Archives
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The Shift: how Orchard painlessly shifted to document storage, and how it’ll affect you
We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems. -
Video: Orchard’s best kept recipes
In this talk that I gave last June for Orchard Harvest in Amsterdam, I showed, in no particular order, my favorite Orchard features, tricks, and modules. Don’t expect a narrative in there, cause there isn’t one, but I’m hoping you’ll learn a thing or two.
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My workflow for comment notifications
Workflows in Orchard 1.7 are a damn sweet feature, and in this post I’m going to show you a very simple and useful case: comment moderation and notifications.
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How Orchard deals with dependency licenses
Managing dependencies in any project presents challenges, but open source adds its own constraints. In the wake of the release by Microsoft of new and useful libraries that are unfortunately encumbered by unacceptable licensing restrictions, I thought it would be a good time to summarize how we do things here in the Orchard project, both to get feedback and to give ideas to others facing similar challenges.
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Effortlessly resize images in Orchard 1.7
I’ve written several times about image resizing in .NET, but never in the context of Orchard. With the imminent release of Orchard 1.7, it’s time to correct this. The new version comes with an extensible media pipeline that enables you to define complex image processing workflows that can automatically resize, change formats or apply watermarks. This is not the subject of this post however. What I want to show here is one of the underlying APIs that enable that feature, and that comes in the form of a new shape.
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Testing Orchard drivers
If you’ve ever tried to test Orchard part drivers, you may have been blocked by the fact that the methods on drivers are protected. That, fortunately, doesn’t mean they are untestable. Those methods are still accessible through explicit interface implementations. In particular, drivers implement IContentPartDriver, which is defined as follows.
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A C# helper to read and write XML from and to objects
I really like jQuery’s pattern of attribute getters and setters. They are fluent and work really well with HTML and XML DOMs. If you specify a value in addition to the name, it’s setting, otherwise it’s getting. In C#, we have an OK API for XML, XElement, but it’s not as easy to use as jQuery’s attr methods. It is also missing the flexibility of Javascript with regards to parameter types. To recreate the simplicity of attr in C#, I built a set of extension methods for the most common simple types:
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Getting your Raspberry Pi to output the right resolution
I was setting up a new Raspberry Pi under Raspbian on a Samsung monitor the other day. If you don’t do anything, Raspbian and the Pi will attempt to detect the modes supported by your monitor and will make a choice of what seems best to it. And sometimes it gets that very wrong. In those cases, you’ll need to find what the right mode is and to set it up.
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Logging SQL queries in Orchard
It is often useful to see what database queries were made during a specific request in Orchard. There are quite a few ways to do this (you can trace right from SQL Server, or you can use Mini-Profiler for instance), but this morning Sébastien showed me a really easy one that I thought I’d share.
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This is how we should read hexadecimal…
Today my five-year-old told me that when she was four, she thought that what came after ninety-nine was… tenty. You know, because seventy, eighty, ninety, tenty.
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Taking an Orchard site offline while you update it
If your hosted environment does not give you a staging site and the means to swap it easily with the production environment like Azure Cloud Services do, or if you don’t have a staging database, or if you just need to take your site offline for the public while you perform data updates in the admin, you may be wondering what solutions you have, if any. -
Dead simple stubbing for JavaScript
I’m writing a lot of JavaScript these days, and for testing I mostly use QUnit. When I need to quickly stub a piece of the code that I’m testing, I like to use the following micro-library. What it does is enable you to replace a bunch of methods on an object with stub versions, in a easily reversible way.
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Always have a host or URL prefix on the default Orchard tenant
The multi-tenancy feature in Orchard enables you to host multiple sites within the same Orchard instance. It’s not a a security feature, just a way to improve site density, and to enable you to save on hosting costs. Nevertheless, a request to a specific existing tenant should never be answered with a page from another tenant. Ever.
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Easy content templates for Orchard, take 2
Placement.info is an XML file that orchestrates the different parts of a content item and sends each of the shapes they create into specific local content zones. If the previous sentence sounded confusing to you, fear not, this post is for you.
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Creating simple custom Orchard widgets
If you want to create a simple widget in Orchard, such as a box of social links, you have three possibilities: