I upgraded this website to Orchard 1.6 today. I've been so busy with client websites that I finally snuck some time over the weekend to upgrade my own website to Orchard CMS 1.6. Since I have been upgrading my website with each and every Orchard release it was a piece of cake!
If you develop Orchard Themes, you will appreciate a new featured, called Layout Placement, introduced in Orchard 1.5. Layout Placement allows you to place a shape in a different zone with a quick change to your Orchard Module's or Orchard Theme's Placement.info file. In this example, I will show you how I used Layout Placement in my Orchard E-Commerce and Online Store Example to place the title of products, categories, and other content types into a zone different than the default Content Zone as specified by Orchard CMS. If you enjoy this tutorial, don't forget to check out my other Orchard CMS Tutorials as well!
I hadn't planned on upgrading any of my personal Orchard Websites until Orchard 1.6. However, after upgrading several client websites to Orchard CMS 1.5.1 I figured there is value to being on the latest version to make subsequent Orchard CMS upgrades easier. Therefore, in addition to upgrading DavidHayden.com to Orchard CMS 1.5.1, I also upgraded this Orchard Website to 1.5.1 late last night as well.
Orchard CMS 1.5 was released last night. I have been testing the two release candidates for about a week as well as successfully performed my first upgrade to Orchard 1.5 today. There are some really cool features in this new release that I will be blogging about as part of my Orchard Tutorials.
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 ).
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.
Orchard CMS includes a Warmup Module that dramatically helps those websites on shared hosting respond to website requests quicker at times when the website has been "put to sleep" due to inactivity or periodic application pool recycling. Most new Orchard Websites that are either on inexpensive shared hosting prone to application pool recycling or receive very little incoming traffic will want to enable the performance settings for the Orchard Warmup Module. By enabling these Orchard Performance Settings, Orchard will respond quicker to incoming requests by serving static snapshots of your website content while the CMS has time to start. Once started, Orchard will begin serving the normal dynamic content. Let's discuss a quick tip on the correct way to configure the Orchard Website Performance Settings.
One of the huge benefits of the Orchard Websites I build is that they run on the free, Microsoft SQL Server CE Database. In fact, not only is SQL Server CE free for small businesses to deploy for their websites, but Orchard takes care of creating and managing the database for you. It just works. You don't have to know or understand SQL Server and T-SQL and you don't need to pay an IT Professional to manage or monitor your database. And, if and when the time comes that you want to backup and migrate SQL Server CE to a more advanced solution like SQL Server Express or SQL Server 2008 R2, there are tools that help me do that to make it affordable, easy, and painless. Let's discuss this in a bit more detail.
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.