I love Twitter Bootstrap and I love creating Orchard Modules that support it. A lot of my Orchard Training is using an Orchard CMS Bootstrap Theme and various Orchard Modules for it. Earlier I mentioned the Bootstrap Carousel Widget for Orchard CMS, which is just one of a number of widgets. Late last night I created a Bootstrap Skills Widget for kicks.
I developed an Orchard website for a client that wanted a quick and easy way to see trends in page views for routable content types like Pages, Products, Blog Posts, etc. The website was already backed with various hard core analytics. This request was more for casual use when managing store products or blog posts. They just wanted a simple bar graph that showed X days of page view statistics right within Orchard as they were managing various content types. As I have come to love, anything is possible in Orchard CMS.
The other day I mentioned teaching Orchard Training where we built several Orchard CMS modules, including a Carousel Widget for Twitter Bootstrap. Check out the following post: Orchard Training and Twitter Bootstrap Carousel Module. In addition to the Carousel Widget, we also developed an SEO module, called Meta Tags, to help with one aspect of search engine optimization of your Orchard Website.
It's been a busy few month with the holidays and developing various Orchard websites, modules, and themes. I took a few months off from Orchard training. This past Monday (January 14, 2013) I taught a class on Orchard CMS to a handful of developers interested in learning how to develop custom Orchard modules. I kept the class small to clear the "cobwebs" and get back into the groove. We developed 5 custom Orchard modules (parts, widgets, types, fields, etc. ) in the 4 hours of training and I thought I would just touch upon them for kicks in a series of posts. Since Twitter Bootstrap is so popular, a lot of the various Orchard widgets and modules used Twitter Boostrap for various CSS, JavaScript, etc. It was a fun and very useful session!
If you have an Orchard Website and interested in adding live chat functionality, I added a new module to the Orchard Gallery called Olark Live Chat. Olark is easy to install, looks attractive, and provides a simple and informative method of interacting with customers and visitors on your website. The Orchard Module makes it easy to enable and disable live chat as well as inject the JavaScript provided by Olark into your Orchard Website.
The Orchard CMS 1.5 was recently released and it includes a very cool Content Picker that helps you build relationships between content items. I absolutely love the new Content Picker in Orchard CMS, but it really needs to have a custom setting that allows Orchard Web Developers to filter the list it displays by content type. During a relaxing Saturday morning I created a modified Content Picker complete with content type filtering and in-tab search functionality.
Microsoft recently released WebMatrix 2 RC which has numerous new features including code completion / intellisense. As an Orchard CMS Developer, I am excited about intellisense in WebMatrix to help with creating Orchard Themes and Modules. Although the release candidate does offer some code completion to make it easier to develop custom Orchard Themes and Modules in WebMatrix, the development experience is rather spotty at the moment.
One of the most popular features included with Orchard CMS is the blogging engine. I personally love to blog in order to share my knowledge and experiences with my fellow .NET Developers whenever possible. During the past week while on vacation I received a request from one of my closest clients that they needed a Related Blog Posts Custom Orchard Module. This is a custom module I have wanted to create for myself for quite a long time, so I came out of holiday hiding for a couple days to create a quick custom module for Orchard that allows a blogger to assign related blog posts to a blog post in Orchard CMS.