Migrating to the Orchard

Over the last [almost 1 year!

] I’ve been in the process of migrating my website/blog to a new blogging platform.  I had been looking at Orchard CMS for quite some time, and was interested in trying it out for myself before recommending it to friends and colleagues for their sites [those that I maintain and those that I don’t].  Unfortunately, real life tends to intervene when least expected, and the time that I had to dedicate to migrating the blog disappeared.  So, here I am, finally, on the new platform and while the process wasn’t always as straightforward as I hoped, it’s now ‘done’.  I hope to now be able to dedicate some additional time to actually producing content [the driving reason for the initial move].

So… why?

There are a number of reasons, but the driving reason was that my old platform BlogEngine.NET, while it was certainly capable, was starting to feel rather long in the tooth.  It was still WebForms-based, I was moving to MVC development on my sites, and I could never really crack the theming nut to get a look and feel that I was truly happy with.  The platform has served me well over the years, but I do most of my writing with Windows Live Writer, and there appeared to be a bug in BlogEngine.NET that was preventing publishing of posts with ‘too many’ images, or maybe it was ‘too long’… I could never figure out exactly what the problem was, but that was the trigger and was why I haven’t gotten back around to blogging since.

Orchard provides a number of ‘bonus’ features [for me], it’s based on MVC/Razor which is a big benefit as it aligns pretty closely with what I’m ‘used to’, which means I can get up an running on changes/modifications right away.  Its modular system should also allow me to selectively override the portions that I care about without changing the source/original copies of things.  There are a lot of modules already pre-built, which is nice, and I’ve been able to find most of what I need to provide feature parity out of the box.  One thing that’s missing… out-of-the-box reCaptcha support for comment entry, but I’ve found a blog post that outlines the process of getting that added to the comments area, so hopefully I’ll get that worked out soon.

Also, the Orchard theme I’ve used supports out-of-the-box responsive design as well, so it should show up much better on mobile devices, and I don’t have two different themes for the different devices.  This is becoming more important these days, and so having this support without much effort on my part is a big win.

 

In Closing

Welcome to my new blog, and I hope to get back here posting much more regularly, with both the technical content you’re used to and more observations on the state of technology in general.

 

Thanks for reading!