I upgraded this Orchard Website to Orchard CMS 1.5 which was just released over the weekend. I am just starting to write Orchard Tutorials on the various new features like Custom Orchard Forms, Admin Content Search in Orchard CMS, and the new pluggable navigation in Orchard. Lots of really nice features in Orchard 1.5.
Microsoft had several important announcements this past week. The main announcements was the new and improved Windows Azure and its support for Web Sites. As an FYI, I created a quick tutorial on Installing Orchard CMS as an Azure Web Site. Another announcement was the release of WebMatrix 2 RC, which includes a lot of neat features including node.js support; HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, C#, and jQuery Code Completion; iPhone and Windows Phone Emulators, etc. I'll talk about those WebMatrix 2 features another time. Right now I wanted to mention the ability to download and install Orchard Modules and Themes via the WebMatrix 2 NuGet Gallery support!
Twitter Bootstrap 2.0.3 was just released with a number of bug fixes and ehancements. I use Twitter Bootstrap as a Default Orchard Theme for Orchard CMS and wanted to mention it here in case you are a web designer or web developer who has not heard of it. Twitter Bootstrap is a free website template from Twitter designed to kickstart development of web applications and websites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, etc. as well as a number of jQuery Plugins.
One of my main goals with this Orchard CMS Website was that it had to be responsive. I do most of my web surfing and reading via my iPhone and iPad. Therefore, being able to comfortably read blog posts on devices smaller than a desktop is important to me. While I was developing the site I used Adobe Shadow to view the desktop, tablet, and smartphone versions of the website simultaneously. There is just something slick about developing a responsive Orchard Website and being able to have my iPhone and iPad in sync as I make changes and browse my Orchard Website in my desktop Chrome Browser!
It probably makes sense that my first official blog post for my fresh start is on Orchard CMS since I currently spend a big portion of my day developing Orchard Websites, Orchard Modules, and Orchard Themes. This particular post is based on my own experience with the new Autoroute Part and Alias in Orchard 1.4 as well as a question I received from a client today. My client was changing the permalinks on published content items in his Orchard Website and noticed the website was still responding to the old permalinks. His question was fair - how do I remove the old permalinks from the Orchard Website?
