Fun with Orchard, Webmatrix, Git and Azure

Why Orchard?

Our company wants to convert an old html site to a content management system. We considered between Wordpress and Orchard and picked Orchard. This post strongly influenced us. It is ASP.NET MVC vs php. We are a .net shop. We thought it would be easier to do custom development with Orchard.

Why Webmatrix?

There are a few reason we used Webmatrix:

  1. Webmatrix works with Orchard very well. Many Orchard training materials use Webmatrix.
  2. Webmatrix is free. We have interns here working on Orchard. We do not have to consume a Visual Studio license.
  3. Webmatrix has an excellent story working with both Git and Azure.

Why Git?

We would like to have a version control system. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. There are several free Git hosts, such as GitHub, Codeplex, and BitBucket. So we picked Git.

Why Azure?

We would like to have website that our entire team can see. Azure web site is an excellent option for us. It is very easy to host Orchard with an Azure website, either with Sql Compact Edition or with Azure SQL Database. Azure also integrates with Git very well.

So how do they work together?

Although it is possible to edit a Azure hosted web site directly with Webmatrix, we hosted out source code in Git because we need a source control system.

It is very easy to work with Git from Webmatrix. One can use git with an existing site or open a site directly from git.

The Sql Server migration solution in Webmatrix is amongst the easiest way to migrate a Sql CE database to Azure SQL Database.

It is also fairly easy to setup an Azure website to pull source code from git directly and build the source code. Each time when we push a changeset to git, Azure is notified and it will automatically pull and build the website. For Orchard, the “built” is actually not more than an xcopy. We just need to embed a .deployment file in our source code. See David Haden’s post for more details.

2 Comments

  • Hi!

    Thanks for an interesting post!

    Did you concider Umbraco? If you did what made you choose Orchard? I love Umbraco, very smooth to work with!

    One thing to notice is that Github is only free if you want to have public repos, bitbucket allow you to have private repos for free.

    :)

    / m

  • @Markus, that's for the useful information.

    As for Umbraco, it is just that we did not evaluate all the content management systems out there. I would say that the intro on Orchard from pluralsight and the 4 part introductions on youtube got us started on Orchard: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-TV.

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