Tales from the Evil Empire

This is me shaving a yak. Shaving the yak, if you don't know, is what you do when a seemingly simple task necessitates many recursive and unforeseen sub-tasks in order to be carried out.

SVG definitely is an increasingly interesting skill, especially as it's making its way into HTML 5 as an officially allowed grammar inside of HTML documents. Most SVG is authored through some kind of tool, and it's absolutely the way to go for artistic drawings. I used Inkscape (open source) and Expression Design in the past for that (I can't afford Illustrator), and I've been happy with the results (to your right and left).

In Orchard, the UI gets composed from many independent parts. We wrote a lot of code to handle that fact without friction. It is easy to add a new part or remove an existing one without breaking anything. One ingredient in this is the placement.info file.

The way URLs work in Orchard today is fine for the simplest sites but it's not very customizable and comes with a number of challenges. Let's look at how it works today. Let's start with a plain page:

This is part 2 for this post…

After a long phase of cleanup on the new Orchard 2.0, we are now busy designing new features. We are focusing on a few foundational pieces, and on enabling e-commerce on top of the platform. In this post, I'm going to expose the basics of the preliminary design for one new foundational piece: Tokens.

There is a (not so) particular kind of shape in Orchard: zones. Functionally, zones are places where other shapes can render. There are top-level zones, the ones defined on Layout, where widgets typically go, and there are local zones that can be defined anywhere. These local zones are what you target in placement.info.