Because of Orchard's decoupled nature, the standard bin folders don't quite work for Orchard because no project has a reference to all the other projects included in the solution. What this means is that Orchard needs to copy all the dlls from the modules bin folders into another folder, the Dependencies folder in App_Data. This all just works out of the box generally, however if you have a weird dependency requirement this can all fall apart. Several times I have had a folder of dlls that I require in the bin folder that isn't being copied into the Dependencies folder, because it doesn't support this scenario. This means that things fall apart at runtime when I try to access code that requires this folder of dlls exist. I tried for several (stupidly wasted) hours to use an Orchard hook to add this folder. I know that I wanted to use the IExtensionLoader interface but I couldn't work out a way to inject my dependency. I think I know what I needed, which is to add the dependency manually into the Host.config file (this XML file contains autofac config stuff) and add a reference to my module in Orchard.Web. But this seemed a bit long. So I wrote a dirty hack.

I had some problems earlier this year with Google complaining that there were a few links around the internet that pointed to non-existent URLs on my blog, blocking me from getting an AdSense account. So I threw together a tiny module that allows 301 and 302 redirects to be configured from a content items edit page.

Over four years ago I wrote a blog post about how you could make your blog snow. The code is still available on Codeplex. Yikes. I thought it was time to update it a little. The snow is now responsive and I improved the performance a little. The snow is automatically injected onto the page when you enable the module. As always when I make anything in Orchard, I ran into a few oddities. Firstly, I needed to display my shape at the beginning of the body tag. Shapes in Orchard can have a position, but if it is null, it defaults to before, so you cant put anything, well, before it. So to get a shape in front we need to insert the shape into the list manually.

Gist embed code is very simple, just a script tag with a link to your gist.

You can parse a Stream with AngleSharp by just passing it into the HTML parser. However, AngleSharp doesn't set the stream position to zero so you get an empty output if you've been writing to a stream and it took me way longer to clock onto that than it should really have done.

The first Dojo Course was recorded and released in 2013 (not long after Lombiq Technologies was founded) and now we are happy to announce the arrival of Dojo Course 2! The course material has the same foundation (the Orchard Training Demo Module, which has also been upgraded in the past years), but it's updated for the (then) latest Orchard version (1.10.1) and the production quality is also improved. Just like the first generation, these videos were also recorded as part of a university course, but this time host is the University of Szeged, Institute of Informatics. Thanks for having us!

AngleSharp is a pretty sweet document parser for .NET. I was parsing some HTML and making some modifications. All good. Then retrieving the full, modified HTML at the end had me stuck. All the examples I could see said to do it like this: document.DocumentElement.OuterHtml. This worked, except it was missing the Doctype. The correct way to do it is to add a reference to AngleSharp.Extensions and then you get a nice extension .ToHtml(), which is perfect.

I remember when I made my first theme and my boss told me we needed to be able to change the header colour. Easy. So I added a site settings part with a property header colour. Then I added a shape to the Layout that picked up my header colour and rendered some style tags to change the header colour. Then we needed a font picker because, of course the theme should support different fonts. New property on my part. Excellent. Then we needed different font pickers for headers, menu, body. But they needed to inherit if none was displayed. Okay, some funny logic and more properties to my settings part. A bunch more properties later and a boatload of CSS in style tags the theme settings were now doing things they really shouldn't have been doing. You could add header images, logos, tag lines, contact information etc. It was starting to look like a unwieldy WordPress theme, doing anything and everything. But if I had had my 'Orchard' way, everything would be buried in their own modular settings screen, widget etc. We needed a marriage between the two, an easy place for users to go to find settings but not all managed by one lumbering giant, horrible-to-maintain theme.