{"id":627,"date":"2012-07-13T10:20:53","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T09:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/?p=627"},"modified":"2012-07-13T10:20:53","modified_gmt":"2012-07-13T09:20:53","slug":"orchard-a-first-impression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/2012\/07\/orchard-a-first-impression\/","title":{"rendered":"Orchard: a first impression"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The blog you&#8217;re reading right now is powered by WordPress. WordPress is a well known blog engine used for a lot of blogs. But for me, being a Microsoft dude, it&#8217;s not that easy extending it and making it my own. That always kept me from creating my entire website in WordPress somehow, never had the urge to start that project.<\/p>\n<p>So recently I got bored with my &#8220;website&#8221; (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.repsaj.nl\">www.repsaj.nl<\/a>) and wanted to try something new. So I went on a search to see what .NET based CMS-es (how\u00a0do you spell that correctly?)\u00a0there were out there. Didn&#8217;t took me too long to find <a href=\"http:\/\/orchardproject.net\/\">Orchard<\/a>, a .NET based\u00a0open source CMS\u00a0which looked promising from the start. And only 2 weeks later, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.repsaj.nl\">www.repsaj.nl<\/a> is an Orchard powered site catered to my needs. I even wrote my own custom page module with live tiles\u00a0and Spotify widget.\u00a0Loving it! The only downside is the speed at which it&#8217;s hosted, but that seems to be a problem of my hosting company, to be continued.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s a little about Orchard:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Installation is very easy, it&#8217;s powered by WebMatrix 2 which let&#8217;s you create new sites based on existing systems like Orchard very rapidly. And that&#8217;s not .NET only, you can also create a WordPress site for instance. Other options include Joomla, Drupal, phpBB and many, many more. When you&#8217;re thinking of setting something like that up in a Windows environment, you should definitely check that out.<\/li>\n<li>Orchard has all the basic CMS bits like creating pages, uploading media, theming, etc. It&#8217;s very much like WordPress, although the WordPress community does offer more content to use at this moment.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s based on MVC which makes it fast (when you&#8217;ve got the right host that is), flexible and search engine friendly.<\/li>\n<li>Development is pretty straightforward. Ok, it&#8217;s may not be that easy for a novice .NET developer, but anyone who&#8217;s got some MVC experience should be able to start with the help of some good tutorials in the <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.orchardproject.net\/\">documentation section<\/a>. You can write themes, page modules, widgets, everything is extensible!<\/li>\n<li>Deployment is super simple, again due to WebMatrix. You set your FTP server details (or web deployment server when supported), press Publish and away you go.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll leave it\u00a0with that for now. But expect more Orchard stuff up here, because\u00a0I&#8217;m pretty exited about it. Finally a decent, well build, professional CMS for .NET based sites. Great!<\/p>\n<p>Oh and for you\u00a0Orchard fans out there, you\u00a0can download my Spotify Widget from the online gallery, or check it out here:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/ZytB8n9u\">https:\/\/t.co\/ZytB8n9u<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The blog you&#8217;re reading right now is powered by WordPress. WordPress is a well known blog engine used for a lot of blogs. But for me, being a Microsoft dude, it&#8217;s not that easy extending it and making it my own. That always kept me from creating my entire website in WordPress somehow, never had<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3KFR1-a7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.repsaj.nl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}