Charting the Orchard API
When first starting out developing applications with Orchard, I remember well the need for more extensive documentation and samples on the API and concepts that exist in Orchard.
I remember how glad I was to find Piotr's blog about the most important extensibility points. Although it didn't provide in-depth details, at least it pointed me to what services there were available, which helped me enormously getting up to speed. I kind of envy these guys who seemed to "get" Orchard as of day 1. It took me a whole lot longer before I gained creative freedom to build anything I needed with Orchard.
Orchard is generally considered to have a steap learning curve for theme and module developers, even for experienced MVC developers. How come? for one thing, it depends on one's knowledge and experience with concepts like Dependency Injection, MVC, the Repository Pattern and the EventBus Pattern. But for the biggest part, it's a lack And then there's a whole new world called dynamic and shapes, alternates and drivers, and a rich set of API features. As Sebastién Ros put it: Orchard is a puzzle. Each part on its own is hard to grasp without understanding other parts. This was especially true for me with regards to content types, parts, fields, drivers and shapes. Also the liberal use of Clay and C#'s dynamic type system has given me a great deal of frustration, since I was unable to use intellisense as I am used to. I remember at some point I realized that when I had a static reference to some content part, it would behave differently when I would cast it to dynamic: I suddenly could perform other operations on it. I was so confused.
However, since day 1 I saw the potential, the beauty, the power that Orchard beholds. And yet it was sometimes a love/hate relationship, frustrations of not understanding, while loving the architecture and its richness. I have never seen a .NET CMS that is free to use with such a great looking backend and is as modular as Orchard and built on top of the MVC framework.
As amazing Orchard is as a framework and application, to be really succesful it needs a large community that will be able to use it. I know of developers who tried Orchard for a few months, but then walked away because it was just too hard to be productive. There simply isn't enough documentation that goes beyond the simple examples that we have today.
To help change that, I started out with an end-to-end turorial: Writing a Webshop Module from scratch, featuring a multi part series on how to write a real world module from beginning to end (although the tutorial is not quite finished yet).
Although the tutorial is a nice introduction to ORchard develoipment, what is still lacking is an extensive list of API's and concepts, each one explained in isolation as well as examples and tutorials to see how everything fits together.
This series of posts is an attempt at charting and documenting Orchards's most useful concepts, services and features as I come accross them during real world development.
Authentication & Authorization
API
- IAuthenticationService
- IAuthorizationService
- IMembershipService
- IPermissionProvider
- OrchardSecurityException
Scenarios
- Implementing your own user registration & user profile
- Protecting your controllers
Related articles
Background tasks
API
- IBackgroundTask
- IScheduledTask
- IScheduledTaskHandler
Scenarios
Related articles
Caching
API
- IVolatileProvider
- IVolatileToken
Scenarios
Related articles
Content Management
API
- IContentManager
- IContentDefinitionManager
- IContentHandler
- IContentPartDriver
Scenarios
- Creating your own content editor page
- Allowing users to manage content on the front-end
Related articles
Data access, migrations
API
- IRepository<T>
- IDataMigration
- SchemaBuilder
Scenarios
- Data access without the content type system using IRepository<T>
- Data access with Entity Framework and connecting to non-Orchard tables
- Creating the database schema using a migration class
Dependency Injection
API
- IDependency
- ISingletonDependency
- IUnitOfWorkDependency
- ITransientDependency
- Component
- Autofac.Module
Scenarios
Related Articles
Event Bus
API
- IEventBus
- IEventHandler
Scenarios
Related articles
Messaging
API
- IMessagingChannel
Scenarios
Related articles
Misc
API
- IClock
- IHtmlFilter
- ILazyField<T>
- IOrchardServices
- IWorkContextAccessor
- Work<T>
Scenarios
Related articles
Modules
API
- Feature
Scenarios
Related articles
Navigation
API
- INavigationProvider
Scenarios
- Integrating with the Admin menu
Related articles
Request filters
API
- IFilterProvider
Scenarios
Related articles
Shapes
API
- IShapeTableProvider
- IShapeFactory
- IShapeDisplayEvents
Scenarios
Related articles
Testing
API
Scenarios
Related articles
