ASP.NET MVP, Orchard Core Contributor

Orchard Core is available in RC 1: https://github.com/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore/releases/tag/1.0.0-rc1

Open-source, modular, multi-tenant application framework and CMS for ASP.NET Core

Flexible content management 

Define custom content types dynamically and reuse content fields. Define roles and permissions for all your users. 

Full, decoupled, or headless cms 

You can separate the content management from the front-end by using GraphQL, and create SPA applications or even static websites. 

Modular 

Every feature is a module which ships as a Nuget package, can be enabled, disabled or replaced. Create your own ecosystem of modules, or reuse existing ones to bootstrap your applications.

Multi-tenant

A single installation lets you manage multiple sites. The notion of Recipe lets you write reusable websites templates. 

Speed 

Between the fast performance of ASP.NET Core and the architectural choices of Orchard Core CMS, you get one of the fastest CMS solutions you have ever tried, on any OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS). 

Workflows 

Create content validation workflows, and define Web Hooks to trigger external processes or react to external events 

List of changes for this release

• Update to ASP.NET Core 3.0
• Content Localization
• RTL admin theme
• Resources CDN
• Media CDN support
• GitHub authentication
• Facebook applications
• .NET Core 3.0
• Localization NuGet packages
• Azure Media resizing
• SQL fields indexing
• Full Text aspect

Orchard Core is available in Beta 3: https://github.com/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore/releases/tag/1.0.0-beta3

Open-source, modular, multi-tenant application framework and CMS for ASP.NET Core

Flexible content management 

Define custom content types dynamically and reuse content fields. Define roles and permissions for all your users. 

Full, decoupled, or headless cms 

You can separate the content management from the front-end by using GraphQL, and create SPA applications or even static websites. 

Modular 

Every feature is a module which ships as a Nuget package, can be enabled, disabled or replaced. Create your own ecosystem of modules, or reuse existing ones to bootstrap your applications.

Multi-tenant

A single installation lets you manage multiple sites. The notion of Recipe lets you write reusable websites templates. 

Speed 

Between the fast performance of ASP.NET Core and the architectural choices of Orchard Core CMS, you get one of the fastest CMS solutions you have ever tried, on any OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS). 

Workflows 

Create content validation workflows, and define Web Hooks to trigger external processes or react to external events 

List of changes for this release

• Update to ASP.NET Core 2.2
• GraphQL for all Content
• Facebook, Microsoft Account, Google and Twitter authentication
• ASP.NET Configuration support
• Decoupled and headless CMS support
• Improved performance
• Background tasks management
• Taxonomies module
• Custom navigation
• ReCaptcha module
• Mini Profiler module
• Recipe migrations
• File based Content Definition
• The Coming Soon theme
• Edit and Display modes

Orchard Core is available in Beta 2: https://github.com/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore/releases 

Orchard Core consists of two different targets: 

• Orchard Core Framework: An application framework for building modular, multi-tenant applications on ASP.NET Core. 
• Orchard Core CMS: A Web Content Management System (CMS) built on top of the Orchard Core Framework. 

Here is a list of the new features implemented in this release: 

• Update to ASP.NET Core 2.1 
  • Precompiled Razor Views 
  • Razor Pages 
• Updated to Bootstrap 4.1 
• Admin responsive menu 
• Assets user interface improvements 
• Fragment caching 
• Content and Query tag helpers 
• Code based manifest files 
• Updated OpenId 
• Social login support 
• Email module 
• Password reset 
• Email confirmation 
• Site and User timezones 
• Date Time (with timezone), Date and Time fields 
• Workflows module 
• Forms module 
• Azure Blob Storage 
  • Assets 
  • Data Protection 
• dotnet new templates 

We are really proud to announce that the first version of Orchard Core has been released in Beta.

What is Orchard Core and Orchard Core CMS?

Orchard Core is a Modular and Extensible Application Framework developped on the .NET Core ecosystem.
It allows you to create Multi tenant SaaS applications and host multiple sites with only one instance.
Orchard Core CMS is a full featured Content Management System that provides many useful modules.
With it, you can easily enable existing features or add your own modules to extend your application.

What features are available?

These features are available out of the box:

• Nuget Packages: Add reference in your application to Orchard Core Nuget packages.
• Performance: Handle many requests per second by default and even more with Response Cache.
• Portable : You can develop and deploy on multiple platforms : Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Deployment: Import/Export the data and the structure of your site with deployment plans.
• Setup: Use different recipes to setup your site with initial features and content types using configurable steps and dynamic parameters. 
• Storage: YesSQL allows you to store your contents in SQL Server, SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL as if it was a document database.

Many other modules can allow you to create a CMS:

• Create your Content Types adding out of the box predefined Parts and Fields.
• Customize your site using Themes with ASP.NET Razor or Liquid syntax files.
• Define different Zones on the site and add Widgets anywhere in your pages.
• Declare Templates in admin that overrides the rendering of your content types.
• Edit your content with Wysiwyg or Mardown editors that can use Liquid filters.
• Get a Live Preview of your content in separate window while editing it from the admin.
• Manage the Users, Roles and Permissions to give access to the Admin dashboard pages.
• Manage your Assets and Media folders, upload files and add link to dynamically resized pictures.
• Organize your Contents and navigate in the site: Lists, Menus, Taxonomies, Urls, ...
• Search: Index your data and Query them in Sql or Lucene using Liquid syntax.

What is the current Status?

Orchard Core is currently in Beta. See the Roadmap for more details. 
This is an Open Source project so everyone can contribute and help in many ways to make it grows.

How do I get started?

Create an application using Orchard Core is as easy as adding a Nuget package reference to your ASP.NET Core project and configure two lines in the startup.cs file.
You can have a running instance in less than 5 minutes following this tutorial.

Useful links:

GitHub repository : https://github.com/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore
Gitter chat room : https://gitter.im/OrchardCMS/OrchardCore
Orchard Project site : http://orchardproject.net
Orchard Core documentation : http://orchardcore.readthedocs.io

This Wednesday February 22nd was the second day of the Orchard Harvest conference 2017 in New York.

We attended to many interesting sessions about Orchard Core and .NET Core.

Theming in Orchard Core

Steve Taylor (Avastec)

Steve walked through how to create a theme in Orchard Core. He took an existing Wordpress theme and converted it to Orchard.

He also demonstrated how to build client side assets using the existing tooling and how this tooling can be extended to accommodate more advanced scenarios.

Present and future of Localization in Orchard

Benedek Farkas (Lombiq)

Benedek gave a sneak peek on the existing features available in Orchard CMS to handle Localization and Translations.

You can retrieve the localization files here http://orchardproject.net/localization and contribute to the translations on https://crowdin.com/project/orchard-cms

Building JavaScript-based apps and components for Orchard websites

Daniel Stolt (IDeliverable)

In this session, Daniel demonstrated techniques, tips and tricks for building client-side apps and components for use in Orchard websites.

He also described some ways to make your client-side apps available as content in Orchard for editors and site admins to use, how to make content and configuration from Orchard available in your apps client-side, and how to make Orchard's server-side routing and client-side routing play nice together.

YesSql

Sébastien Ros (Microsoft)

During the lunch, Sebastien took some time to make a side session about YesSql, the .NET Document database interface used in Orchard Core to store json objects, create documents and query map/reduce indexes.

https://github.com/sebastienros/yessql

What's up with .NET Core 2.0 and C# 7?

Bertrand Le Roy (Microsoft)

Bertrand made a quick refresher course on .NET Core 1 and C# 6 and then showed the latest features and talked about what may come after with .NET Standard 2.0 and C# 7.

Orchard Core CMS

Sébastien Ros (Microsoft)

Sébastien described the goals and the major changes of Orchard Core and made a demo about the main features already available in Ochard Core CMS as Setup, Content publishing, Lists, Fields, Live Preview, Layers, Menus, Flow, Widgets, Recipes, ....

The most important feature of Orchard Core is Performance.

Making a quick stress test, Orchard Core is able to return 2,000 requests per second, without caching enabled.

The memory usage and the number of tenants you can load will also be improved (500 tenants => 2Gb). 

https://github.com/OrchardCMS/Orchard2

Panel, Q&A

Sipke Schoorstra, Daniel Stolt, Zoltán Lehóczky

Finally, the main contributors answered to the questions of the attendees about the Orchard project.

This Tuesday February 22th was the first day of the Orchard Harvest conference 2017 in New York.

We had the pleasure to attend to many interesting sessions about Orchard CMS, Web sites uses case, Performance enhancements, ASP.NET Core MVC 2.0, modular SAAS development with Orchard Core.

Keynote

Sebastien Ros (Microsoft)

Sebastien started this day by a keynote, introducing the organization of the event and talking about attendees and speakers.

Using external data with Orchard

Jorge Agraz (OneStop Internet)

During this session, Jorge explained how Onestop has used their external commerce data and Orchard’s Content Management system to make their product data display like any other Orchard content.

When Output Cache Just Isn't Enough

Chris Payne and Daniel Stolt (IDeliverable)

In this session Chris and Daniel created a website and came across several simple and common performance problems that the built-in output cache in Orchard cannot solve.

Their IDeliverable.Donuts module is available here:

www.ideliverable.com/products/premium-orchard-modules/ideliverable-donuts

What's new in ASP.NET MVC Core 2.0

N. Taylor Mullen (Microsoft)

Taylor gave us an overview about the upcoming new features that will be available in ASP.NET Core 2.0 like Razor Pages.

Scaling Orchard

Rob King (Bede Gaming)

Rob explained how Bede Gaming is using Orchard CMS to build a multi-tenant solution that serves millions of transactions per day, in a multi-node Azure environment.

What is Orchard Core SaaS Framework?

Nicholas Mayne

Nick made multiple demos showing how to use the framework used in Orchard Core to create a modular SAAS application.

Please join us for our next Orchard Harvest Conference 2017.

February 21 - 22, 2017 (Tuesday - Wednesday)

The event will be held in New York, USA at the TKP New York Conference Center.

2 Days of Community, Networking, Speakers, and Social Activities

We are very excited about this event and look forward to welcoming members of the Orchard Project open source community from across North America as well as from around the globe.

For more information about the event, please visit the Orchard Harvest Conference 2017 website.

The documentation of the Orchard project is a community effort and an open source initiative.

The Orchard team decided from the very beginning to use Markdown files to manage the documentation pages and to publish the source code on GitHub  so that people can contribute providing pull requests.

Recently, the documentation has been migrated to MkDocs in order to be hosted easily on ReadTheDocs.

The benefits are almost the same than previously :

• Any changes on the repository will automatically be deployed after a commit/push thanks to a WebHook.
• You just have to know the Markdown syntax to edit the files.

Some new features convinced us to switch to ReadTheDocs :

• The files are statically generated, so the display is pretty fast.
• The search inspects an index file to allow to find the terms you are looking for.
• The template is made in Jinja2 (http://jinja.pocoo.org/) which is easy to integrate.
• The design is responsive so the pages are well displayed on smaller screens.
• We can specify which branches we want to build, which will allow to keep an history of previous versions.

If you want to discuss with the team, you can reach us on the Gitter chat dedicated to the Orchard documentation.