Tales from the Evil Empire

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.

Nick Mayne is one of the main developers working on Orchard 2.0, a.k.a. Orchard Core.

Rob King works for Bede Gaming, which specializes in providing a platform for gambling web sites. The company moved to Orchard in 2013, and has strong scalability requirements, with sites serving millions of requests per day.

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.

Daniel Stolt and Chris Payne from IDeliverable presented some new output caching techniques that they’ve developed. The problem that they’re solving is what happens when you have to output user-specific data into rendered contents. In those cases, you want to cache the constant parts of the output, while keeping holes dynamic. This is known as donut caching.

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.

Here’s a minor inconvenience that I’m going to put out there in the hope that one or two of the horrible people responsible for it may realize the errors of their ways and make the world a marginally better place.

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…