If you’ve been following along, I am certain you have started to understand my slight frustration with WordPress. I am not sure I am going to fully abandon the application because there is a need for it. But, at the heart of my development skills, I am a .NET developer and I learned my web development on ASP.NET and C#. Which brings me to the purpose of this post.
I am looking for a CMS that meets a few requirements. First, it should be easily extendable. Second, it should be fast and last it should be modern. Alas, I am going to start working with Orchard Core which is currently in alpha beta, meaning, it is not ready for production. The Orchard CMS meets my criteria because its sole purpose is to be extendable which satisfies my first requirement. The latter two points are satisfied using Orchard Core which is the 2nd version. Orchard Core was rebuilt using ASP.NET Core which is the next iteration of ASP.NET and it is faster and modern. You can review the links for details on how it achieves these requirements. In this post, I am going to walk through how to setup Orchard Core for development.
What You Will Need:
- Text Editor: Visual Studio Code or IDE: Visual Studio Community (These are FREE!)
- .Net Core SDK and Runtime
- Git
- Node.js
- Orchard Core Source Code
Prep
Organize your development folder. I use a folder titled, dev, on an external HD. From here I store all my cloned git repositories in a folder titled repo.
Getting the Source Code
Fire up your favorite command line application. I just use PowerShell because. To open your native command line shell in windows, press windows key + x + a
Navigate (cd) to your dev folder
Grab the repo link
Git clone the repo link
Navigate into the Orchard Core directory
TIP: when you are typing you can partially type Orchard and tab to list the folder
Building the Source Code
Call dotnet restore
Call dotnet build
Launching the Site
Navigate to \src\OrchardCore.Cms.Web\
Call dotnet run
When it’s ready to go you will see this notification
And voila! You have Orchard Core up and running.
Conclusion
That development environment is incredibly easy to setup. It took me less than half an hour and I didn’t fumble with anything. I imagine some are saying, yeah but it is .NET and easy on Windows. All I have to say to you now is, the modern .NET is cross-platform and doesn’t play favorites when it comes to operating systems. So, Macintosh, any Linux flavor and Windows are all easy to get started on. Learn more here and if you really want to learn the new Orchard Core CMS check out this video. After watching the video, I realized how great Orchard Core is compared to WordPress and will be doing all of my development on that platform going forward.