Orchard CMS: Up and Running

Chapter 3. Displaying Content

As we saw in the previous chapter, getting a basic Orchard site up and running is a pretty low friction process. Without having to write a single line of code, we were able to create new pages with dynamic content and reasonably advanced functionality. However, we also saw that the content we displayed has a default rendering, which we can’t fully customize through the admin tools.

Fortunately, Orchard does provide functionality to allow us to alter this rendering. In fact, with minimal effort Orchard gives us great control over how we display content. Virtually every piece of data that gets rendered by Orchard (collectively known as shapes) may be customized by overriding its default template. In this chapter, we’ll learn about the conventions and tools that make this process relatively straightforward.

Customizing Biography Content

As it exists now, the bio projection page simply takes each field in our Bio content type and renders its label and value one after the other with each on its own line (see Figure 3-1). It would be better if our content read a little more naturally, such as “John Zablocki was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and plays guitar for Daisy’s Gone.” The label-value rendering might be sufficient for a product listing, but is less suited for our biography listing.

Ultimately, we’ll create a template for rendering Bio content items in a projection page (or any other container). However, to demonstrate how Orchard alternates work, ...