As with many others that switch to a new blogging engine, I wanted to be able to change my theme fast and without too much of a hassle.

Normally, the first part is easy. If you know your way around in asp.net mvc and if you understand some razor, then you will find yourself in known surroundings. It is easy to change some colors, some views and other things, by working on the CSS and _Layout.cshtml files. No need to worry there.

When that is done, you probably want to start tweaking the look and feel by

• adding information
• removing information
• changing how information is shown

At first you will find yourself optimistic and ready to get the system to behave the way you want it to behave. You will notice very fast though that it is not that simple. The way that everything is shown to the visitor, is based on a very modular approach which is hard to understand if you dive right in. The idea is that orchard is created with a notion of “layers” there is a base that is available to everyone. you can have a theme that changes the structure of a page, just by redefining the _layout.cshtml page. When you want to change how a page is shown, then you ill have to define that in the “layer” on top of the base. In your theme directory, you will have a “views” folder it can be empty, or it can contain cshtml files. If that is the case, then you have some override in place that changes the content of a page.

To understand which views you must override to change your content, is a completely different story, you can start digging and, to be honest, get lost pretty soon. Everything is very well structured, but *very* modular. If you want do hide a title or show something, then you’ll have to look for the correct file that you can “override”. I did not explicitely say this, but the best way to do this, is to copy that file to the “views” directory of your theme. When that is done, you can alter the resulting file.

This is for content to be shown or not to be shown, but there is another notion that you must understand. Each component that you define is rendered on a specific place that is NOT defined in your cshtml files. Orchard introduced the notion of “*.placement” files for that. In those files, which are again very modular and organized per module/plugin, you can define the location of a component in its context. You can do very special things with it and you should look into it. I will not discus it here, but later I might write something about that.

Ok, let’s get to the point here. I told you about content and placement. Now when you are getting started with all this, you might need some help. Because of that, the orchard team created a plugin that helps you to get on the road pretty fast. It is an administrative plugin that integrates with your CMS when you are logged in as an administrator:

Designer Tools – allows you to find out a lot of information of each component on a page. To give you an example, it gives the info on the placement, the template (which file is used), content type, the html and some other things.

When you install it, it will be visible in the bottom of your screen and you will be able to open it by clicking on the button in the complete right end of the screen.

When you do that, a “firebug-like” window extension will open and it will show you the information that I discussed, but so much more:

In short: it will help you a lot when starting on orchard design/development, so make use of it!

you can find more information on it over here: http://gallery.orchardproject.net/List/Modules/Orchard.Module.Orchard.DesignerTools

Tags: orchard, design, ui, development, Designer Tools, orchard CMS

Hi,

Some might have heard about it: Windows 8 and visual studio 11 (VS11) consumer preview were released last night to the general public. For those that are interested, you can find the iso images on the following location:

Windows:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso

The serial key that is required to complete the installation can also be found here

Visual Studio:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/downloads#groups

This includes visual studio(express) and TFS, in all their flavors…

For now I will play around a bit and let you know what I think of it, but I can already say that it looks promising!

Have fun!

Tim

Tags: win8, consumer preview, ws11, visual studio

If you are working with CRM and have to import data from another system, then it is a default that you cannot change the createdon field directly. This is something that you want to do in cases where you want to import data from another system or source, but where a creation date is dependent on that source.

You will notice very fast that it is not possible to set the createdon value. Basically, you can set up several constructions with additional date fields to work around it,  but in fact it isn’t that hard at all. What is described below, should work with the data import functionality, as well as with the web services.

Since the introduction of CRM 4.0 there is a field on each entity that can be set. It carries the name “OverriddenCreatedon” and allows you change the CreatedOn field. Basically, you have to set that field instead of the “createdon” field in order to change the createdon that is displayed to the user in CRM. Below, you can see the effects of the override in the first line. Today 21/02/2012, I created the 3 rows. On the first row, I specified the overriddencreatedon field to be somewhere in December 2008, which is a long time ago.

The effect is that the createdon fied contains the value that you want it to be, while the real creationdate is contained in the overriddencreatedon field for future reference.

The other 2 lines are just created to show the effects of setting the specified field to null or not setting it at all. No action is taken by CRM in that case.

Hope it helps for you too!

Tags: crm4.0, msdyncm, dynamics, Microsoft, creationdate, OverriddenCreatedon

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the transfer from wordpress to orchard CMS. In that post, I told you that it is not really possible to transfer a blog hosted by wordpress to orchard CMS. (Because you cannot replace that export.php file) There are of course other means to that end, but today I want to talk to you about a possible intermediate step that you can use to get your blog to orchard, without having to do anything fancy…

The idea is that you can export your blog by using the default export functionality. that leaves you with a file that is pretty much useless for orchard, but NOT for wordpress. You can set up a local version of that blog engine that you want to leave behind. Some years ago, even I would have been complaining. But fortunately for windows users, there is now something like “web platform installer” it is a tool that allows you to install virtually almost any web platform. ( it is not limited to that of course at it offers a lot of other great things to get a system up and running fast)

It includes wordpress and it allows you to install a full functional wordpress environment on your local system. To do this, it requires you to install webmatrix and mysql, but these can be removed later if you whish…

During installation, “web platform installer” will help you by asking some questions concerning the database and all…

After the installation is done, all you have to do is start up web matrix, start the new “wordpress site”, import your blog, replace the “export.php” file and the rest of the actions that was described here. You will have more work with the images if you want to transfer those to the new location. if you do not delete your old blog, I assume you can as well let them reside on the same location…

If you encounter problems, or want to add something, please let me know as I did not try this out thoroughly..

Tags: wordpress, orchard, orchard CMS, transfer, migration

I have a friend, let’s call him John. John is complaining to me regularly  that his exchange goes offline without notice, this on a daily basis. This event has as a consequence that no user is able to connect to exchange anymore (outlook, windows phone, etc, etc…

Because he did not like the idea of having to restart the server at all times, I started to find out what exchange component (as a windows service) was having trouble. After some poking around, I discovered that restarting the “Microsoft Exchange Information Store” windows service solves the problem. (Or at least for a while that is).

Now I know that this is a very naïve way to solve problems as the service should never had problems in the first place… It is like giving somebody a pill to hide the problems, but only for a while… I did not have the time to look at it decently, so I finally went temporarily for that solution..

You could have guessed it, but the problem reappeared daily. After some extensive looking around in the event log of the server,  I found the one below…

Appartently, his exchange DB has grown passed the maximum size of 18GB (which is he max for a 2003 Exchange standard server)

After that, I found out that someone had a mail box of 13 GB, which is rather excessive… After cleaning that one up. All I had to do was wait for the next passing of 5AM…

… To see that my Exchange store was not detached! Victory!

What a mess!

It has been coming up for quite some time now. I wanted away from the php-based Wordpress, towards a blogging platform that is based on .NET (preferably MVC) Not that I have something against PHP, because I don’t. It is just that I don’t know that much about it.

Today, I will describe the steps that I took tot get my blog switched to Orchard CMS. I will not discuss the set-up as it is widely documented. If your host works with Plesk as a control panel, please read my earlier post on this. Also consider opening the following directories for the same user and with the same read, write and maybe even execute permissions: media, themes and modules. It enables the fact that orchard is not limited when doing things that involve these directories. If you are paranoid, you can of course clip the permissions after everything is set up.

Now: We have a Wordpress installation with posts, that contain images and other stuff. Today we will focus on those.

Export

By default, you can export your Wordpress content (blogposts, pages and comments) from the control panel. Unfortunately this isn’t BlogML, but some spiked up version created by and for Wordpress. (it allows you to move from one Wordpress instance to another…

There are some interesting reads that describe you the process of converting this file to its BlogML equivalent by using XSLT transformations, but to be honest, I didn’t get those to a quality that I could trust.(for reference)

Fortunately, there is an alternative that has far greater potential.  “WordPress BlogML Export” is a solution that has been provided to change the functionality of the Wordpress export in such a way that it exports BlogML instead of the Wordpress variant. The only thing that you need to do replace 1 (!) file on the location where your blog is installed… (It thus only works if you have a “self-hosted” Wordpress) (Make sure to have a backup of the original file. You won’t have to store that for a long time as you are moving towards orchard.)

Now export that file, but don’t upload it to your blogging platform just yet as we will have to do some manipulations first!

Images and other media

if you stored images and other media, it will be stored most likely in the wp-media directory of your Wordpress installation. You will not be able to just move that directory to its new location as the routing of orchard does not see that directory as a valid path in the CMS. Therefore it is wise to take the images directory and put it on the destination location (the orchard installation) in the media directory. Moving the location where the images can be found, implies that your posts will have to look somewhere else to load images when displayed. What I suggest is that you change the posts, before uploading your BlogML file to Orchard. What I did to get this working was the following:

I took an image reference from the blogml file:

http://www.tripledot.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/image.png

the reference will not work, but that is the point. Then I changed it so that the image could be found by opening the URL:

http://www.tripledot.be/Media/Default/WordPressLegacy/2012/01/image.png

The difference between those 2 links is the change that must be applied to all image references in the BlogML file. Use Notepad++ or any other editor to do a quick replace of all occurrences. Now your image references are basically in order and they should all be “openable”

Double Posts

A common problem with Wordpress is that all edits of a post are stored. You can clean that out before uploading the BlogML file, but I preferred to do it from Orchard afterwards.

Import

Finally, import your precious BlogML file into Orchard through the import module that is located in the Blog section. (This implies of course that you opted for the Blog recipe when setting up Orchard. If you didn’t do this, then what is the point of reading this post anyway? :) )

At this point your blog should be up and running and you should be able to use it in its full Glory.

Remarks

• I strongly suggest that you set up a “test” environment as things can go wrong, it is better to find them out when trying than when doing them for real. I did this and it helped me a lot to set out my strategy.
• If you do the import, and it goes wrong there is no problem, you can import again to a newly created blog without any problem. The earlier import can be deleted.
• Tags are not exported with the wpblogml alternative. That is something I chose to live with…

If you have problems or questions, I would like to hear about them!

Tags: orchard CMS, orchard, wordpress, migration, strategy, howto

Last night, I finally made the jump towards Orchard CMS as my blogging platform of choice. By doing that, I stepped away from Wordpress. I wanted to do this for a while now and after some research on the most important things such as migration of my current posts and stuff like that, I took the jump.

Later today, I will give you a detailed overview of the steps that you must take in order to do it as smooth as possible.

Tags: orchard, wordpress, migration

After having worked several years with wordpress, I am really thinking about moving to another blogging engine. Up until now, I didn’t find anything that interesting, but I heard a lot of positive stories on orchard CMS. Therefore I tried it out on my machine, by installing it with web platform installer.  It worked great and showed me a lot of potential, therefore I decided it to test if it worked on my Hosting, which is working with the Plesk control panel.

The procedure that I used to upload the engine to my hosting is the easiest on the book (FTP). Now, when I did this for wordpress, everything worked at once and a setup was started, unfortunately this was not the case for Orchard CMS. As you can see below, the following error manifested itself and gave problems. (I had to turn off custom errors to get to the actual error that is shown)

The most important part is the title and this part:

HibernateException: Could not create the driver from Orchard.Data.Providers.SqlCeDataServicesProvider+OrchardSqlServerCeDriver, Orchard.Framework, Version=1.3.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null.]

It was obvious that this error was due to permissions that were not granted correctly, so this helped me to limit the scope a little. After some poking, I found here that it is due to Plesk Control Panel not giving enough privileges to some directories in the Orchard CMS  solution.

After giving Read and Execute rights on the bin directory (and its kiddo’s) to the “Plesk IIS WP User”  everything worked fine and I was good to go.

Have fun exploring

Tags: orchard, access denied, permissions, 0x80070005