Orchard CMS ASP .NET MVC to Core MVC

2
votes

We are about to rebuild a our public web site. We don't change platforms often. We pick one and stick with it for about five years. When the platform is showing its age we begin to research currently available options.

At this time, we have decided to abandon DotNetNuke. Orchard CMS is high on our list of options. There is no need to discuss our reasons or other options. This is not an opinion survey. But I do have a question.

.NET Core would be our preferred platform. I see that the Orchard CMS team is working on a .NET Core version. It seems premature for us to use it right now because it is not yet stable. On the other hand, activity in Orchard CMS on ASP.NET seems to be waning. We are concerned that if we go that route, we would investing in a platform near the end of its life cycle.

Does anyone know if there will be a viable migration path from Orchard ASP.NET MVC to .NET Core MVC?

2
orchardcms

2 Answers

4
votes

Although nothing is set in stone yet, I expect that realistically, you will be better off re-implementing the site in Orchard Core CMS. The two systems are very different in terms of data schema in order to automatically migrate, and any custom modules and themes you create in Orchard CMS will have to be recreated in Orchard Core CMS. Even if that work consists primarily of copy paste and accommodate here and there, there are certain things that are so different that it’s incompatible with the new CMS. One such example is the Layouts module in O1, which is replaced with something entirely different in OC. Additionally, there are different and better solutions to certain problems in OC when compared to how you would do it in O1.

My personal opinion is that you’d be better off building your site directly in OC and skip O1, despite the fact that O1 is more mature, for a couple of reasons:

  1. OC is vastly more performant and scalable than O1.
  2. OC is built on top of .NET Core, which means you have the option of running it on a Linux image. Not to mention that .NET Core is optimized to run as a server when compared to the full .NET Framework.
  3. As you correctly noticed, activity on O1 is dwindling, whereas activity on OC is quite high.

Although there is still a lot of moving ground in OC and it’s not as mature, the above reasons would be compelling enough for me to go for it.

0
votes

Orchard Core (OC) is a complete re-implementation of Orchard CMS (01) and the changes are really important.

So even if there is no easy way to migrate your content form O1 to OC, I managed to generate a recipe by exporting the blog posts I had in my older O1 site with the expected new json format.