About The Orchard Project
Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. It will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, scripters, and developers. Additionally, we seek to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the
ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the
CodePlex Foundation. It is licensed under a
New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI. The intended output of the Orchard project is three-fold:
- Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users , scripters, and developers
- A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications
- A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions
In the near term, the Orchard project is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through extensions and themes. You can learn more about the project on the
Orchard Project Site.
Project Status
Orchard is currently in the initial stage of development. We have chosen to launch the project at this stage in order to invite early participation by the developer community in shaping the project’s direction, and so that we can publicly validate our designs and development approach. Some of the initial source code and specs are available for review and comment but there is no downloadable release at this time. We encourage interested developers to check out the source code on this site and get involved with the project in these early stages.
About The Team
The Orchard team is a small group of developers at Microsoft who are passionate about delivering open source solutions on .NET technology. The team is primarily composed of ASP.NET developers and has recently grown with the addition of two of the principal developers on
Oxite, Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew, as well as Louis DeJardin, a long-time ASP.NET developer, community software advocate, and creator of the
SparkViewEngine for MVC.
Together this core team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and
Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to
Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.
How To Get Involved
We hope that by engaging with the community in the very early stages of the project that we will be able to shape Orchard into a valuable set of tools and applications for the community. The Orchard team is committed to open community participation and is in the process of working through the details to be able to accept code contributions. We encourage community participation at all levels from general project feedback to bug fixes and patches.