This time, you can see a proof-of-concept demo for an admin UI-based theme editor with AI integration by Márk Bartha from Lombiq.

But before that, let us quickly mention the newly available storage indicator for the Media Library by Sára El-Saig, which notifies the user of the free space on the local file system when storing media items.

And thanks to Manuel Tamayo Montero, the Orchard Core documentation has been updated with additional lines to help developers use the Anchor Tag Helper.

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 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!

You can still cast your vote for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award! This week's topics include improving FlatPositionComparer performance and reducing allocations for ShapeDescriptors! See you next week at Orchard Harvest!

Cast your vote for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award! This week's topics include simplifying using StringValues in Liquid templates and shape morphing in Razor pages! Oh, and do you know about the Orchard Harvest's sponsorship opportunity?

Don't miss your chance to shape the conversation at the Orchard Harvest Conference 2025! It's also time to nominate exemplary community members for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award. This week's topics include introducing a new User Display Name shape and a new page in the documentation about the Archive Later feature.

The new AddShapeTableProvider extension method and the new External Authentication Feature are the topics for this week. Don't forget to check out our newest Orchard Nuggets post about how to add workflows to an ASP.NET Core app! Let's see the details!

Make it possible to add Razor HTML content to the shape as a property, OpenId UI Enhancements, and you still have some time to nominate exemplary community members for the Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award. Don't forget that we will have the Orchard Harvest conference in three weeks! Orchard Core updates Make it possible to add Razor HTML content to the shape as a property With this change, you can pass HTML content as shape properties using the <add-property name="propertyName"> child tag helper. The rendered inner HTML will be assigned to the given propertyName. This can be used to easily include complex HTML content in a reusable shape. This is similar to prop-* attributes, but you can also include Razor code as the IHtmlContent property value, which was impossible before. To test this new feature, we will use the Orchard Demo module and go to ~/OrchardCore.Demo/Home/AddProperty. To do that, make sure to reference the OrchardCore.Demo project to your web application. When you are ready, don't forget to enable the feature called Orchard Demo from the admin UI of Orchard Core under Configuration -> Features. Now let's see the code itself! The AddProperty method of the HomeController just simply renders the content of the AddProperty.cshtml file. Here, you can see that we render the EmbedContentInShape shape and pass some properties to it and the properties now can contain HTML content too. As you can see, the property named HtmlContent and OtherContent contains HTML text which is now fully supported. Of course, you can mix and match the different formats, for example, to only use <add-property> when you want to pass HTML content as property. OpenId UI Enhancements There were some changes recently regarding the UI of the Open ID module thanks to Mike Alhayek. You can create Open ID applications under Security -> OpenID Connect -> Management -> Applications. In the Applications list, he sorted the records by application display name. In both Create and Edit views: Moved the field Display Name to be the very first field since that is a UI field. Moved the Client Secret field just below the Client Id. So the order is Display Name, Client Id then Client Secret. Added a way to create a new random client ID and password. Also, a way to copy the values. Localized the Flow phrase. You can create scopes under Security -> OpenID Connect -> Management -> Scopes. Here, he moved the field Display Name to be the very first field since that is a UI field. News from the community Jean-Thierry Kéchichian Community Award 2024 At the end of last year, our good friend, Jean-Thierry Kéchichian, a truly extraordinary member of our community, unexpectedly passed away. To honor him, keep his memory alive, and foremost, inspire people to do good work for the community, we launched an award named after him for exceptional community members. Every year, the community votes on who has done the most for Orchard Core. This can entail activities in the form of e.g., code contributions (including documentation), help under issues and discussion, evangelization outreach, community management, or anything else. However, it needs to be public and tangible. It's your turn to nominate a community member! You will find this discussion in GitHub where you can mention somebody who you think has done most for Orchard Core, with a sentence explaining what they've done. Nominations are open until the 27th at midnight, Anywhere on Earth. After that, we'll vote on the nominees secretly. The winner is then announced at the Orchard Harvest conference on the 12th of September. Orchard Harvest 2024 The full Orchard Harvest program has finally arrived. This year’s program is packed with insightful sessions, engaging panels, and ample opportunities to connect with the Orchard community and to make Orchard Harvest the biggest Orchard Core event of the year. All sessions will be recorded and published on the Orchard YouTube channel after the event, so even if you can't make it live, you can see the sessions. However, being there live will allow you to ask the speakers, meet other community members, and have a lot of fun! All indicated times are local time in Las Vegas. After each session, you'll have a chance to ask questions, and we'll have a short break too. Here is a detailed schedule to help you prepare for the conference. Can't wait until September? Check out recordings from last year's special online Orchard Harvest on this YouTube channel here. Ready to be a part of something extraordinary? Reserve your spot today at Orchard Harvest Conference 2024 and get ready to level up your skills! See you there! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 465 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!

Convert Themes views to shapes, improving notification filter performance, and announcing the 2.0 release of the Orchard Core Commerce project are the topics for this week! Without further ado, let's get started! Orchard Core updates Convert Themes views to shapes Before this change, there was no flexible way to contribute to the output of the Themes views. For example, there was no way to inject a "Customize" button next to the Enable/Disable button to allow customizing the appearance. The goal of this change is to convert the concrete view of the Themes view to shapes so we can inject shapes into the output. As you can see, the outcome is the same. The only difference is that people can inject shapes into variance zones now. Improve notification filter performance After the move to System.Text.Json some metrics went up. This fixed the lock contentions and large object heaps. Plus, some other GC stats are also better. The creation of JsonSerializerOptions uses a weak reference and locks internally so they shouldn't be created too often. The NotifyFilter was created then eagerly while not necessary. Now it's only on demand with some extra caching. The NotifyFilter class is a filter, meaning it will be invoked in every request. Orchard Core will invoke its OnHandlerExecuting method. And on every request, it was creating a new filter instance and it was then creating a new JsonSerializerOptions. It's creating a new one because it needs to set a dynamic converter, a converter that needs something that the DI resolves. And creating a JsonSerializerOptions object is expensive. Now you can just resolve the IOptions<NotifyJsonSerializerOptions> which class contains the JsonSerializerOptions to improve the performance. News from the community Orchard Core Commerce 2.0 Orchard Core Commerce is an Orchard Core port and partial rewrite of the open-source Nwazet Commerce module that was built for Orchard CMS 1.x. Nwazet Commerce was initially built in 2012 by Bertrand Le Roy, loosely based on a commerce sample by Sipke Shoorstra. The initial goal of Nwazet Commerce was to power the website of the hardware startup Nwazet. While Nwazet is no longer operating, the Nwazet Commerce project went on and was further developed by a group of passionate contributors who are using the platform for their own, and their customer's websites. Like Orchard, Nwazet Commerce was built with extensibility in mind, and as such, it has its own extensions (typical examples include local tax and shipping modules). It's also a pure, idiomatic Orchard. Orchard Core represents a major evolution of the Orchard design principles and is sufficiently different that running Nwazet Commerce on it will necessitate significant work. As such, the community decided that starting from a blank slate was the best way to go, so they will port Nwazet Commerce piece by piece, being careful to accurately apply Orchard Core's new design principles. The community also decided to adopt a new name that gets rid of the now obsolete origins and establishes our ambition for the module to become the go-to commerce module for Orchard Core. Back in 2022, we published a demo where you could see the current state of the module. A few months later, we reached another milestone when we finished with the basic implementation of Stripe Payment integration (without taxation, shipping, etc.). Stripe is a payment service provider that business owners can use to accept dozens of payment methods, from credit cards to buy now, pay later services. Stripe Payments handles the steps between a customer providing their card information and learning that their payment has been accepted. As you may know, Lombiq provides stewardship for the Orchard Core Commerce module. That means that we do code reviews and work on features and fixes. At the beginning of 2023, we released the 1.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! You can read some of the key features of the release in this post. You can easily try it out by cloning this repo and building and running the OrchardCore.Commerce.Web project. Thanks to Auto Setup, the site will be set up with the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe. After you can go to the dashboard, using the credentials admin and Password1!, and go to Content -> Content Items to create your first Product. And one month ago, we released the 2.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! This is a major version increment because there are some breaking changes, so watch out! We have upgraded to the latest Orchard Core 1.8 packages too. One of the breaking changes is that the built-in Stripe payment provider support has been separated into a standalone package. For now, it's still the only payment processor we support out-of-the-box but we plan to expand that in the near future. You can also implement your custom payment providers. We've also added product listing with filter, search and paging support, the ability to resume payment from the order page, more documentation including a guide, and many other improvements, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements. Check out the full list of changes here. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 470 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!

Use PagerAsync and PagerSlimAsync instead of using the dynamic New, new Azure AI Search feature and a demo about our Walkthroughs module for Orchard Core! Let's see the details! Orchard Core updates Use PagerAsync and PagerSlimAsync instead of using dynamic New Since we have nice extensions for the pager, it is better to use them to reduce the dynamic calls in the code. It's faster to use these PagerAsync and PagerSlimAsync extension methods instead of having dynamic calls to render the Pager and the PagerSlim shapes. Azure AI Search feature Azure AI Search, an AI-powered information retrieval platform, helps developers build rich search experiences and generative AI apps that combine large language models with enterprise data. Implement search functionality for any mobile or search application within your organization or as part of the software as a service (SaaS) apps. And from now on, Orchard Core supports Azure AI Search! Let's see how you can utilize this feature! First of all, you need to enable the Azure AI Search feature under Configuration -> Features. But before enabling the service, you'll need to configure the connection to the server. By default, you can navigate to Configurations -> Settings -> Azure AI Search and provide the Azure Search AI service info. Now, we can create a new index for the Article content type (that is a predefined content type created by the Blog recipe). When creating, resetting, or rebuilding an index, we trigger a job in the background that will upload all existing content items to the Azure AI Search index so the data will become searchable shortly after the action. You can create an Azure AI Search Index under Search -> Indexing -> Azure AI Indices. In this demo, we enabled the Search module to enable frontend search. Then, we used the previously created articles index as the default search index. Head to Search -> Settings -> Azure AI Search and select the articles index. Make sure that the default search provider is the Azure AI Search in the Content tab. If you head back to the default search form URL (~/search) and type something in it to search for the predefined article content item, you will get back the article content item. If you navigate to the Microsoft Azure portal to check out your search service, you will find that the articles index has one document, and the field names are coming from Orchard Core. It was just a quick demonstration of this feature, head to the documentation page of Orchard Core to learn more about it! Demos Lombiq Walkthroughs for Orchard Core This demo is about the Orchard Core Walkthroughs module for teaching Orchard Core fundamentals by guiding the user in step-by-step guides. This walkthrough covers key Orchard Core features, such as content management, user roles, and theme selection, and points users to further learning resources. Now it's time to try out this feature 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 Lombiq Walkthroughs module too. So, let's run this solution and enable the Lombiq Walkthroughs feature under Configuration -> Features. Now, if you head back to the site's homepage, you will see the first welcoming modal. The module uses shepherd.js, for the walkthroughs, and these modals are rendered by this library. Let's see it in action! As always, if you prefer videos, you can head to YouTube for a recording! News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 481 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!