Contents tagged with DecentCMS
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The Evil Empire Strikes Back
A little more than three years ago, I left Microsoft, and co-founded Nwazet, a hardware company that built cool products for makers. At the end of 2014, we sold our intellectual property to ModMyPi. Since then, I’ve been doing freelance consulting and development under the name Decent Consulting, and I’ve also been building a new CMS based on Node.js: DecentCMS… And today was my first day back at Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager.
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Many ways to relate Orchard things, part 1: database relations
A long time ago, I wrote a documentation topic on how to implement 1-n and n-n relationships in Orchard using database relations. It was much needed at the time, as this was still a difficult topic. Between spotty mapping mechanisms for relationships, and specific Orchard conventions, it wasn’t something you could expect just anybody to figure out on their own. It is still the way to go under some conditions, but those conditions are arguably very uncommon, and there are now much better solutions for more common cases.
In this series of posts, I’ll show one technique per post, with pros and cons, and use cases for each. Today, we begin with database-bound relationships.
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Node dependency injection library extracted from DecentCMS
There are quite a few DI libraries for Node, I know, and I evaluated many of them before building my own. It’s not that the others are bad, it’s just that I needed a few unique features that I couldn’t find together in a single library. My library, Decent Injection, is exactly what I needed for DecentCMS, because it was built as its foundation, with no other requirement than to be useful to me. My goal by extracting it as its own project is to help those users who have told me that they would like to use it in their own projects. Often, when building exactly the library you need, you end up with something that others will find useful too. It’s pretty cool when it happens.
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CMS as a service with DecentCMS
No web site should be a silo. A CMS should be great at organizing, syndicating, and presenting your content, but it should also communicate with arbitrary applications outside the CMS. In particular, mobile applications should be able to use the data from the CMS. In DecentCMS, you can enable the
content-apifeature to expose all content items as JSON documents.Content items are then available under two endpoints:
srcandshapes. -
Querying DecentCMS, part 3: a paginated list of results
In the previous two posts, I exposed the general design of DecentCMS’ search feature, and described its indexing and querying APIs. In this post, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to build a paginated list of search results that will display the list of API documentation topics.
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Querying DecentCMS, part2: querying the index
In the previous post, we looked at the basic concepts DecentCMS querying are built upon, and at how an index is built. In this post, we’ll examine how to query such an index in order to produce a result set.
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Querying DecentCMS, part 1: building an index
DecentCMS’s search module provides the infrastructure to build and query search indexes, as well as a file-based implementation that is suitable for small sites. Querying in DecentCMS is based on a simple JavaScript API that is loosely based on the map/reduce pattern. The basic idea is that you first build an index, and then you can run queries on that index. The architecture ensures that querying can scale to very large content stores. It also enables querying to work in a unified way across heterogeneous storage mechanisms. Effectively, storage and querying are entirely separated.
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The Orchard Way
An order for an electric conversion of a vintage Porsche just arrived at Greg’s workshop. He follows a script that will implement the transformation of the car. He looks at the order, and sees that the customer bought the 70kWh battery. He picks up the right number of cells, and re-orders more to refill the stock. The batteries are secured in the trunk. Then, he removes the car’s engine, and disposes of it. He fits the electric motor in its place, and proceeds to route wires from the trunk to the engine’s compartment. The control system is then assembled. All these operations are done sequentially by Greg. In a few weeks, the car is ready.
Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, another order for a brand new electric car arrives at Elon’s factory. It should be an obsidian black metallic all-wheel drive with a 85kWh battery, panoramic roof, silver cyclone wheels, black leather seats, carbon fiber décor, black alcantara headliner, autopilot, and subzero weather package. That’s a lot of little independent details.
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Writing DecentCMS documentation
Documentation is considered a feature in DecentCMS, and as such, it is expected that all modules come with tests, API documentation, and documentation topics. Documentation, like tests, are part of the same code repository as the rest of the application or module.
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The widget layer file in a DecentCMS site
The widgets layer file can be found under
/sites/name-of-the-site/widget/index.json. Theindex.jsonfile describes the layers of widgets for the site. Layers are collections of widgets that can be turned on or off by an expression that is associated with each layer and that gets evaluated for each request against an environment that can be contributed to by modules, and that can use extension rules also contributed by modules. More than one layer can be active on any given page of the site.