I was recently trying to fix a bug in orchard and it was suggested to use shape morphing and alternates for the fix. I realized I needed to know more about these area’s and started looking around. If you have spent much time trying to learn about Orchard CMS you will soon find that the […]

User journeys are actions our users (see our personas) take to achieve their goals. The primary user goals have already been mapped to the project requirements so we can take those and map out the journeys. I find it good practice to look at the existing user journeys on the current site and then look at how these can be improved. It’s not feasible to map out every possible user journey as there could be thousands of scenarios, so it’s best to focus on the priority requirements for each of our target users.

A long time ago you had to write Orchard code by hand, like cavemen. Then the era of code-writing code came when Orchardizer was released. Now we add our own take on an Orchard developer's Visual Studio extension, introducing Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension with an enterprise-level long name!

Snippets are Layout Elements that you can drag n drop into the layout canvas. You add them to the Views folder of your theme and they have to end with Snippet.cshtml. Layout Snippets it's one of my favourites features of Orchard.  

Our Liquid Markup Orchard module now got a lot smarter! The module enables you to create templates (from the admin or from code) in which you can use the Liquid Markup language. This is a bit more restrictive than e.g. Razor what you may usually work with when developing Orchard. However still it's quite powerful and now we have the following new features:

To help achieve the projects objectives and goals, the project must meet certain criteria. These requirements can be seen as “Success Factors” or “Victory Conditions” in which the project can be measured.

Personas are essentially fictional characters that represent the different user types that use our website. I’m not a huge fan of personas as they are one-dimensional and can be misleading, for example, our first persona represents a Developer but our ‘Creator’ group could also be a designer for example. With that said, they do a good job of humanising our audience and communicating the types of user we need to cater for, which can help keep the user in mind when designing the site.

Orchard messages appear as text messages in the Messages Zone. But sometimes we need something fancier than a simple text.