Following the migration of lombiq.com, Git-hg Mirror, Hastlayer, and Orchard Dojo from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core (and also the redesign of lombiq.com and Orchard Dojo), we had only one site remaining that was still running on Orchard 1: DotNest.com. While you could create Orchard Core sites on DotNest for years, until now, the DotNest website itself still ran on Orchard 1.

We have recently finished upgrading DotNest to the latest Orchard Core version (2.1.6) so that you can enjoy the very best and latest Orchard has to offer on your own sites too!

Orchard Core updatesNew Assets Build Tool (Assets Manager)Currently, Orchard Core includes a processing pipeline for client-side assets (typically scripts and stylesheets), which is used to perform front-end development workflow tasks such as transpilation, minification, and bundling of client-side assets in both core projects and extensions (i.e., modules and themes). Many of the built-in modules and themes in Orchard Core use this pipeline to process client-side assets, and you can enable your own extensions to use it as well. The client-side asset pipeline is powered by Gulp, a popular open-source task runner based on Node.js that can be used to automate a wide variety of tasks in a development workflow. This will be deprecated once the community releases Orchard Core v3, and after that, you can use the new Assets Manager instead.

Believe it or not, while you could create Orchard Core sites on DotNest for years, until now, this website still ran on Orchard 1 :). This is now the past, though, and DotNest.com is as up to date as the DotNest sites!

Orchard Core updatesImprove handling of publish/unpublish operationsThis change lets us prevent the publication in the handlers because you can say cancel, and it will be considered. To say cancel, you must set the Cancel property to true of the PublishContentContext. In this case, the PublishAsync method of the DefaultContentManager will also display a message to the user saying that publishing the content was canceled and not published correctly. In this case, the mentioned PublishAsync will return a false value, which was not the case before. And the same applies when unpublishing a content is canceled.

Orchard Core updatesReorganize the Admin MenuCurrently, site settings provided by modules are scattered on the menu in many places. From user experience, it would be nice to place all settings under one dedicated location on the menu for easy access and to quickly know where all the settings are located. Also, the text style on the menu items isn’t unified.

Orchard Core updatesSimplify the Login and LoginForm viewsThe goal of this change is to keep the LoginForm.Edit.cshtml to minimal since the Login.cshtml is defining the structure. This allows a user to override everything they need in the Login.cshtml including removing the form headline. The following code has been moved to Views/Account/Login.cshtml:

Orchard Core updatesSupport depends-on when using script and style inlineThe depends-on attribute available in script/style Tag Helpers should work the same as declaring a dependency in a resource manifest and causing the dependency to be included. This doesn't happen, though, and the dependency is not included. The dependency order is only enforced when it was already included before. Let's say you add a script into one of your Razor files, like: