Upgrading from Orchard 0.5 to 0.8

Orchard is an Open Source CMS being developed by Microsoft that uses .NET MVC. It’s still not officially released but I’ve been running this blog using it since the alpha release in April. Every time a new version has come out I’ve planned to close my own blog and move the final posts over here. Version 0.5 felt really close to letting me do that, but there were a few show stoppers.

Version 0.8 has just come out and I’ve just finished upgrading to it. All the show stoppers are gone and there are some really nice new features. I wouldn’t recommend it to a client just yet. It still needs some polish. By version 1.0, which is due to be released in January I think it’s going to be a very nice and easily extendable CMS.

Bertrand Le Roy has written a good overview of what’s new in Orchard 0.8. I was very relieved to find that paging is now supported by the blogging module. This was the main thing preventing me from moving all my blog posts over from my old blog. However a more exciting new feature is widgets and the widget manager that gives you a nice flexible way of composing your pages.

Running on alpha is never easy and upgrading from 0.5 was not as easy as I’d hoped. Although Orchard does include a built in way of upgrading, there were too many breaking changes in this release for it to work. Luckily Nick Mayne has written a BlogML module for exporting and importing your blog from Orchard using BlogML. This has been a life saver. It worked brilliantly, but there are currently a few small bugs that meant I needed to clean my data a bit. Nick is working on these and will probably have them fixed in a few days.

After all my data was in I noticed a few bugs in Orchard. The only serious one was that links to my blog posts were broken because the links were relative rather than absolute. Someone has already spotted this problem and a fix had been suggested by the Orchard Team. It was a nice easy fix as well.

I also found the RSS link that had been in the HTML document header in Orchard 0.5 was missing. I pointed this out in the site discussions, and later, felt a bit sheepish when I read this had already been pointed out in the release notes. In the future I will always read the release notes right down to the bottom. The Orchard Team suggested a fix, but for some reason it broke my installation so I just added the code I needed directly into the template files.

After that there were a few extra tweaks I added. I added Google Analytics code to the template and also the code I need to make my domain act as my OpenId. Ideally I’d put this into a module, but for now added it directly into the templates is fine.

For now I’m using the built in theme ‘The Theme Machine’. It’s a nice clean and flexible theme, but at some point I’d like to put on my designer’s hat and create my own theme.

I’m really pleased with Orchard 0.8, now I’ve upgraded to it. I’m going to start moving the rest of my blog across and also, more excitingly I’m going to start playing about with writing my own modules. I can’t wait.

Nick Mayne said

Thanks for the walk through dude. Going to upgrade mine to some dev change set in the near future, but want to get a couple side projects out the way first.