CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#architectureasp.net-mvc-4orchardcms
esp
esp

Reputation: 239

Is Orchard the right choice? SQL Azure, VS 2010

I am working on a project where we would build a public facing website with an authenticated set of forms in the back end, our requirement is to build and deploy this to Windows Azure; from an architecture perspective we're planning on leveraging a CMS for admin users to populate content, and build and deploy a set of MVC pages throughout the application.

I've spent a few days researching Orchard and can't find guidance on how to build custom pages as part of an MVC project and deploy them to an Orchard solution hosted in Windows Azure. Perhaps I'm going the wrong way about this? Download the source code, and customize that, deploy that to Azure?!

Not much guidance, and this is out of date - http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Deploying-Orchard-to-Windows-Azure

Any thoughts? Other .NET based CMSs? Anyone point me in the right direction with getting this Orchard growing? This is going to be a huge product.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 197

Answers (1)

levelnis
levelnis

Reputation: 7705

One thing I would suggest is that you defer making the decision about whether you need a CMS until the latest possible moment. You can convert a vanilla MVC application into an Orchard module at any point, but once you've made that switch, you won't be able to revert it without significant rework. I found this out to my cost in a project I was working on recently. Someone in the organisation made the decision to use Orchard before we had really got to grips with whether we actually needed a CMS for the project. Ask yourself these questions:

  1. How much of the site will be content that Admin users would need to update themselves?
  2. How much functionality will you need to build outside of the custom content areas?
  3. Are there business requirements that wouldn't be supported by an out of the box Orchard installation?

If point 1) outweighs points 2) and 3) then you may have a case for going down the Orchard route now. If 2) and/or 3) is more prevalent, I'd recommend delaying that decision as long as you can without impacting the project. If you do decide to go with Orchard and you have to customise it, be prepared for a steep learning curve, as I found it very complex to understand. What it does, it does superbly. If you have to customise it significantly then try to find someone who has worked with it before. It was for that reason, and that reason alone, that I eventually got to grips with it.

As far as integration with Azure is concerned, it works swimmingly. Just ensure that you create a custom .deployment file that tells Azure to deploy the contents of the Web folder. If you create a custom Module, it will simply be a web project within your application, but it will live within the Modules folder inside the Orchard application structure and will need to be deployed alongside the rest of the Orchard codebase. The Orchard data migrations make schema updates to your domain model really trivial to update in your database, even in SQL Azure, which is a really good feature.

Upvotes: 2

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