Orchard CMS: Up and Running

Chapter 2. Creating and Managing Content

In Chapter 1, we briefly explored how to work with the content management tools of Orchard. In this chapter, we’ll dig a little deeper as we build out a baseline to our site, which will then be extended with custom modules and a custom theme in later chapters. This baseline will include a handful of simple pages as described here. These pages will provide enough variety that we’ll be able to showcase Orchard’s content management capabilities.

Home Page

The same home page from the previous chapter

About

The About page from the previous chapter

Contact

A page with a form to use to contact the band

Events

A page listing upcoming band-related events

Bios

A page with band biographies

Blog

A standard blog

Gallery

A page with images, videos, and audio

Bio Items

In its simplest form, a biography on the Daisy’s Gone Orchard site is just a web page. It could easily be added to the site using the same approach we used to add the “About” page in the previous chapter. However, we’re going to have a bio page for each band member. Though we could cram all bios into a single page, it would be more readable to have a unique page for each musician (and drummer). That requirement means that I’ll effectively be creating the same page at least three times, just with different content.

Note

An old joke asks, “What do you call the guy who hangs out with the musicians in the band?” and answers “The drummer.”

The process of creating a bio page is somewhat analogous to that of creating ...