Tales from the Evil Empire

Bertrand Le Roy's blog

  • Orchard Harvest 2017–Writing a theme for Orchard Core

    In the first session of the second day of Orchard Harvest, Steve Taylor showed how to build a new theme for Orchard Core. All the pieces are already in place for building themed sites, and the work is similar to Orchard 1.x themes, except for some json file editing because of missing admin UI in places. New Razor Pages features can be used, such as tag helpers, @inject directives, etc. The tag helpers in particular, coupled with Orchard’s shapes, make for very clean markup in view files. The video for the talk, when available, will be a valuable reference for people who want to get started building sites with Orchard Core: the CMS now looks feature-complete enough to do some serious work. Widgets are there, the shape system is there, search, navigation, all work. That Steve was able to build a complete site and theme under an hour (with some pre-built css and views, of course) shows how far Orchard Core has gone already.

  • Orchard Harvest 2017–What’s new in ASP.NET MVC Core 2.0

    Taylor Mullen from the ASP.NET team is a developer working on MVC Core 2.0. In this session, he went over the design of the new Razor Pages feature. He carefully explained what is difficult with MVC currently, in order to justify the feature. He actually started by showing what it’s not: it’s not PHP-like, and it’s not a new take on previous “ASP.NET Pages” features.

  • Orchard Harvest 2017 – Using external data with Orchard

    Jorge Agraz is opening the conference after Sébastien Ros’ keynote with a talk about using external data in Orchard. Jorge work for Onestop, a company that builds e-commerce sites. Their web sites get their commerce data from APIs and then used to display that through their controllers with Orchard shapes. They attempted to use widgets instead of controllers, but that came with some significant maintenance problems.

  • On dependencies, dependency injection, and sanity

    What's interesting about debacles such as the recent left-padding madness is how it can get you to re-think seemingly obvious concepts, and challenge some basic assumptions. Here's in particular a little reflection that just occurred to me on the way between the bathroom and my office, and that may seem super-obvious to some of you. It wasn't to me, so here goes, I'm sharing…

  • Easy custom RSS in Orchard

    Orchard adds RSS automatically to everything that looks like a list of content items: blog posts, of course, but also comments, projections, lists, search results, tags, etc. I’ve explained before how RSS works internally, but adding a new feed from code can look like a daunting task if you’re not an experienced Orchard developer. Fortunately, there is another feature related to RSS that makes it possible to create custom RSS without writing a line of code.

  • Why I prefer spaces to tabs

    Coding convention discussions are always fun. I just had one of them on the weekly Orchard meeting, where I’ve joked that spaces are objectively superior to tabs, by which I meant that there are objective arguments in favor of spaces that I find subjectively compelling..