Tales from the Evil Empire

Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project.

I've shown in a previous post how to make it easier to change the layout template for specific contents or areas. But what if you want to change another shape template for specific pages, for example the main Content shape on the home page?

Yeah, it's one of those posts, sorry.

My personal blog still runs on Orchard 0.5, because the theme that I used to build it is not yet available for more recent versions, but it is still very important for me to know that I can migrate all my content and comments to a new version at any time.

The UI composition in Orchard is extremely flexible, thanks in no small part to the usage of dynamic Clay shapes. Every notable UI construct in Orchard is built as a shape that other parts of the system can then party on and modify any way they want.

In the previous post, we’ve been flipping bits manually on three ports of the Netduino to simulate the data, clock and latch pins that a shift register expected. We did all that in order to control one line of a LED matrix and create a simple Knight Rider effect.

When programming a Netduino microcontroller, you are going to use constants from the SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware.Netduino namespace. In particular, there are constants defined for each of the microcontroller’s output and input ports, enabling you to write for example:

var button = new InputPort(
    Pins.ONBOARD_SW1,
    false,
    Port.ResistorMode.Disabled);

In my last Netduino post, I showed how to create a simple Knight Rider effect. One of the problems of that implementation was that we were occupying one digital port of the Netduino for each light in the ramp. It’s fine for that simple effect, but in future posts we’ll look at controlling our whole 8x8 LED matrix, which has 16 pins whereas the Netduino has only 14 digital ports.