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.