Sarasota Web Design and Sarasota Web Development

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Developing Custom Orchard Modules and Orchard Themes

  • David Hayden - Orchard Web Developer

orchard tutorials

25
Mar
Fixing the Orchard Gallery Feed Error - Install Package Failed

Fixing the Orchard Gallery Feed Error - Install Package Failed

When the official Orchard Website moved to Azure the URL of the gallery feed changed. To avoid having Orchard Web Developers change the URL I believe a redirect from the old URL to the new URL was put in place, but this apparently has not worked because when you install a new Orchard 1.4 website from scratch one often receives an "Install package failed" error when attempting to download and install modules and themes from the Orchard Gallery. While the problem could be because you don't have write privileges on the Modules and Themes directories, it also might be because the gallery feed URL needs to be changed! I'll walk you through the change.

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

23
Mar
Creating Custom 404 and Error Pages in Orchard CMS

Creating Custom 404 and Error Pages in Orchard CMS

Creating custom 404 and error pages has changed in Orchard CMS. Prior to Orchard 1.4 we had to modify our web.config files to allow custom errors and then modify the handlers a bit to get Orchard to actually serve our custom pages. Now all we need to do is override a couple of shapes, NotFound.cshtml and ErrorPage.cshtml, and we have custom 404 and error pages in Orchard in seconds. In fact, my custom 404 Error page in Orchard teaches you just that!

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

19
Mar
Display Edit Links Around Content and Widgets in Orchard CMS

Display Edit Links Around Content and Widgets in Orchard CMS

As promised, I have been blogging about undocumented and relatively unknown changes in Orchard 1.4 after blogging about What's New in Orchard 1.4. We all know about the new Projector Module, Autoroute, and the new Orchard Fields and performance enhancements, but there are a lot of other changes in Orchard 1.4, too. First, I blogged about how DataMigration Classes in Orchard Automatically Update, which is something useful to Orchard Web Developers who develop custom Orchard Modules. Now I want to talk about the "missing" edit links around content and widgets, which is important to those administering Orchard Websites.

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

13
Mar
Orchard Data Migration Classes Automatically Update in Orchard 1.4

Orchard Data Migration Classes Automatically Update in Orchard 1.4

I've talked about the main new features in Orchard 1.4 in a number of Orchard CMS Tutorials. Various features like Autoroute, Projector Module, new custom fields, and Orchard performance enhancements are a wonderful addition to Orchard. Now I would like to write a series of blog posts about those features in Orchard 1.4 that aren't so obvious and probably not even documented. Unless you are an Orchard Web Developer who has been developing Orchard Websites for quite some time, you are probably not even aware of these changes. First Up - Orchard Data Migration Classes Automatically Update in Orchard 1.4.

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

02
Mar
What's New in Orchard 1.4

What's New in Orchard 1.4

Orchard 1.4 was released the other day and has some very important features as well as a lot of bug fixes and performance enhancements. It also comes with some breaking changes that will make upgrading to Orchard 1.4 a bit more effort. Since the Orchard 1.4 release notes just don't capture the coolness of this release, I thought I would play Orchard Developer Evangelist for a day and provide much more detail and context around the new features in Orchard 1.4 and why now is a great time to learn more about this ASP.NET MVC Content Management System ( CMS ).

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Tags: orchard orchard tutorials orchard websites projector module
Author: David Hayden

28
Feb
Simple.Data to Update Orchard Blog Posts Contents

Simple.Data to Update Orchard Blog Posts Contents

I am a huge fan of Amazon Web Services. I use a number of the services for my own businesses as well as the businesses of my clients. I also play around with it a lot on my blogs and various play websites, too, since Amazon offers a free tier. On one of my Orchard Blogs I was using the Amazon S3 Services to store photos, but was recently notified that the free tier period was expiring. I decided to close that account and needed a quick and dirty solution to update the image links in all of my Orchard Blog Posts to point locally to my server instead of Amazon S3. Here is where something like Simple.Data can easily open the Orchard Database, read the contents of each Orchard Blog Post, and update each blog post with new links to the images on the local server. It took me 10 minutes to complete this in Simple.Data, and about 30 minutes to write this blog post!

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

27
Feb
Autoroute Custom Patterns and Route Regeneration in Orchard 1.4

Autoroute Custom Patterns and Route Regeneration in Orchard 1.4

One of the new features in Orchard 1.4 is Autoroute, which like most features, arrives in the form of an Orchard Module. Autoroute is a new Content Part that attaches to Content Types and replaces the Route Part to offer much more flexibility in routing patterns for routable content types. Autoroute provides the ability to create and select custom route patterns, override patterns on a case by case basis, and the ability to regenerate the route when new versions of the content item are saved. In addition to specifying static values in the routes, Autoroute also leverages tokens in Orchard that allow you to create routes based on dynamic information such as creation date, user, and other information that may vary from content item to content item.

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

03
Jan
Modifying Web.config to Serve Site.xml and Static Files with Orchard CMS

Modifying Web.config to Serve Site.xml and Static Files with Orchard CMS

I received an email from an Orchard Web Developer wanting to know how to serve his site.xml file from his Orchard CMS Website. If you add a site.xml file or other static file to the root of your Orchard CMS Website you will get an HTTP 404 Not Found Error. This isn't so much an Orchard CMS question as it is an ASP.NET and Web.config question, because the answer lies in the web.config file for Orchard which is currently configured to respond to all static file requests at the root with a 404 Error if there is no route configured in ASP.NET MVC to handle the request.

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Tags: orchard tutorials
Author: David Hayden

15
Dec
Orchard Projector Module Has Random Sort Criteria

Orchard Projector Module Has Random Sort Criteria

In my previous Orchard CMS Tutorial, Projector Module in Orchard CMS, I mentioned the new Projector Module. I also mentioned how it was missing at least 1 important feature, the ability to return a random set of items from a query. This is important for those Orchard Websites where the client wants to rotate various information on the website like customer testimonials, clients, new products, products on sale, or any other content type where you want to spotlight a few random items from time-to-time. Well, the Orchard Developer Team heard this feeback and created a new Random Sort Criteria in the Projector Module.

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Tags: orchard tutorials projector module
Author: David Hayden

15
Dec
Projector Module in Orchard CMS

Projector Module in Orchard CMS

Over the past few weeks I have been playing with the new Projector Module in Orchard CMS. The Projector Module isn't available in the Orchard Gallery yet, but you can download it by enlisting in the Orchard Source Code on CodePlex. Although still in beta, the Projector Module works fine in a lot of the simple scenarios in which I have been testing it. I won't go into the Projector Module in detail since it isn't fully available yet, but I thought I would show you some screenshots just to give you a taste of what it can do. Note that some or all of this may change by the time it is available, but here is an example of using it to display featured and sale products for our e-commerce website based on Orchard CMS.

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Tags: orchard tutorials projector module
Author: David Hayden