As you've surely noticed now, also from the barrage of privacy policy updates you should've received, in the EU the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, takes effect today. This greatly enhances how your personal data should be protected by companies, but if you're a company, you also need to make sure you comply with it (if you manage EU citizens' data then you should, even if your company is not incorporated in the EU).

The Workflows module has been ported to Orchard Core, and it is awesome. In this post, I will give you a quick tour of the changes.

We should really take better care of our largest organ, the skin. The Skin Cancer Foundation, a non-profit from New York City, helps by educating people on skin cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment - it's actually the only international organization to focus on this. And as you may have guessed, their website runs on Orchard CMS! So they got in touch with us and we worked together on a series of tasks to upgrade the site a bit.

It has a certain ring to it when you can say your company, institute or school is 50 years, or 150 years old. How about 250 years? The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the oldest academic honor society in the US is almost that old, being founded in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Having a history of even 17 US Presidents and countless other notable people being members, Phi Beta Kappa has an established presence to date - and a web presence also based on Orchard CMS.

Orchard is full of alternates for different shapes. Unfortunately, the editors don't work like this. For the editors in Orchard to work in the MVC style we are accustomed to it employs a simple trick to bind the models and add the html prefixes. To do this it renders a generic shape, EditorTemplate that renders the specified template. Usually this would be fine, except when you need to use alternates to override a specific editor (for example, a named field). Say you want to override the editor for the Enumeration field with the name FieldName, you'd expect to be able to put a view in your EditorTemplates folder called Fields.EnumerationField-FieldName because the alternates are added to the EditorTemplate shape. So we can use this and add a view called EditorTemplate-FieldName.cshtml with the contents:

My blog, like most blogs, is pretty simple. There is only one interactive aspect, aside from the entire admin area, and that is comments. And let's be honest here, Orchard's comments are pretty lacklustre. Embeddable comment platforms like Disqus are hugely popular now and so that should solve the comments problem. I originally shied away from comments because I had lofty ideals about my blog being free from third party tracking and not contribute the gradual erosion of privacy across the internet. But I'm now skint so those have all gone out the window, I've added Google analytics, ads, AMP integration and Disqus comments are coming; full on pandering to my nosey overlords. I also cant justify the cost of a web server to host my blog when I could do it for nothing on a different platform.

This is a rather obscure requirement that, surprisingly, I have needed on two separate occasions. Hence the blog post, just in case any other poor sod out there needs it.