Orchard CMS: Up and Running

Chapter 8. Maintaining Orchard Sites

We’ve seen that installing Orchard themes and modules simply requires copying files into well-known directories. If we were to create a second Orchard site, we could simply copy our modules and theme into the Modules and Themes directories under the Orchard.Web project for the new site. However, we’ve already seen a better way to share modules—the Orchard Gallery.

Packaging Themes and Modules

Though the Orchard team has supplied the Gallery with many useful modules, most of the nearly 400 packages (as of the writing of this book) have been contributed by Orchard users. Though we created our theme and modules to satisfy the needs of the Daisy’s Gone website, there’s nothing that would prevent us from sharing our creations with the Orchard community.

Note

Our theme and modules were intentionally kept simple. It’s arguably reasonable to share a module or theme with limited functionality. Just be sure not to call it a 1.0 product! In fact, sharing a pre-1.0 version is a good way to help shape your project by getting early feedback.

We’ll first package up our theme. “Daisy’s Theme” isn’t likely to win any UI contests, but you never know who might find our minimalist approach to design appealing. To start the process, we’ll return to the command line and enable the Orchard.Packaging module:

orchard> feature enable Orchard.Packaging
Enabling features Orchard.Packaging
Packaging was enabled

Once this module is enabled, we’ll be able ...