How to create your website from scratch using Orchard CMS. Part 1. Introduction to Orchard CMS

about the project

The Orchard CMS project was announced in March 2010 with the release of the first beta version of the project. The creators of Orchard CMS set a goal to build a content management system on the new successful ASP.NET MVC framework that would meet the following requirements:

• open free and free project, depending on community requests;
• fast engine with a modular architecture and all the necessary means of CMS;
• publicly accessible online gallery of modules, themes and other components of the extension from the community;
• high quality typography, attention to layout and page layout;
• emphasis on creating a convenient and functional administration panel;
• rapid deployment of the system on the workplace and easy publishing to the server.

Orchard Content Management System is an open source project written in ASP.NET MVC. Orchard is part of an open source non-profit foundation Outercurve Foundation's ASP.NET project gallery .



Fig.1.1. The default appearance of the Orchard CMS
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Initially, Orchard and its source codes were licensed on the basis of a free license MS-PL, but recently, with the release of the first public version, the project changed the license to a simpler and more common New BSD License .

Four preliminary versions were released during the year, until Orchard CMS reached version 1.0. All this time, the developers kept in touch with the community, accepting suggestions, taking into account comments and correcting errors found. To publish the source code and collect user feedback, the project was launched on the open source project codeplex.com portal at http://orchard.codeplex.com/ .

Today at http://orchard.codeplex.com/ you can find extensive documentation on all aspects of using Orchard CMS, you can participate in the discussion of the project in forums, you can send a report about the error found on the bugtracker, you can download the latest project source codes and binary builds.

In addition to the developer page http://orchard.codeplex.com/ , the official project site was launched at http://www.orchardproject.net/ , which today contains all the supporting documentation necessary for working with Orchard CMS. In addition, the official website contains a gallery of modules and other components created by the community to expand the functionality of Orchard CMS.

Since Orchard CMS is an open source project that is free for the community, developers can send their fixes and deliver their source code to the project through the Mercurial distributed source control tool, which integrates the http://orchard.codeplex.com/ page.

The first stable version of Orchard CMS 1.0 was released in January 2011, and this event greatly influenced the further growth of the project. Dozens of discussions appeared in the project forums, a lot of new participants joined the community, the gallery of extensions and modules began to grow rapidly.

A version of Orchard CMS 1.1 is being prepared for an early exit, which will bring new interesting features to the project, for example, support for the so-called “Recipes” (Recipes) that will automate the deployment of Orchard CMS with certain sets of functions. A full roadmap with a list of already implemented functions and functions that are currently being worked on can be found at http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/feature-roadmap.ashx .

Download Orchard CMS

There are several possibilities to download Orchard CMS to the workplace to create new web applications. Among them:

• manual download from the project site, self-deployment and configuration;
• Automatic download from the application gallery using the Web Platform Installer quick access tool (click on this link to start the installation );
  
• automatic download, work with code and database, analysis of code quality and maintenance through reports, fast and automatic publication to the server using the new free development tool WebMatrix.

The option of manually loading and setting seems routine. Why do something for a long time with your hands, if the process can be automated and spend time working with the CMS, and not to download and install it.



Fig. 1.2. Downloading source codes and binary builds of Orchard CMS from the official site

The option to download via the Web Platform Installer greatly simplifies setting up a CMS at the workplace, offering automatic project download, all necessary dependencies, and configuration of the CMS on the IIS server. This option is considered in this article on Habrahabr, which is somewhat outdated, but gives a general idea. Downloading Orchard CMS using WebPI is a great opportunity to quickly and automatically launch a CMS on a local computer or server.



Fig. 1.3. The Web Platform Installer and Orchard CMS window in the list of web applications and tools

However, the best way to download, work, deploy, and follow-up projects based on Orchard CMS is to work through the new WebMatrix development tool.



Fig. 1.4. Download Orchard CMS from WebMatrix template gallery

In this tutorial, WebMatrix will be our main tool for building applications based on Orchard CMS.

WebMatrix - a tool for developing and maintaining web projects

WebMatrix is ​​a free, lightweight tool for developing, deploying and maintaining web applications. The WebMatrix installation package takes only 8 megabytes and is installed in a few seconds. WebMatrix is ​​built to work with the latest Microsoft technologies: IIS Express 7.5, SQL Server Compact 4.0 compact database and Web Deploy 2.0 automatic deployment tool.



Fig. 1.5. WebMatrix 1.0 start window

WebMatrix offers the following features for web developers:

• creating web application projects from scratch or based on basic templates;
• Download popular web application templates from remote storage;
• built-in tracking of parameters of requests to the web application during testing and automatic recording of data in the log;
• built-in code editor for web applications: scripts, styles, markup, and so on, with syntax highlighting and other standard features;
• Built-in full-fledged database schema editor: creating databases and tables, deleting and editing the database structure, entering, deleting and editing data in the database;
• built-in project support by analyzing pages and creating reports on search engine optimization problems, layout errors, broken links and many other parameters.

Fig. 1.6. Working with code in WebMatrix

An important feature of WebMatrix is ​​not only the ability to create web applications, but also accompany them throughout the entire life cycle. Thus, WebMatrix will be useful to you not only at the stage from design to development of a web application, but also later, when your application will work as a real project.



Fig. 1.7. Work with databases in WebMatrix

WebMatrix, as well as other important development tools designed for web developers, is available for automatic download via the automatic installer of the Web Platform Installer web platform. How to download and work with the Web Platform Installer you can learn from this article on Habrahabr .



Fig. 1.8. Project analysis and work with reports in WebMatrix

A large amount of information on WebMatrix can be found on the official websites http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/ and http://www.asp.net/WebMatrix .

Work with Orchard CMS through WebMatrix

In the first part of our guide to developing web applications based on Orchard CMS, we will learn about downloading, launching, configuring and publishing our first application. At each stage, our work will be facilitated and automated by WebMatrix.

Download Orchard CMS

Orchard CMS based project is very easy to upload to WebMatrix. Simply launch the development environment and in the start window (Figure 1.5) select the Site From Web Gallery item.

In the appeared window with the list of web application templates available in the remote storage, find the Orchard CMS (Figure 1.4). For a quick search, select the CMS section.

Enter the site name and click OK. WebMatrix prompts you to familiarize yourself with the license of the downloadable template and notify you of the size of the data you need to download from the storage (Figure 1.9).



Fig. 1.9. Download project Orchard CMS through WebMatrix

Click the I Accept button (I agree) to agree with the license and to continue downloading the Orchard CMS template. A few seconds later, after downloading the template from the remote storage and its automatic installation in the workplace, you will receive a notification of successful completion. If you want, review the installation process log and click OK to go to the downloaded template in the WebMatrix environment (Figure 1.10).



Fig. 1.10. WebMatrix main window with Orchard CMS template loaded

As you can see, WebMatrix helped automatically download and install the Orchard CMS template in a few seconds, greatly saving us time on routine operations.

Launch Orchard CMS

The beauty of working with WebMatrix is ​​that after a quick download and automatic installation of the web application template, you need to press just one Run button to start your application ready and configured (Figure 1.11).



Fig. 1.11. The first launch of the project based on Orchard CMS

After a short initial compilation, the project will be launched in the browser and you will be able to perform its initial configuration. In the Orchard CMS start window, you can specify the following parameters:

• the name of your site;
• username with administrator privileges and password;
• database type: embedded and compact SQL Server Compact or existing on the client or SQL Server (Express).

In case you select SQL Server (Express) as the server, you will need to enter the connection string to the existing server.

SQL Server Compact is great for storing data, this database is easy to manage and Orchard CMS fully supports working with the structure of this database. Therefore, in the course of our guide, we will use SQL Server Compact as a means of storing data for our applications.

Choose the first item Use built -in data storage and click Finish Setup to complete the initial setup. The site will be configured in a few seconds.



Fig. 1.12. Orchard CMS primary configuration indicator

Immediately after the configuration, you will be presented with your first website on the Orchard CMS with a sample template ready for customization, editing and content filling (Figure 1.13).



Fig. 1.13. The first site on Orchard CMS

As you can see, since the launch of WebMatrix and until the finished website based on the Orchard CMS was uploaded, a few minutes passed in the browser. Saving your time is one of the important properties of WebMatrix.

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