Recent Posts and Articles
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Real world Orchard CMS – introduction.
So, I’ve been a bit quiet here recently, mainly because I’ve been absolutely swamped with a re-architecture project for a pretty major client, but any free time I did have I’ve been using it to learn about Orchard CMS. As you, yes you, you’re the only person that reads my blog… as you may know, I’ve had my own CMS for a number of years (http://www.fluxcms.co.uk or http://flux.codeplex.com), but with pressure of work I’ve not had much time to update it or add new features and to be honest, now that Orchard has released v1.1, I really don’t see much point in taking flux forward – Orchard kicks it’s ass to the ground and stomps on it’s private bits.
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Orchard upgrade from 0.9 and 1.0 to 1.1
I have 2 sites that I recently upgraded to Orchard 1.1.
The Orchard docs do a decent job of walking you through the process, BUT I ran into issues with each of the upgrades. The instructions to make a backup are just plain good advice (you need to do this).
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Customizing Orchard Themes using Shape Tracing and Url Alternates in Designer Tools
If you started developing Orchard Websites and custom Orchard Themes when Orchard 1.1 was released, consider yourself lucky! The new Designer Tools, like Shape Tracing and URL Alternates, that were released with Orchard 1.1 are an incredible leap forward in creating Orchard Themes. Shape Tracing is absolutely amazing and gets all the love, but let's not forget about the incredible usefulness of URL Alternates when it comes to overriding how things are displayed based on URL!
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Upgrading an Azure hosted Orchard install from 1.0 to 1.1
Last night, I finished upgrading this site from Orchard 1.0 to Orchard 1.1 (yay!). As such things go, it could have gone a lot worse, but it also took a long time. Most of that time was taken up because I had to essentially perform the upgrade twice – once an in-place attempt, and the second with a fresh copy of the Orchard source. So that I wouldn’t have to rely on my memory to recall the steps involved if I need to do this again, since the documentation doesn’t cover all of the gotchas, I’m posting the steps I followed. Feel free to leave feedback on what I’ve done wrong or how the process could be improved! -
Even better customizability in Orchard
One of our goals in Orchard is to make it possible and simple to change and customize the markup and style for everything that gets rendered by the application and its modules. Of course, this is made a lot trickier by our other big requirement of making everything a composition of atomic parts.
Yesterday, we brought on site a web developer who is a fan of Drupal and is occasionally using Joomla! and WordPress, in order to get some good feedback after her using Orchard on a project. And that we got.
One of the many interesting things she told us had one essential quality though: it was immediately actionable. Here is the idea...
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How to get a source code enlistment set-up for Orchard development
This screencast walks you through the process of setting up your development machine for Orchard development. -
Walking Through the Orchard Part 3 - BlogML Import and Rewrite Rules
This is Part 3 of my series on setting up my blog for Orchard CMS. In this post I will share my experience importing my old blog posts from the BlogML format into Orchard and setting up rewrite rules. -
Scope-based permissions for OpenId, Microsoft Connect and Facebook in Orchard CMS
Recently I have been updating my open authentication module to deal with a more granular approach to scope based permissions and how the admin user can set these up.
When enabling a Feature, the permissions attached to this feature will be inserted in to the database with default ones enabled.