Migration from Orchard to MiniBlog

The past couple of days I’ve been working on migrating my blog from the Orchard CMS to MiniBlog. The main reason for me to migrate to a different system is because I don’t work a lot with Orchard anymore. There were also some crashes from time to time which I couldn’t explain. I’m currently hosting my websites on Azure Websites, because of that I didn’t feel much for using a database system. Read more →

Developing a new Orchard content part and widget

Note: Going through my blogpost draftfolder I noticed this post which I wrote about a year ago. Seeing a lot of time has gone into it I decided to post it anyway. It’s based on Orchard version 1.2, so things might have changed, but the basics are probably the same. Now for the real post. I’ve got a new job where I was needed to create a new CMS website and add some client specific features on it. Read more →

Upgrade Orchard 1.3 to 1.4

As I’m busy designing and developing my new weblog I noticed a minor Orchard version was released. Because I’m in the starting phase of the development cycle, I decided to upgrade to the latest version. This is rather easy, as you can just download the latest sources from CodePlex, extract and copy them over the old codebase (well, I deleted the original 1.3 files and copied the 1.4 files to a ‘clean’ folder). Read more →

Update Orchard theme using SQL statement if the UI does not work anymore

If you create a theme for Orchard, it’s only a matter of time before you stumble across a yellow screen of death. I know this, because it happened multiple times to me. One of the reasons for these errors are the dynamic objects, which are used a lot in Orchard. You won’t get compile-time errors with these objects, so they need to be handled with care. Now, when a theme causes a yellow screen you are kind of screwed as you can’t do anything anymore on the website, like logging in to the admin area. Read more →

Getting the Orchard archive to work in your blog

A few months ago I decided to migrate my weblog from SharePoint to Orchard, because it’s more lightweight and better suited as a simple blog. I also started to develop some custom modules and themes for this CMS and have to say I like it! One thing though, which has bothered me from the beginning, was the empty Archive block at the right side of my blog. I had done so much work to import the SharePoint blog entries to Orchard (a manual copy-paste action), so I knew the posts were there, I could even browse to them. Read more →