Month: February 2017

Orchard Project

Well despite having been interrupted by real life a couple of times, I’m back to learning more about the Orchard Project CMS. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m reviewing a previously completed introductory course on Pluralsight. The course was recorded using an earlier version Orchard so I sometimes have to take some time to figure out the new way completing some tasks. Fortunately the underlying concepts haven’t changed too much. I am discovering that the newer version may be overkill for the site I’m planning, but I’m going to continue because I still want to learn the software. It appears that much of the complexity of Orchard is implemented to allow the software to support many different user roles. This would probably make Orchard an excellent foundation for a large corporate website where it is desired to control access by users in narrowly defined roles.

One thing that I have learned is that compiling and hosting Orchard development is taxing my six year old computer. I’ve decide that it is time to build a replacement desktop system. I will continue running my existing system as a whole house file server with 6Gb of redundant disk storage.

With the exception of mobile computing platforms (I’m currently using a Surface Pro 3) I’ve custom built all of my desktop systems since the mid 90s. I do this for several reasons; 1) fun, 2) control of the components, and 3) reuse of components when possible (my current system is still housed the same case I bought for my first build). I’ve been interested in building powerful but compact systems since I built a home theater PC (HTPC) back when over-the-air high-definition broadcasts were first becoming available. One of the key criteria for an HTPC was noise reduction. I also consider this of paramount importance for a system that will be located near me in my office.

I’m excited about this new system build, and have begun ordering components. I’m planning to document this build and posting it to this site in case anyone cares to follow along.

Gotta go, I hear Orchard calling.

Month Two of my New Year

Well, it’s February and I’m a little behind schedule of where I had hoped to be on bringing my new project to life. Now that this site is “live” and in acceptable shape, I’m starting to bring my main site to life. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I intend to use the Orchard Project CMS as the platform for my home automation website. I’m also hoping to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host the site. Both of these choices were made primarily so that I can use this project as an opportunity to learn and/or increase my knowledge of these platforms. I’m using the Orchard Project because most of programming work I’ve done over the past several years has been in the .Net environment using C#, HTML, JavaScript and CSS to build a custom website for courseware development by the Air Force. Using Orchard lets me increase my understanding of C# and the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern without having to create the entire framework from scratch.

I’m hoping that learning how to host a website on AWS will give me the skills to work in the growing field of cloud computing. To accomplish these goals, yesterday and today were spent training on Orchard through the Pluralsight website and AWS on Lynda.com. The Orchard training was a review of a previously completed lesson to refresh me on getting my local development environment setup while the AWS training was mostly all new information.

So far so good. I hope to have the site live with a few introductory posts and a default theme within a week or so. Then I will continue creating content and working on a unique design for the site before starting on creating my custom training module.

Hope you’ll follow along.