ASP Experts

Orchard 1.3 was released yesterday night with some really neat features that I will outline in this post. I will come back in depth on some of those with full-length posts. Let's start with the simple but super-useful ones… 1. Draft Preview Once you've created and saved a content item, there will now be a "Preview" link next to its summary: Previously, it was impossible to view unpublished contents. This was one of the most requested missing features, and there it is. 2. Delete Content Types and Parts Speaking about features high on the wish list, you can now delete the custom content types and parts that you built. 3. Markdown Not everyone likes editing contents in Wysywyg editors, for various reasons. There has always been…(read more)

In Orchard, the UI gets composed from many independent parts. We wrote a lot of code to handle that fact without friction. It is easy to add a new part or remove an existing one without breaking anything. One ingredient in this is the placement.info file . The role of placement is to dispatch the shapes that represent content types to local zones and to specify in what order they should appear. it separates the templates and their orchestration, implementing some healthy separation of concerns. It is quite powerful and flexible, but it represents a sort of inversion of control that can be quite puzzling to designers: we are used, in other systems, to the layout pulling the different "includes" that constitute it. With placement, the…(read more)

The way URLs work in Orchard today is fine for the simplest sites but it's not very customizable and comes with a number of challenges. Let's look at how it works today. Let's start with a plain page: Once you're done typing a title, when you tab out of the title field, an ajax request is fired that asks the server to do a fake publication of the page and get a slug out of the title. This happens in the Routable part, and it is extensible by implementing ISlugEventHandler. There are a few problems with this. First, the fake publication is creating some noise for subscribers to the publication event. It would be better unfortunately to do away with the nice ajax behavior. Second, it becomes really hairy once you introduce containers…(read more)

This is part 2 for this post … Before I show some more advanced features of Tokens, I should probably say a word about why exactly we think we need this feature. In a CMS, there are many places where you need to build strings from some static but configurable part and a number of values that come from the environment. In the first post in this series , I used the rather silly example of Mad Libs because I thought it was a fun and light-hearted way of explaining the technology. But obviously we are not building the feature to play silly word games, we are building it because we need it to build other cool stuff. Real applications include: e-mail formatting : this does not require full templating but always involves inserting values from various…(read more)

After a long phase of cleanup on the new Orchard 2.0, we are now busy designing new features. We are focusing on a few foundational pieces, and on enabling e-commerce on top of the platform. In this post, I'm going to expose the basics of the preliminary design for one new foundational piece: Tokens. You could technically confuse Tokens with a fancy String.Format, or with a very lightweight templating solution, but you'd be slightly wrong in both cases. Its usage is what sets it apart from both. You will use tokens whenever you need to build a string by inserting named environmental variables into a string that has placeholders. That is it. No code, no loops, no ifs, just formatted substitution, but really the keyword here is environmental…(read more)