Meet the Orchard Project!

Orchard is a new CMS system developed by a team from Microsoft under the auspices of the newly formed Codeplex Foundation . I want to draw your attention to the fact that this is not a Microsoft project and the company does not provide any official support for Orchard, but Microsoft contributes to the project by selecting a full-time development team of 8 people (you must admit that a full-fledged team of high-class specialists is a good help). Initially, the project involved developers from the ASP.NET team, but later they were joined by the guys from Oxite . By the way, despite the fact that leading developers Oxite Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew switched to Orchard, the project did not cease to exist, and the blog engine, once created to support the MIX'09 conference site, is preparing for release (as the developers promise, soon after complete MIX'10 :)).

Development Orchard began relatively recently, in October last year. At the moment, not a single, even an intermediate version has been released, but the development is very active . It's nice that all the code is provided under the New BSD License, and not Ms-PL as most of the projects hosted on Codeplex and developed with the participation of Microsoft employees.

At the moment, a lot has already been implemented from the standard set of functionality of mature CMS:

• Basic Administration and Authentication Panel
• Creating and managing pages
• Page templates and content zones on pages
• Various content types / metadata, viewers and content editors
• Editing and publishing content (drafts, publication schedule, preview)
• Extensibility - basic content types and infrastructure composability (based on MVC 2 Areas)
• Media content management (basic support for loading and displaying images in content)
• Managing users, roles, memberships, profiles, and access rights
• XML-RPC (Live Writer, MetaWebBlog) support for pages
• Basic blog features (creation of blog and post management)
• Comments - comments related to content types, comment management, spam protection
• Tags - tags related to content types, tag navigation
• Settings - management of application level and extension level settings is implemented in the UI
• Themes - support themes, install / uninstall themes via UI

Of course, Orchard does not yet have all the necessary CMS functions, and even that which does not always work, but I believe that Orchard has everything ahead!
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Links

For those who want to get acquainted with the Orchard Project, a few links to useful resources:

• Official site of the project
• Codeplex Project
• MSDN Project Forums

Several screenshots

The screenshots deployed change set 45991 .
(Admin control panel is very similar to Wordpress)