Sarasota Web Design and Sarasota Web Development

Blog Tags
Developing Custom Orchard Modules and Orchard Themes

  • David Hayden - Orchard Web Developer

orchard themes

10
Apr
Switching Orchard Theme Styles and Colors

Switching Orchard Theme Styles and Colors

Orchard CMS is an excellent content management system based on ASP.NET MVC. I absolutely love creating custom Orchard Themes and Modules for my clients. One particularly nice thing about Orchard is that although it can be very opinionated in the HTML it renders, it will get out of your way! This makes Orchard an absolute joy for creating custom themes for clients. Often these custom themes come in multiple styles / colors and the client wants to switch between those theme variations easily. As with all things in Orchard, this is easily done and I do it with my default theme in Orchard - Twitter Bootstrap.

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Tags: orchard themes
Author: David Hayden

24
Dec
Twitter Bootstrap Orchard Theme

Twitter Bootstrap Orchard Theme

Twitter came out with a Bootstrap toolkit "designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more." The Bootstrap CSS and JavaScript is indeed nice, so much nicer than the default Orchard Theme - Theme Machine. Now that I have a little free time over the holidays, I thought I would create a custom Orchard Theme based on Bootstrap from Twitter. It's still not quite finished, but Bootstrap is definitely working with Orchard CMS and I am excited to start offering it as a theme for my clients.

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Tags: orchard themes
Author: David Hayden

15
Sep
Custom Orchard Themes - Converting Existing Web Design and HTML Templates

Custom Orchard Themes - Converting Existing Web Design and HTML Templates

I convert a lot of HTML and CSS Templates to custom Orchard Themes for clients. These web templates are either created by their web designer, purchased from a website selling HTML and CSS Templates, or already exist on their current website that they want me to convert to Orchard CMS. As you might expect, these HTML, CSS, and JavaScript templates are built without any knowledge of Orchard, handmade and not expected to be converted to a CMS Theme, rarely optimized for a production website, and are usually HTML 4 instead of the HTML5 expected by Orchard. Converting these web templates to Orchard Themes is not only about getting these templates to play nicely with Orchard, but optimized for SEO, website performance, and other areas important to the health and welfare of the website and client's business. Here are some observations I've picked up while converting various HTML and Web Templates to Orchard Themes.

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Tags: orchard themes orchard websites
Author: David Hayden

25
Aug
New Orchard Theme and Website

New Orchard Theme and Website

Welcome to my new website developed with Orchard CMS, a free open-source content management system running on IIS7, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 3.0. I've kept things clean and simple, but the website does host a custom Orchard Theme as well as a number of Orchard customizations and custom Orchard Modules like a Tags Module, Recent Tweets Module, SEO Module, and social networking modules to share blog posts via Twitter and Google +1. Over time I will make further enhancements, but right now I think it looks clean and professional and conveys a sampling of what I can accomplish as an Orchard CMS Developer. Now let's take a peek under the hood.

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Tags: orchard themes orchard websites
Author: David Hayden