I began my coding journey as a kid back in the days of AOL and dial-up, building Windows applications with Visual Basic. From there, I eventually transitioned to C#, diving into web application development with ASP and moving through the evolution of ASP.NET MVC to Razor Pages. Staying relevant in the ever-evolving .NET world has always been a priority for me, which is how I stumbled upon Orchard Core. Its modern architecture and flexibility instantly caught my attention, making it the next logical step in my journey. I was drawn to its potential and decided to invest my time in learning and building with Orchard Core.
In fact, the website you're reading this blog post on was built with Orchard Core, and it only took one day to build! This rapid development is a testament to the platform's power and ease of use, making it a perfect fit for developers looking to create robust, scalable applications quickly.
In today's fast-paced business environment, enterprises are constantly seeking platforms that offer flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. While ServiceNow and Salesforce has long been a popular choice for many organizations, the emergence of Orchard Core presents a compelling alternative for those considering in-house development. This blog post explores how Orchard Core can fit seamlessly into an enterprise setting, highlighting its standout features, and how it can potentially save organizations significant costs.
Orchard Core is an open-source, modular, and multi-tenant application framework built on ASP.NET Core. It provides a robust foundation for building content-driven websites and applications with a high degree of customization and extensibility. Its rich feature set, including media management, multilingual support, modularity, multi-tenancy, security, and workflows makes it a powerful tool for enterprises looking to tailor solutions to their specific needs.
Although Orchard Core uses relational databases (like SQL Server or MySQL), it stores its content as documents, similar to NoSQL databases. This means that each content item (e.g., a blog post or product) is stored as a document containing flexible, JSON-like structures. This allows for easy updates and changes to the content schema without altering the underlying database tables.
One of Orchard Core’s standout features is its multitenancy capability, which allows you to manage multiple sites or applications from a single installation. This is a game-changer for businesses and developers who need to deploy multiple websites, applications, or portals, each with its own unique configuration, content, and user base, without the overhead of separate installations.
Multitenancy in Orchard Core means that a single instance of the platform can serve multiple "tenants," with each tenant acting as an independent site or application. Each tenant can have its own:
With multitenancy in Orchard Core, businesses can efficiently manage multiple web properties under a single instance while maintaining flexibility, security, and scalability. Whether you're building a SaaS product or managing multiple business units, Orchard Core’s multitenant feature is a robust solution that streamlines your operations and optimizes your resources.
When it comes to building custom automations, Orchard Core provides a highly flexible and extensible workflow engine that allows you to automate practically any process or operation, tailored to your organization’s specific needs. Unlike rigid pre-built automation solutions, Orchard Core’s workflow system is modular, meaning you can design, modify, and expand workflows as your business grows or your processes evolve. Whether you're automating content publishing, data collection, system integration, or user interactions, Orchard Core offers the power and adaptability to handle it all.
At the core of Orchard Core’s workflow capabilities is its event-driven model, allowing workflows to be triggered by various events. These triggers can be tied to user actions, content updates, scheduled tasks, or even external system events.
Key Trigger Types in Orchard Core:
With these triggers, you can automate a wide variety of processes that are customized to fit the way your business operates, from simple content approval workflows to complex, multi-step business processes.
Orchard Core’s workflow engine includes a rich set of predefined activities that handle common tasks such as sending emails, creating or updating content, and integrating with external APIs. These activities are modular, meaning you can combine and chain them together to build sophisticated automations.
Built-in Activities Include:
For tasks that need to be automated on a regular basis, Orchard Core supports scheduled workflows. You can configure workflows to run at specific intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly, using cron expressions. This is ideal for automating background tasks that don’t require user interaction.
Common Use Cases for Scheduled Workflows:
One of Orchard Core’s most powerful features is its ability to integrate with external systems, making it a versatile automation platform for businesses that rely on multiple tools or platforms. The HTTP Request activity allows Orchard Core to connect to any API, meaning you can automate tasks that span multiple systems, creating seamless integration between your applications.
Examples of External System Integration:
Orchard Core provides the tools to build custom workflows that meet your exact needs, but it doesn’t stop there. Because it is open-source and highly extensible, you can create custom workflow activities or modify existing ones to handle very specific use cases.
Examples of Custom Workflow Activities:
Orchard Core workflows are designed with reusability in mind. Once you create a workflow, it can be reused across multiple tenants, sites, or modules. This is particularly useful for organizations that manage multiple brands, departments, or customer segments, where the same workflows can be applied with minor variations.
Orchard Core goes beyond the backend, it also provides the tools and flexibility to build rich, dynamic front-end experiences for modern web applications. Whether you're building a content-driven website, a single-page application (SPA), or a complex enterprise portal, Orchard Core’s front-end capabilities allow you to create highly customizable and responsive web interfaces.
One of Orchard Core's strengths is that it is frontend framework agnostic, meaning that you can use any front-end technology you prefer. Whether it's Razor Pages, Liquid templates, or modern JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue.js, Orchard Core provides full control over how your front end is built and rendered.
Razor Pages: Orchard Core integrates seamlessly with ASP.NET Razor Pages, making it ideal for developers familiar with the ASP.NET ecosystem. You can leverage Razor views to create dynamic, server-rendered pages that integrate directly with Orchard Core’s backend.
Liquid Templates: For developers who prefer a more flexible and user-friendly templating system, Orchard Core supports Liquid templates. This is ideal for building content-heavy websites where designers and content editors may need to tweak the layout and design without diving into complex code.
JavaScript Frameworks (SPA): Orchard Core can also serve as a headless CMS, allowing you to build your front end using popular JavaScript frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue.js. By interacting with Orchard Core’s GraphQL or REST API, you can easily fetch content and data to power a decoupled front-end application, giving you the freedom to use modern front-end technologies while benefiting from Orchard Core’s backend capabilities.
Orchard Core allows you to create highly customized and interactive front-end experiences through several features:
Themes: Orchard Core supports theming, allowing you to build custom themes or use pre-built ones to define the visual appearance of your website or application. You can tailor themes to match your brand and implement responsive designs to ensure compatibility across all devices.
Widgets and Layouts: The platform provides a flexible layout system that allows you to create reusable widgets—small, customizable blocks of content or functionality that can be placed in different parts of a page. Widgets make it easy to build dynamic layouts without the need to hardcode every element.
Reusable Templates: Whether you're using Razor or Liquid templates, Orchard Core enables you to build reusable templates for content types, fields, and parts. This ensures consistency across your site while minimizing duplication of code.
Localization and Multilingual Support: Orchard Core offers out-of-the-box support for multilingual front ends, enabling you to create websites and applications that serve content in multiple languages. This is crucial for enterprises operating in global markets.
One of Orchard Core’s strongest points is the diversity and flexibility of its query mechanisms. Whether you’re fetching content via a REST API, performing complex GraphQL queries, or using SQL directly, Orchard Core offers multiple ways to interact with your data.
SQL Queries Though Orchard Core uses a document-based approach for content storage, it still supports traditional SQL queries. This is especially useful if you need to retrieve or manipulate content using SQL’s familiar relational querying capabilities.
GraphQL API Orchard Core comes with GraphQL support right out of the box, allowing you to create precise, customizable queries for your content. GraphQL’s powerful query language lets you retrieve only the data you need, whether it’s content types, specific fields, or nested data structures.
REST API For simpler use cases or integration with other systems, Orchard Core provides a RESTful API. Through the REST API, you can perform CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on your content. This makes Orchard Core a great fit for applications requiring seamless integration with third-party services or mobile applications.
Custom Queries Module Orchard Core offers a "Queries" module, which allows you to build custom queries using SQL, Lucene, or even your own custom logic. This feature gives you complete control over how you want to retrieve data, offering a high degree of flexibility.
Whether you want to use SQL to retrieve structured data or Lucene for full-text search, the Queries module makes it easy to create reusable query logic accessible to both developers and non-developers.
Search is a vital component of any content-driven website or application. Orchard Core integrates with Lucene, a high-performance, open-source search engine that allows for fast and scalable full-text search, making it an excellent tool for indexing and searching content.
At the core of Orchard Core’s search capabilities is Lucene. Lucene enables you to index your content types, fields, and parts, making them searchable across your application. You can configure search indices to cover the exact fields and content types you want, ensuring high relevance and fast results.
Lucene in Orchard Core supports boolean queries, allowing you to combine search terms using AND, OR, and NOT operators for more refined results. This makes it easy to create advanced search queries for complex content structures.
Additionally, faceted search allows users to filter search results based on predefined facets like categories, price ranges, or any other metadata. Faceted search is particularly useful for e-commerce websites or large content repositories, where users need to narrow down results to find exactly what they’re looking for.
While Orchard Core comes with Lucene as its default search engine, it also supports Elasticsearch, one of the most powerful and scalable search platforms available. Elasticsearch is known for its ability to handle large-scale, complex search queries with speed and efficiency, making it an excellent choice for organizations that require advanced search capabilities or need to search across vast amounts of data.
For businesses or applications that deal with large datasets, need distributed search, or require highly customizable search indexing, Elasticsearch offers a robust solution. Integrating Elasticsearch into Orchard Core allows you to:
While Orchard Core may not come with all the bells and whistles of popular platforms like ServiceNow or Salesforce, it offers a powerful, flexible, and highly customizable foundation that’s ready to be leveraged. Its capabilities, ranging from content management to automation, are there for the taking, and for organizations looking to pull back on hefty subscription costs, Orchard Core presents an incredibly appealing alternative. With its open-source nature, modular architecture, and the freedom to build tailored solutions, it's an excellent choice for businesses aiming to gain full control over their applications without sacrificing functionality or scalability.