As you surely know there are a variety of options to theme your DotNest site, including going hardcore and writing templates with Liquid markup. Now if you're among those hardcore developers who want to write code even for their DotNest sites, good news: Liquid just good a lot smarter! The Liquid Markup module is available on all DotNest sites and it enables you to create templates either from the admin or deploying them from source control (see who this works on the Writing a theme from scratch Knowledge Base article). In these template you can use the Liquid Markup language, which is a bit more restrictive than e.g. Razor what you may usually work with when developing Orchard. However still it's quite powerful and now we have the following new features: Variables, not just fixed strings can be used when passing parameters to tags. So e.g. you can create a custom dynamic title for your pages. Accessing items of collections in the view model are now supported. E.g. from a template now you can selectively display the second and third image attached to a content item, not just the first one as before. The antiforgery token can now be displayed so you can write completely custom forms. Orchard-aware relative links can be easily constructed, so you can construct dynamic URLs that will work in any environment. Custom link and meta tags can be registered. This way e.g. you can add multiple shortcut icons for your site or add custom meta tags for Facebook sharing. Custom CSS classes can be added to shapes to improve how you can style those elements. Furthermore CSS classes can now also be added to the HTML document. For the whole list of features and examples covering every scenario take a look at the module's Readme. So brush up your Liquid skills and start coding!

Three new modules arrived to all DotNest sites today to allow your users to vote content up/down and mark them as their favorite! Namely, these modules are now available on DotNest: Favorite by Nick Mayne: users can mark content items as their favorite. Vote Up/Down by Nick Mayne: users can vote content items up/down with arrows to show if whether they like it. Voting API by Sebastien Ros: provides basic voting-related services that are used by the Favorite and Vote Up/Down modules. So this should cover a lot of voting-related interactions you'd like to provide to your users. Let's decide with a vote!

It's not a bad thing if your website is actually used by people. And now on DotNest you have the tools to improve your user's experience and make them feel home with custom profiles and avatars! For this we just added two modules, available on all DotNest sites: Profile: this is the module that allows your users to have their own profiles. By editing the User content type you can add fields like "bio" which are then editable by everyone for themselves. Avatars: the Avatars module builds on the Profile module and lets your users upload avatars (profile pictures). These can then be displayed under their contributions. E.g. blog posts' author profiles will be linked from posts, where their avatar will be also displayed. With these we now have you better covered, so create your social DotNest site for free!

As you may have heard, Ryan Drew Burnett, the guy behind Show Orchard released a new theme aimed mainly at blogs, Bindery. Good news! Thanks to Ryan the theme is now also available on all DotNest sites! What's more it seems that this theme will be just the first in a series of themes developed by Ryan and offered on DotNest, so stay tuned. For now you can also check out the theme in action on its demo site. Create a DotNest site for free and you can start writing your own blog with Bindery!

We constantly strive to make DotNest even better for you. So if you give us some feedback, we'll gladly listen. This time we listened to three enthusiastic DotNest users and thus added three new extensions to the DotNest selection! Lombiq Fields module: adds some useful content fields, including Media Library Upload Field so Media items can be uploaded attached to content items and the Money Field to store money amounts. You can also see the module in action in the Orchard Communtiy Meeting's podcast. Social Meta Tags module: adds meta tags for various social networks (Open Graph Tags for Facebook/Google/Pinterest/LinkedIn and Twitter Card Tags) and Google Authorship tags. PJS.Bootstrap theme: a great theme by Philip Senechal. Create your DotNest site for free and try out these new features!

We just updated all of your DotNest sites with some cool new features! These give you some more tools to customize your sites. Let's see what's in the box: Target: Blank module was added. After you enable it all the outbound links on your site will open in a new tab. Helpful Extensions module is here as well. It adds, among others, some useful tokens and extends Projections with new filters. NogginBox Owner Queries feature is now available: this adds the ability to filter on content by its owner to Projector. The Orchard Liquid Markup module was updated and thus allows you more complete customization options with Liquid Markup templates: now Orchard WorkContext is accessible as well as dynamic content item expressions now work. This means that you can now e.g. completely override content shape templates or can do some fancy things based on the current user! With all this you'll need to think twice before hosting Orchard yourself!

The Orchard 1.9 release brought a lot of improvements a few weeks ago: apart from tons of bugfixes and smaller enhancements it also contains three new modules, Audit Trail, Layouts and Dynamic Forms (just to name what you as a DotNest user will mostly see). 1.9 is a great release, a large milestone that makes Orchard a mature CMS. And now you have it on DotNest! We needed to do loads of compatibility and bugfixes as well as a lot of testing to ensure that once your sites run 1.9 you'll be only affected by the positive changes. For the last weeks we've run all of our own sites at Lombiq (including DotNest.com) on 1.9 to iron out issues before upgrading all DotNest sites. But it's done, so enjoy all the good things that 1.9 brought! For a full overview of all the changes in 1.9 check out the release notes. And by the way since DotNest sites now run on 1.9 of course Try Orchard! also lets you do a test drive of Orchard 1.9.

It wasn't exactly easy to do, but now DotNest is even more integrated into Microsoft Azure: you can created DotNest Orchard sites as an Azure App Service, from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

As you can see we swapped out the old clunky look of DotNest with a fresh new one! Everything was re-hauled. Oh, and of course it is, just as the old one, responsive. But in a better way! We hope this new DotNest is a lot more pleasant for your eyes!

Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one: in this blogpost we're going to demonstrate the process of customizing the content structure of an actual website running on DotNest, currently having ~30 regular users. Seriously, grab some popcorn, you'll need it. Wall of text incoming. Requirements The website is created for the Hungarian World of Warcraft guild "Elemental Gankery". The structure of a guild is partially represented in the roles in the system to provide higher-level permissions to the leaders of guild, who are able present and edit content that is visible to members of the guild. Members have access to view almost any content on the website and the ability to comment on content items, as well as communicate with each other using the forums. Newly registered users are able to submit an application to the guild, but cannot access the content on the site. Since the site is targeted at users speaking Hungarian, most of the hints and notification texts are written in Hungarian - when used as an example in this blogpost, these will be translated to English. Permissions To be able provide generic permissions for members, two new roles have been added to system and some changes were made to existing ones. The Content Item Permissions module is also heavily used for many of the content items, as you will see later. The roles and their permissions in the system are as follows: Administrator: the leader of guild (aka Guild Master) and part of the leadership (aka Officers) are given administrative permissions to be able manage the important aspects of the site. Officer: the other part of the leadership and some distinctive members of guild (aka Core Unit) are added to this Role to be able to edit any content on the website. Ganker: regular members with the ability to view almost all of the site's content and communicate through comments and the forums. Authenticated: registered users, who are not (yet) members of guild. They can submit (and see) guild applications and are able to submit comments on them in case they need to answer further questions during the application process. This role is set up in a way that they cannot access content in general, only those that are targeted towards them (using Content Item Permissions). Anonymous: a role that is even more restricted than "Authenticated". Only a small set of public content is visible to them (also using Content Item Permissions). Public content The first type of content represented to anonymous users is a menu that contains links to sign in and register. There are some widgets on the home page with useful links related to the game and the guild, as well as some hints for visitors in case they would like to submit an application. The home page is actually a public blog, where the leadership can make announcements when the guild defeats a powerful enemy for the first time in the form of a blog post. All these content is configured using Content Item Permissions. Restricted content Submitting an application Let's see what happens when you register on the website: a new menu item will appear (only visible to registered users) that leads you to the application form as well as another one that leads you to the page where you can see previously submitted applications. The application process is very similar to a job interview where you submit some information about you and your gaming experience in a written form, that may lead to a verbal interview with the leadership who will then decide to accept the application or not. The application form is driven by the Custom Forms module (although with the upgrade to Orchard 1.9, we will probably migrate it to Dynamic Forms). It uses a content type called "Guild Application" that has TitlePart, AutoroutePart (hidden using placement) and a bunch of fields (most of them are required) that applicants can use to answer questions about e.g. themselves, their previous gaming experience, motivation to join the guild and some technical stuff. Authenticated users are given permission to submit forms of this type. Upon submitting the form a content item is saved (but not yet published) and the user will see a notification on the site with a message that basically says to wait for further instructions. Reviewing an application At this point a workflow will activate to notify the leadership about the submitted application. The workflow definition is fairly simple: the trigger is the "Form Submitted" event for the application form. It leads to the "Send Email" activity, which (not so surprisingly) sends an email to a predefined set of email addresses (GM and Officers) with instructions to review the application and then publish it if it's valid. A link to the content item is included in the email using the combination of the "Site.BaseUrl" and "Content.EditUrl" tokens. Upon publishing this content item, it will be displayed among the other applications in a Projection and the applicant receives a notification about that - let's see how that's set up! Sending the notification also involves a workflow, but this time the trigger is the "Content Published" event for the "Guild Application" content type and the email message contains a display link to the content item. The recipient of the email is of course the applicant, using the "Content.Author" and "Content.Author.Email" tokens. As for the list of applications, the Query we need to create filters content items by their content type (Guild Application), sorts items in a descending order by their creation date and then displays them in an unordered HTML-list. Then we just create a Projection using this Query and set up content permissions so that authenticated users can see it. Some of the fields' display shapes are overridden using Liquid templates to display an actual link for URLs that were entered using an Input Field. This is simply done by enabling the "Liquid Markup Templates" feature and creating a template with a name matching the field (see the list of conventions), e.g.: "Fields_Input__IncombatUIscreenshot" and its content is: <p><a href="{{ Model.ContentField.Value }}" target="_blank">Screenshot link</a></p> At this point the members of the guild and the applicant can discuss further questions in the form of comments on the application and upon coming to a conclusion regarding accepting or declining it, the application is closed. This is simply done by disabling comments on the content item and adding some text at the end of the title, like "DECLINED" or "ACCEPTED" to distinguish it from the open ones. Member content Forums Most of the member-only content consists of forums: the first thing to do here is to enable the Forums and Watcher modules. Then the WatchablePart should be added to the content type definition of the Forum and Thread content types. We'll also add ContentPermissionsPart to the Forum content type to able to restrict access to certain forums so they are only visible to the guild's leadership. We use a Taxonomy called "Forum Category" with a few terms to categorize forums, so we can display them in separate Projections - we'll add a TaxonomyField to the Forum content type with this Taxonomy selected. Each of these categories have their own Query and Projection set up, so we can display them separately. When DotNest is upgraded to Orchard 1.9 we'll use a Layout to display all of these Projections on one page. Each Query is configured to filter content items by content type (Forum) and a specific term of the a ForumCategory Taxonomy. They are ordered by their Title (ascending) and are listed in a grid with some responsive styling added: col-lg-3 col-md-4 col-sm-6 col-xs-12. Of course each of the Queries have a corresponding Projection with a nice URL, Content Item Permissions set up to restrict access to members (except for the one that is displaying Officer-related forums) and a Content Menu Item in a dropdown menu under a (text-only) Custom Link called "Forums". Watching Forums and Threads As mentioned earlier, members are able to use most Forums, create Threads and post replies in them. Since we added the WatchablePart to Forums and Threads, users can subscribe to notifications if there's new content: this is simply done by clicking on the "Watch" link that is displayed for these items. For these notifications to be sent, we'll once again use Workflows: you can check it out the Watcher module's docs for a general example and below are the ones we have on this website specifically to work with Forums. One of them sends a notification if a new Thread is created - this will be activated if the Forum it's created in is one of those that you are "watching". The starting point of the workflow is the "Content Created" event set up for Thread. When sending an email chained after a "Run for next watcher" activity (in the loop of the users watching the content item) we can use the User-tokens to define the recipient like this: {User.Name} <{User.Email}>. Then the email template contains a link to the Forum where the new Thread is opened: <p>{Content.Author} user opened a new Thread in the <a href="{Site.BaseUrl}{Content.Container.DisplayUrl}" target="_blank">{Content.Container.DisplayText}</a> Forum.</p>. The other one sends a notification when there's a new Post in one of the watched Threads or Forums (so this will be triggered if you're watching the Forum the Thread is in, even if you're not watching the Thread) with small differences: the starting point is the "Content Created" event for the Post content type and the email template is the following: <p>{Content.Author} user posted a new reply in the <a href="{Site.BaseUrl}{Content.Container.DisplayUrl}" target="_blank">{Content.Container.DisplayText}</a> Thread of the <a href="{Site.BaseUrl}{Content.Container.Container.DisplayUrl}" target="_blank">{Content.Container.Container.DisplayText}</a> Forum</p>. Displaying YouTube videos Videos recorded during gaming are for perpetuating great moments (like first kills), so we upload them to YouTube to be able to watch them later. For this purpose we have a content type called "YouTube Video" with TitlePart, AutoroutePart, BodyPart, CommentsPart and an InputField set up to enter a 11-character-long string, which is the ID of a YouTube video (so you don't have to enter a full URL, since it's always the same, except for the ID, of course). Not only that, but this field has an overridden template to automatically display the embedded video with adaptive sizing: {% if Model.ContentField.Value != empty %} <div class="embed-container"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/{{ Model.ContentField.Value }}?html5=1&autoplay=0" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></div>{% endif %} Then we set up a Query with content type filtering (for YouTubeVideo) and descending order (by creation date) and a Projection to display them a simple, paged list. Character roster Currently we don't have a module providing profile editing functionality (though this may change very soon!), so we have something similar in the meanwhile. We've attached a new content part called GuildMemberPart to the User content type that has a few fields for entering data regarding the players and their characters: a TextField for character name, a single-select EnumerationField for guild rank (this is not connected to the Role), a multi-select EnumerationField to list the days the player is available and a BooleanField to deselect a checkbox for hiding inactive players. The downside is that these data can only be edited by administrators, since using the built-in functionalities there is no way to display the editor of an actual user (and make sure that only that user can access it). Like in many cases before, we set up a Query: we're filtering items based on their content type (User) and the value of the BooleanField that was mentioned before. Then we order items by the value of the field for the character name and display them in a grid using a Projection. Summary This post demonstrates pretty well how you can display rich, customized content to your users on DotNest - and we haven't even used all of the available features! Happy customizing!