My fight setting up and customizing Orchard CMS 1.10.X

delacruzjl
Date : 5/24/2023
Categories :
Tags : cms , services , azure , visual studio , dotnet

Orchard is a great CMS tool, perhaps the only free option out there for us .NET fans. It is however very developer heavy when it comes to customizations. I am documenting my hurdles to get http://www.centerforprogressiveliving.org into the web with Orchard CMS.

First off, the Center for Progressive Living nonprofit mission is to provide resources to disabled adults currently located in the Oklahoma area. I met his founder, a Chaplain, during one my Navy tours and I found his idea very noble which is why I decided to help him get an online presence without burning his cash.

The Tools

For this evolution I am utilizing Microsoft Azure services:

SQL Database instance for Orchard database
App Services with Code and .NET 4.7
Share payment plan with custom domain.

The Azure market place does provide Orchard 1.10.1 and you can get quickly up and running with all the settings ready to go, BUT I have been working on 1.10.3 and when I tried to use my brand new customized Theme things didn't go so well which is why I decided to regain control and just do the Orchard deployment myself, but feel free to try, for a nonprofit website with no unique need Orchard out of the box works just fine.

The Theme

I have chosen the Agency Theme template from StartBootstrap for his website, it's simple and very much covers the sections he is trying to market.

One good advantage of this theme is that it uses font awesome icons to build the services and about images which saves a lot of research time looking for appropriate images.

Development

Now, let's talk about the tech stuff, you need:

Orchard CMS 1.10.3 with Url Alternates and Widget Alternates modules enabled.
Docker Windows Containers
A good editor, e.g. Visual Studio Code, preferably with docker extension installed.

Certainly you could use Visual Studio and download the full version of Orchard CMS and compile the whole thing, my objective was to keep it minimum to get the theme up and running within a week by just spending a couple hours a night, compiling all 85 projects of Orchard would eat very much my whole plan.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.