Orchard for custom websites

Question

I've just installed Orchard and created a sample site. I want to evaluate this CMS to see what it's capabilities are if I could choose it for my CMS of choice for ASP.NET MVC based sites. Has anyone used it to run a custom, highly modified website? Unfortunately no sample sites are provided at Orchard site to see it in action.

I know what my requirements will be and those are quite demanding. I have my own little CMS in ASP.NET MVC 2 which I tailor to my needs anytime I want but it lacks a lot of functionality that you get when you have a bigger team of developers at your disposal like the Orchard has.

The best way to reply to this question is if you can provide some insights into customization and if you can provide a link to a working site.

Answer 1

There are a couple sites out there.. Here are three I have worked on...

These two were for a University, they have a contact us page, Payment system, and also hooks in to multiple databases with a large set of business logic for students and payments. The Registration system also has an updated menu template to deal with drop downs.

http://housing.bathspa.ac.uk/ (v0.5) http://registration.bathspa.ac.uk/ (v0.5)

My blog jsut has a modified theme which was enough to get me up an running.

http://www.themayneissue.com/ (v0.5)

There are a few open source modules I work on as well.. http://orchardopenauth.codeplex.com/ http://orchardblogml.codeplex.com/ These also allow for customization of the Orchard system

Answer 2

There are two community sites using Orchard, Orchard Gallery and NuGet gallery. For now me with my team is being writing an appication for nearly two months using Orchard and the only thing I can say is that it is awesome!

Yes, Orchard is very simple for now, but it is so powerfull in the same time. I just love their dynamic shapes and content types. Use it and you'll love it!

And as a bonus:

Just get code from repo and look through it, it shines like a diamond (the only problem is lack of comments). I am sure every MVC developer will find a lot of stuff to learn from it.