Orchard Harvest 2015 – Orchard for tens of thousands of journalists

Lombiq gave us a case study of Media Kitty, which is a web site with 18,000 users. This is a rewrite of a web site that was previously written with VB and WebForms.

The new site features rich profiles including images, taxonomies, subscriptions, and billing/payment. The contents of the site is then restricted by permissions that depend on subscription levels. The site also has a social network aspect, where users can follow each other, like posts, post private messages, and invite others. Integration to external social networks is also provided.

Layouts and the media library are heavily used. A custom field was built to allow end-users to manage their own media.

They implemented some extensions to placement to enable grouping of shapes (think tabs, as one possible way to present that). It’s even possible to show the same shape under multiple groups. No numeric positioning under groups however.

This being a migration from an existing application, they had to migrate the legacy data, and operate the site, including during the migration.

One of the tools they have built is a way to use Orchard as a framework in an existing application, like VNext will enable, but on the current version. They use that to build a console application running Orchard code (NOT the command-line interface that comes with Orchard).

They also showed some of the tools they have built to better manage Orchard instances on Azure.

They’ve built a module that allows for remote execution of recipes that they use from continuous integration (TeamCity) to trigger configuration changes on new builds.

UPDATE: the video is online.