ORCHARD CMS

Orchard CMS, a free open-source content management system running on IIS7, .NET Framework 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 3.0. I’ve kept things clean and simple, but the website does host a custom Orchard Theme as well as a number of Orchard customizations.

There is paying no extra charges from your host provider for a SQL Server Database for Orchard. Orchard CMS runs on the free SQL CE 4 Database from Microsoft that is automatically created by Orchard on installation and managed by Orchard during the lifetime of your website. SQL CE can also be copied to and from the website like any other file so you also don’t need to install or purchase any expensive or complicated tools for backup or moving your website and database to another host provider. If you do choose to upgrade your database to SQL Server Express or SQL Server 2008 R2, this can be done fairly easily when appropriate. Since most of my clients run Orchard CMS with the free SQL CE Database from Microsoft.

The key to to Orchard Website is the Orchard Theme, which defines the look and user experience of your Orchard Website. Orchard comes with a built-in theme, called The Theme Machine, or one can choose a free theme from the Orchard Gallery. As more and more Orchard Web Designers enter the Orchard Community the choices of Orchard Themes will increase and improve, but in general, the theme choices right now in the Orchard Gallery are not that great.

The Orchard Theme for this website is custom. We can started with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and created a custom Orchard Theme based on those initial HTML Templates. It takes awhile to be good at creating Orchard Themes due to the extensive compositional nature of Orchard, but once you get really good at creating Orchard Themes, the sky is the limit. New Orchard Developers will find the learning curve for creating Orchard Themes a bit longer than most content management systems, but the power and flexibility of Orchard more than makes up for the time it takes to learn it.