The Orchard Project – Planting a Few Seeds

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Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform.

image The broad vision of the orchard project is to grow the ASP.NET open source community and partner with existing application authors to help them achieve their goal.

The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold:

  • Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users, scripters, and developers
  • A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications
  • A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions

There was a Deep Dive into Orchard Extensibility for CMS Developers at MIX that introduces the project and an early release built on ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for you to try.

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To kick the tyres I used the Web PI download to setup a test site using Orchard CMS on a Hyper V vm at https://a.bility.co.nz/to/blog.

In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an underlying framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through extensions and themes.

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One thing I want to be clear on is that the intention of this project is not to take away from the great work that is being done by other ASP.NET CMS solutions Umbraco,  DotNetNuke®, mojoPortal,  Kentico and Sitefinity but to focus our attentions more free and open source offerings that drive re-use and extensions.

The project is in the very early stage and it is a great time to get involved if you are interested in shaping the future direction of this work.

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