Tales from the Evil Empire

Yes, well, if you feel that I haven’t blogged enough today, this post is for you. There is one session that I missed in that frantic blogfest, and for good reason: I was giving it, with my friends Nick and Sébastien. I won’t detail the contents of what we said (you’ll have to wait for the video to make it to YouTube, sorry), but I can definitely share our slides. So here goes… Enjoy…

The NFL Player Association web site is a migration from a WebForms application. The team wanted a WordPress-like CMS, but running on .NET. They ruled out SharePoint and Umbraco, and went for Orchard because of its dashboard (that was 1.8 at the time). They chose to deploy on Azure.

In which we learn how much of a narcissist Sébastien really is: he watches his own sessions from previous years, and learns a lot doing so ;)

Sipke made a new demo of Orchard Layouts, which have in my opinion dethroned workflows (and taxonomies before that) as Orchard’s crown jewel. He started by showing simple layout elements such as HTML and Markdown, then quickly switched into Orchardy extension and reusability mode.

Bede Gaming is an online casino gaming company that is built entirely on Orchard. As such, they need to be able to debug a lot of Orchard code as fast as possible. For that, they use Glimpse a lot. Glimpse is a Firebug-like tool for debugging server code.

Onestop has been using Orchard for a few years now, and it’s one of the largest players in the community. They are delivering a complete e-commerce stack that is largely built on Orchard. And when I talk about a stack, this even includes product photoshoots and shipping from a huge warehouse in Los Angeles. They just handle everything end-to-end.

The fourth Harvest conference, where the Orchard CMS community gathers to share experiences, talk about the future of the platform, and generally have a great time together, is happening October 5-6 in Alicante. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers, if I may say so myself, including the following fine people from Microsoft: Sébastien Ros, lead developer and Benevolent Dictator of Orchard, and N. Taylor Mullen, developer extraordinaire and super-fun speaker.

The dynamic layouts feature in Orchard is pretty awesome, but using it with the Bootstrap 3 grid system may not be immediately obvious. The feature comes with a built-in grid system, but I prefer to use Bootstrap’s fluid grids. I’ve built a few template overrides that I use to bend Orchard layouts to use the Bootstrap grid.