Issues with Orchard CMS

Question

I have researched for some time the Orchard CMS and I'm pleased with some of his futures but also I have some issues that I don't know how to deal with them:

• All the items (content type) are linear and they don't support a tree like data structure (Ex: books > titles > web-links)

• One of the big problem (depending how you see things) is that the model and the view for the items are coupled (content part > driver with display / editor views)

  So for a new page the model, view and position are locked and you can have only one view of the model.

• Use of advance language futures the are not suited for beginner developers and are not very clear (dynamic functions, clay objects - nice future, ...)

  // Creating table VPlayerRecord
  SchemaBuilder.CreateTable("VPlayerRecord", table => table
  .ContentPartRecord()
  .Column("Title", DbType.String)
  .Column("VideoUrl", DbType.String)
  .Column("WidthPx", DbType.Double)
  .Column("HeightPx", DbType.Double)
  );
  

  This syntax is not very clear for beginner developers and is a bit over engineered. Also because the model is a dynamic object in the view we don't have any intellisense support.

• To build a new page we have something like three degree of separation (3 projects)

  • Build a content part module
  • Build a content type
  • Build a theme module

How do you overcome these issues in your projects with Orchard CMS? and what other issues have you found and fixes :)

Answer 1

1. read this: http://orchardproject.net/docs/Creating-1-n-and-n-n-relations.ashx and this: http://orchardproject.net/docs/Creating-lists.ashx
2. How is this a problem and why do you see this as coupling? What alternative do you see?
3. Where do you see this as a problem and how has it blocked you?

edit on 2: it is not true that you can have only one view of the model. You can have any number of display types. For example, the summary view of items is handled this way. You also have display types for admin views, and you can add your own. Not sure what you mean by "position is locked". If we mean the same thing by position, I'm puzzled by how you could have gotten such an idea. Relative positioning of parts and fields can be changed through placement.info.

edit on 3: even with this example, I'm not sure what would be difficult here. This is fairly expressive imo. Were you confused yourself or are you just assuming people would be? You are claiming that this is over-engineered. How would you simplify it then? What feature do you think is not needed? You don't get IntelliSense in views on model objects but the flexibility you gain by doing so justifies it by a very large margin. Ask anyone who's been making real use of it.

new 4th point: I can't see a reason why you would separate that into three modules or why you think you should. I've certainly never seen an example of that. I would also point out that creating a part and a type are often done by two different people (a type creator is often just a consumer of existing parts). But again you don't have to separate them into different modules. A theme is clearly a different concern from the two others and makes sense to be a separate project but a theme can come with code and can actually in principle do everything a module is doing. So if you want to package a part, type and theme into a single package, you could do that. It wouldn't make a lot of sense but you could. Finally, I don't see how any of those four points are related to page creation.

Answer 2

Orchard has to be taken as a challenge. As a beginner I have quickly built a few sites with ease. After that the learning curve became steeper. I've read many articles on the subject, numerous times.

I have used some CMS's before and had some knowledge what is the nature of managing content. Learning Orchard opened a whole new definition of content management. Now I can think of solving some everyday tasks and various business processes by implementing Orchard.

The whole thing is built in a very abstract layer, forcing you to think abstract too. If you follow this way, there are many blog posts, as well as official documentation to help you.

There are few basic building blocks and concepts that can be used like a bricks. Sounds like a phrase, I've heard it hunderts of times. I have also seen thousands of houses built from red square bricks, and they were all different, while the bricks were all equal. Such things can be accomplished with Orchard.

Read and understand the programming patterns. They are essential part of knowledge that will help you in solving Orchard based tasks. They will also help you change the way you are accomplishing your non Orchard related tasks.

I would say, there are two basic areas one need to understand. Storing and retreiving the piece of content is one, while presenting it to the crowd is the other. It might look difficult, it is difficult, but the goodies behind are delightfull. Not to mention great guys, some from evil empire, some not, that will certainly help you along the way. Not to forget, git's are your best friend. There are many wheels already invented. Caution, neither comes with free lunch.

P.S. I haven't write such a long post since usenet times. It might not be suitable for a site like this. It's kind a way to give a thanks to this French guy, and to all other Orchard evangelists from Poland, over Cyprus to the States. They saved my ass in many occasions.