Tales from the Evil Empire

Raise your hand if you’ve ever written code looking like this:

If you’re going to get into any sort of technical job, you’re going to have to ask questions. A lot of questions. Unfortunately, too few people understand how to ask questions properly. Asking questions is a skill. It has to be learnt.

CMS is extremely important strategically for any web company. About 35% of web sites use a CMS, and the top ones are all PHP (WordPress on its own is more than 20% of all web sites). In other words, if you care about the market share of your web platform, you need a good CMS running on it.

We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems.

In this talk that I gave last June for Orchard Harvest in Amsterdam, I showed, in no particular order, my favorite Orchard features, tricks, and modules. Don’t expect a narrative in there, cause there isn’t one, but I’m hoping you’ll learn a thing or two.

Workflows in Orchard 1.7 are a damn sweet feature, and in this post I’m going to show you a very simple and useful case: comment moderation and notifications.

Managing dependencies in any project presents challenges, but open source adds its own constraints. In the wake of the release by Microsoft of new and useful libraries that are unfortunately encumbered by unacceptable licensing restrictions, I thought it would be a good time to summarize how we do things here in the Orchard project, both to get feedback and to give ideas to others facing similar challenges.

I’ve written several times about image resizing in .NET, but never in the context of Orchard. With the imminent release of Orchard 1.7, it’s time to correct this. The new version comes with an extensible media pipeline that enables you to define complex image processing workflows that can automatically resize, change formats or apply watermarks. This is not the subject of this post however. What I want to show here is one of the underlying APIs that enable that feature, and that comes in the form of a new shape.