your talk is selected for Harvest in 1 or 2 weeks after the application period. The chosen speakers will receive complimentary tickets for the event. Want to support our mission? Become a sponsor! Reach out to us at [email protected] or [email protected] to explore sponsorship opportunities. Secure your spot today and get ready to level up your skills at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024! See you there! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 473 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!

Support comments in recipes, support Create and CreateAsync in DataMigrationManager, and a demo about a Multitenant Decoupled Blazor InteractiveServer Example! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Support comments in recipes The recipe reader doesn't support comments in JSON (it's a mode that isn't turned on). This can be annoying when you have a lot of recipes and need to make notes in them as to why you did something. It's because System.Text.Json by default doesn't support comments. We parse using JOptions.Document that is not configured to allow comments. From now on, the settings of the JOptions have been changed to allow comments in recipes. Support Create and CreateAsync in DataMigrationManager You could run into a problem with data migrations: your migrations may not proceed after a module's initialization. The reason for that could be a change of synchronous code to asynchronous. It can happen because you may forget to add the Async suffix in the CreateAsync method. That could be OK, but there is inconsistency in the behavior of UpdateFromX(Async) and Create(Async). Updates work correctly no matter what suffix but Create does not. Now, this behavior has been unified; both Create and CreateAsync methods are now supported. Demos Multitenant Decoupled Blazor InteractiveServer Example In this demo, you can see how to use Orchard Core in a decoupled scenario. There's also a discussion under a GitHub PR to add a Blazor guide for decoupled CMS. Sijmen Koffeman decided to follow this guide and make this a multi-tenant application because that would be very interesting to do in his current situation where he maintains a line of business applications that they provide to several tenants. He took the example from the guide and made it further, and that works so far. In his demo, you can do a deep dive into the code that sits inside the Orchard Core Multitenant Decoupled Blazor InteractiveServer Example repository to see the current state of this work. Head to YouTube for a recording to know more! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 472 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 search handler; fix bad async usage in RecipeHarvester, and a demo about the Gravatar Module! Check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates Add search handler You may need a way to be able to log search attempts. Like if a search is leading to 0 hits, you want to know about it and report on it. This is something we can easily add by adding a handler that is called after a search is executed. So, this feature is about adding an ISearchHandler which is called from the search controller. This handler has a SearchedAsync method that is triggered after a search is executed. In the following screen, you can see the ISearchHandler interface itself, and the code that invokes its SearchedAsync method. Fix bad async usage in RecipeHarvester The IRecipeReader interface has a GetRecipeDescriptor method, which is now marked as obsolete. Instead of that, you will need to use the new GetRecipeDescriptorAsync in the future. The reason for that is the HarvestRecipesAsync method in the RecipeHarvester was not awaited, and the solution was to have a foreach loop to do an await GetRecipeDescriptorAsync() since it doesn't require thread safety. Demos Gravatar Module Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally unique avatars. On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an image of their choice to be associated with that email address. And the OrchardCoreContrib.Modules repository contains a module that utilizes the Gravatar service! So, for this demo, we will clone the following GitHub repository, which contains a set of modules for Orchard Core CMS that is driven by 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. The module that enables user avatars using the Gravatar service is called the Gravatar Module. If you run this solution and enter the admin site using the admin username and admin@OCC123 password, you can navigate to Configuration -> Features and search for the "gravatar" word to enable the Gravatar feature. This will mean that now you can utilize the new Gravatar HTML Tag Helper and the gravatar_url Liquid Filter. Let's try them out! To use the new Liquid Filter, we created a new content type with the Liquid Part attached to be able to add some Liquid code to our content item. We created a new content item of this content type and called it Gravatar Liquid Filter Demo. Here we constructed a list that contains the names and email addresses of some of the main Orchard Core contributors. Please note that the reason why we can use these email addresses here is that all of these addresses have an associated Gravatar. The gravatar_url Liquid Filter calls the GetAvatarUrl method of the GravatarService to retrieve the Gravatar image URL. Once we have the URL, we can use it as the src for the img HTML tag. The Gravatar Tag Helper is already utilized by the Gravatar module. If you check out the navigation bar of the admin site, you can see the Gravatar of the currently logged-in user here instead of the default one. That's because the module contains a UserMenu.cshtml file which overrides the given shape. Here we used the email address of the currently logged-in user and also provided a size, which is the width of the rendered image. 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 434 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!

Lucene index rebuild and reset steps, update all action bars, utilize ContentTypeExtensions, and a demo about the Lombiq GitHub Actions project! Do we need to tell more about the content of our current post? Let's jump into the recent news of Orchard Core! Orchard Core updates Lucene index rebuild and reset steps Currently, when we are creating a search index from a recipe it doesn't build the index. This causes issues with Lucene and Elasticsearch where the Queries won't return any results, and also Elasticsearch will log an issue about "all shards failed" if nothing has been indexed yet in its indexes. It would be nice to be able to trigger an index to be rebuilt or reset from a scheduled background task as a one-time-only task. And from now on, you will find two new recipe steps that will help you with that: The Reset Lucene Search Index Step resets a Lucene index. The Rebuild Lucene Search Index Step rebuilds a Lucene index. You can find more information about how you can use these new recipe steps in the Orchard Core documentation. Update all action bars We have some improvements regarding the action bars on the admin UI of Orchard Core. As you can see on the screen below, there was a lot of wasted space between the search box and the New button. There was an extra round space between the filter icon and the search box and we also had uneven spaces, as you can see. The other thing is when using a mobile phone to manage contents (or any view with an action bar), the search input on the top shows up very small because of the wasted space between the search box and the New button. And here you can see the updated action bar. You can see that all of the mentioned issues are resolved like the search box is now longer, and we have equal spaces. Utilize ContentTypeExtensions We have had a static class called ContentTypeExtensions for a while now in the source, which contains several useful extensions. Like shortcuts to tell that the given content type is creatable, versionable, has stereotypes, and so on. Here the goal was to use the newly added extensions ContentTypeExtensions across the solution. Demos Lombiq GitHub Actions The Lombiq GitHub Actions project contains extensions that make a lot of things very easy in an Orchard Core or an Orchard Core-based project. If you don't know GitHub Actions or aren't entirely clear with the terminology, GitHub actions are GitHub's automation platform or CI/CD platform. Orchard Core of course also uses it to run various builds. And how you define a pipeline there is by creating workflows and/or composite actions. Workflows are what actually run, and actions are something that you can add on your own as well, these are things that workflows can call. Workflow is kind of like a program, and action is like a library that your program calls into. And of course, actions can be third-party as well. The point here is that you can use GitHub actions to automate a lot of things, like .NET builds, running tests, and doing various verifications on a pull request, and you can also do all kinds of modularization between these builds. And what we have under this project are workflows and actions. Workflows that you can call from your own workflows. Pretty much like one-liners, for example, to run the .NET build and execute a test. Actions are the building blocks that you can also use if you just want to have something specific. And we have quite a lot of actions and workflows here. Let's check out the workflow called Build and Test Orchard Core solution workflow! Here you can see how you use it. The example above is not even a minimal usage actually, it can be even shorter. This can be your GitHub Actions workflow in your own repository with an Orchard Core application, where you execute the workflow that we provide here. This is actually used in Orchard Core Commerce as well. If you check out the build-and-test.yml file inside the repository, you will find all the code that is necessary to run such builds. If you check out the details of a pull request inside the Commerce repository, you will see there are builds for Ubuntu and Windows as well. These are all the automated checks that we run. This is quite a long build because it's not just a .NET build, it also runs all kinds of static code analysis. It verifies that .NET packages are consolidated, and it also runs unit and UI tests with SQL Server and Azure Storage actually. And the Lombiq GitHub Actions projects contain a lot more than that! Are you interested in the details of what you can achieve if you use this project in yours too? If your answer is yes, or you want to know more about this automation platform check out this recording on YouTube for more! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 365 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 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 an AppSetting option to disable SQLite connection pooling, leveraging your CSPROJ meta information and news and updates around the Lombiq Helpful Libraries! Check out our current post to read about the details! Orchard Core updates Remove Lucene from built-in recipes This is about making the built-in setup recipes lightweight: Lucene is a feature that you don't need on every site, especially due to it storing files on the local file system that need to be preserved (i.e., not temp files) it needs special considerations for hosting (you need to take care of those files when moving the app between environments and doing deployments). The goal here is to not enable Lucene by default in the following recipes: Headless: just remove it. Blank: just remove it. Blog: Create an SQL RecentBlogPosts Query and don't enable Lucene by default. Have a separate, non-setup recipe to set up the search just for a frontend search page (i.e., 90% of what happens related to Lucene in the recipe now). Have a second non-setup recipe that runs the previous one and also swaps out RecentBlogPosts with a Lucene Query. And from now you can find two new optional recipes in the TheBlogTheme: Lucene Query Recipe: this recipe runs the Blog Lucene Search recipe and as an example, the recipe replaces the RecentBlogPosts SQL query with a Lucene query. Lucene Search Recipe: this recipe enables the Lucene feature and creates the Search setting, Lucene indices, and permissions. The Recipes and Starter Themes page of the Orchard Core documentation has also been updated to reflect these changes. Leverage CSPROJ meta information Out of the box, a Manifest.cs file is generated, which includes the ModuleAttribute, FeatureAttribute, ThemeAttribute, and so forth, that describe the Orchard Core meta-information about your projects. However, let's say you want to connect available meta properties at the CSPROJ level, i.e., such properties as $(MSBuildProjectName), $(AssemblyVersion), $(PackageTags), to name a few. At its core, you may want to follow a pattern similar to InternalsVisibleTo, i.e. <ItemGroup> <AssemblyAttribute Include="System.Runtime.CompilerServices.InternalsVisibleTo"> <_Parameter1>Test.$(MSBuildProjectName)</_Parameter1> </AssemblyAttribute></ItemGroup> The principles are the same, but in prior versions, the attribute constructors were not available to lean into. Michael W Powell also decided to provide helpful MSBuild Items as a more accessible, self-documenting shorthand input. From now, you can connect available meta properties at the CSPROJ level by leveraging CSPROJ meta information. If you are interested in how to leverage Orchard Core CSPROJ item lists and properties to enrich and get the absolute most from your authoring experience, this is the page you should take a look at! News from the community Lombiq Helpful Libraries - Navigation for Orchard Core The Lombiq Helpful Libraries contains various useful libraries that can be handy when developing for .NET, ASP.NET Core, and Orchard Core, to be used for your own projects. This time we would like to show you two helpful abstract classes: the NavigationProviderBase and the MainMenuNavigationProviderBase. NavigationProviderBase: an abstract base class for creating reducing boilerplate in INavigationProvider for checking the name parameter and if the user is authenticated. MainMenuNavigationProviderBase: an abstract base class derived from NavigationProviderBase for creating a home page menu structure using the main navigation name. If you use the Lombiq.BaseTheme automatically displays the generated menu as a widget in the Navigation zone. There is a Lombiq.HelpfulLibraries.Samples project for various examples in the form of an Orchard Core module. And that project contains a class called HelpfulLibrariesNavigationProvider. This class inherits the MainMenuNavigationProviderBase, which overrides the NavigationName with the "main" value. And if you check out the sample code here, you can see some other interesting stuff, like how we set up where to navigate users when they click on the given menu items. .ActionTask<LinqToDbSamplesController>(context, controller => controller.SimpleQuery())) In this case, we say that let's navigate the user to the SimpleQuery action of the LinqToDbSamplesController. And of course, you have the option to provide additional arguments as well if you check out the NavigationItemBuilderExtensions static class. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 247 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!