CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azurecloudorchardcmsazure-cloud-services
Richteaman
Richteaman

Reputation: 11

Themes in Orchard hosted in Azure

I've been setting up Orchard 1.8 in an Azure Cloud Service. I've got it working, but I'm now confused as to how to use it.

Installing themes via the gallery fails silently. The devs say this is because Orchard on Azure doesn't support the theme gallery, and suggest adding new themes to the project and uploading a new package (https://orchard.codeplex.com/discussions/453688). Ignoring that this requires any designers that want to make minor CSS changes now need Visual Studio, access to the entire source code, and then wait through a 20 minute deploy, this just doesn't seem possible.

This post explains how the Azure emulator doesn't work with Orchard. So now I'm confused; what is the expected workflow for a brand new Orchard site hosted on Azure if I can't make changes to the site in production or staging but cannot run it locally either. I'm aware I could run it without the Azure emulator on regular IIS but that seems to be too far removed from the production environment to be a good test.

I was drawn to Orchard originally because it had great documentation and supports MVC Web API, but this seems so fundamental that now I'm not so sure. I feel like every time something goes wrong they'll always be doubt whether it's working as designed or if there is an Azure idiosyncrasy going on.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's had an Orchard site from scratch in Azure, I'm hoping I've just missed something simple with this.

Thanks, Tom

Upvotes: 1

Views: 174

Answers (1)

Bertrand Le Roy
Bertrand Le Roy

Reputation: 17814

You should never install modules or themes on a production server. Instead, install those on your dev machine, build the package and then deploy. If you don't want to deal with the heaviness of cloud services, don't use cloud services. Azure Web Sites are about a million times easier to use, and they work great. They allow for what you're asking for.

Upvotes: 2

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