Installing Orchard Content Management System
page 3 of 4
by Steven Smith
Feedback
Average Rating: This article has not yet been rated.
Views (Total / Last 10 Days): 24271/ 25

Customizing Orchard

Now that we have Orchard installed, let's walk through how to use, briefly.  The initial Welcome to Orchard post that you see here is actually more than just some boilerplate - it's worth reading and it includes some working links to the admin area of the application.  For instance, the second paragraph has a link to "manage your settings" - go ahead and click that.  This will bring you to the dashboard:

From here, you can see all of the various menu options and settings you can control for your new site.  If you want to create a new page on your site, simply click the link to Page under New at the top.  You can create a blog - even multiple blogs - from the Blogs menu option.  Here you can see that I've created two blogs for Steve and my fictional friend Joe:

Once you have a blog set up, you can add a new post to it easily enough from the New Post link.  The new post, and the 2 new blogs, can be seen here:

Of course, this theme isn't ideal.  You can customize the theme from the dashboard as well.  Not surprisingly, this is done from the Themes menu.  You can even install a theme from an online gallery (built using the orchard gallery open source project developed by NimblePros).  Currently the gallery has dozens of themes to choose from - I pick Vintage Brown - Version: 1.0:

A moment later, I see:

The next step is to enable the theme and tell the site to use it.  You can also Preview the theme before making it live.  Returning to my new blog, it now looks like this, in Preview Mode:

It's great that I can write new posts from the web site, but I'm a big fan of Windows Live Writer.  Luckily, it's pretty easy to make that work with Orchard, too.  First, you need to go into the dashboard and enable this as a feature.  Go to Configuration - Features and enable the Remote Blog Publishing feature under Content Publishing:

 

 

Launch WLW and add a new blog account.  When prompted for which blog service you use, choose "Other services".  Specify the web address of your blog (e.g. "http://localhost:8086/steve" for my test) and your user name and password (the admin account if that's all you have set up currently):

That's it!  It should automatically locate what it needs and result in something like this:

You can write a test post from WLW and see it like so:

That's it!  You're ready to start blogging or continue adding content to your new site built on the open source Orchard CMS platform.


View Entire Article

User Comments

Title: Nice and easy   
Name: leonic
Date: 2011-04-21 12:54:24 AM
Comment:
really nice and easy
good post!
Title: Excelent Article   
Name: rakesh
Date: 2011-03-30 8:15:05 AM
Comment:
Thanks,
Realy Excelent Article

Product Spotlight
Product Spotlight 





Community Advice: ASP | SQL | XML | Regular Expressions | Windows


©Copyright 1998-2024 ASPAlliance.com  |  Page Processed at 2024-03-28 10:14:12 PM  AspAlliance Recent Articles RSS Feed
About ASPAlliance | Newsgroups | Advertise | Authors | Email Lists | Feedback | Link To Us | Privacy | Search