After some other recent improvements theming a DotNest site is now even closer to writing standard Orchard themes: with some complicated fixes around how URLs are handled (you don't want to know details, trust me!) writing a Media Theme is now a lot better experience. Templates and URL helpers in them will behave like you're used to, not to mention they will work in the same way locally during development as on DotNest. So go on and write a theme for that DotNest site of yours!

As you surely know you have complete control over theming your DotNest site, including using custom templates written in the Liquid language. The latter got some important updates now: If you have errors in your template then it will be shown in place of the template and also logged with the Reports feature (which entries you can view from your site's admin). No more ugly generic error pages, you'll know in an instant if something went wrong with the template. You can now select if a template is rendered on the frontend, the admin or both. Media Themes that you can deploy from source control will behave like a standard theme and thus their templates will be only active for the frontend. Before this they were also displayed on the admin which caused quite some confusion. So do some theming!

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!

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!

Until now you could only theme your DotNest site by using stylesheets. But now these dark days are over! We present you the power of Liquid Markup templates! What is Liquid? Liquid Markup is a templating language specifically developed for being able to write safe templates. It's "safe" because you can't just write arbitrary C# code, thus potentially endangering other tenants. But you wouldn't want to do that anyway, right? By making the Orchard Liquid Markup module available for all DotNest sites as of today you get an option to write templates from the admin site using Liquid, through the built-in Templates modules. These templates are then used just as normal shape templates. And not only this but you can add templates to your Media Theme (just files with the .liquid file format) and when the theme is deployed the templates will be deployed as well! There are constraints on what you can achieve from Liquid templates of course but it should be more than sufficient for theming your site. Also you have the power of Orchard shape composition at your hand too: go and read the readme on what power you can unlock! Also since the module was demoed on the weekly Orchard meeting you can watch iT in action in the recorded video (from 41:47). Oh, and by the way we also updated Orchard to the latest 1.8.x version so your site is now living on the bleeding edge! (Don't worry, we tested everything thoroughly.) Let's go and theme the heck out of that site of yours!