A presentation of the Orchard 2 subsystems that should interest any .NET app developer.

1. Orchard 2
…and why you should care

2. Orchard 1
▪ Content Management System
▪ Inspired from Drupal and WordPress
▪ Super-extensible
▪ Not designed for anything else than web CMS
▪ Doesn’t integrate well into other apps
▪ Bootstrapped by black magic incantations

3. Orchard 1 subsystems
▪ Multi-tenancy + Dependency Injection
▪ Module system
▪ Event bus
▪ Themes & UI composition
▪ Runtime content-type system
▪ Extensible CLI and recipes
▪ Setup
▪ Warmup
▪ Users & Roles, Permissions
▪ Background tasks
▪ Workflow
▪ Media management
▪ Localization
▪ Cache
▪ Data access, database migrations
▪ Tokens

4. Orchard 2
▪ Rewrite
▪ Built on ASP.NET Core
▪ Designed to integrate into other applications, in parts or as a whole
▪ Even less coupling
▪ Same extreme extensibility
▪ Embraces document databases instead of relational
▪ 10x Orchard 1’s throughput

5. DEMO
Bootstrapping an Orchard 2 web site

6. Multi-tenancy
▪ Improves site density
▪ Handles tenant-specific routes
▪ Scopes dependency injection and enabled features to the tenant

7. Module system
▪ Factors applications into single-responsibility subsystems
▪ Exposes services
▪ Dynamic compilation
▪ Local routing
▪ Features can be enabled and disabled

8. Event bus
▪ Decouples services
▪ Program against interfaces
▪ Interfaces are resolved by name
▪ Dynamic service resolution
▪ Really exchanges messages
▪ The base of Orchard extensibility

9. Themes and UI composition
▪ Shapes: dynamic view models
▪ Templates: views that render a shape
▪ Runtime template resolution
▪ Powerful system of alternate templates for specialized template overrides
▪ Placement: cooperative UI composition

10. Runtime content-type system
▪ Runtime types driven from code or metadata
▪ Types are composed from single-responsibility parts:
a blog post is made of a title, a slug/URL, a body, tags, and comments
▪ Any type can be modified

11. CLI & recipes
▪ Application command-line automation
▪ Thin shell
▪ Modules expose commands
▪ Model binding for the command-line
▪ Recipes: files containing custom commands (enable features, create content-
types, etc.), and import data

12. Setup
▪ Takes over requests for un-configured
shells
▪ Ask as little as possible up-front:
database engine, admin credentials, setup
recipe
▪ Defer as much as possible, make
decisions reversible

13. Warmup
▪ Serve statically-rendered pages while the app is warming up
▪ Pages that don’t have a pre-rendered version on disk will have to wait
▪ Orchard’s feature inspired the equivalent IIS feature

14. Users, roles, and permissions
▪ Pluggable authentication
▪ Decoupled users and roles
▪ Users are extensible content-types
▪ Modules expose permissions
▪ Permissions apply to roles
▪ Permissions are additive: no deny
▪ Single LoC permission checking

15. Background tasks
▪ HTTP favors fast and stateless operations
▪ Cleaning up, sending emails, long-running computations, all are best done in the
background
▪ Ideally, you’d have a separate service process and a message queue
▪ Next best thing is Orchard’s background task infrastructure

16. Workflow
▪ Makes processes pluggable and configurable
▪ An activity can be triggered by the output of another
▪ Manages processes that last for more than the request

17. Localization
▪ Standard po files
▪ All messages enclosed in a T():
@T(“This message needs to be localized.”)
msgctxt "~/Modules/Orchard.MediaPicker/Views/Fields/MediaGallery.cshtml"
msgid "No media. "
msgstr "Aucun média"

18. Data access & migrations
▪ Schema migrations (v1)
▪ Separation of storage and querying
▪ Pluggable storage providers
▪ Query on index
▪ Map/reduce-like pattern

19. Tokens
▪ Extensible contextual variables
▪ string interpolation
<a
href="mailto:{FormSubmission.Field:Email}">{FormSubmission.Field:FirstName}
{FormSubmission.Field:LastName}</a>

20. Conclusion
▪ Many interesting subsystems that are not tied to content management
▪ Interesting architecture
▪ Largest OSS application built on .NET Core