Orchard News & Articles

Welcome to the November 2011 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to email us at pr@cmswire.com to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.

Welcome to the October 2011 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to email us at pr@cmswire.com to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.

Ok, so maybe you still don't believe it, but Microsoft has really warmed up to open source -- especially when it comes to web content management. Not only have they officially launched WebMatrix, a website development and deployment tool, but they have also announced the first official version of Orchard, a .NET open source web content management system.

A little update on Microsoft's open source Web CMS project, Orchard (news, site). Well, it wasn't actually Microsoft's project before and it's definitely not now.

Orchard has officially moved in CodePlex.org as the second project in the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery (the first was the ASP.NET AJAX Library). An official announcement on the new foundation's website says that Orchard is now licensed under the OSI-approved New BSD license.

Orchard Web CMS

Microsoft has made a three year committment which includes a full development team to the Orchard Project, which you can now follow on a new website.

There is still no set date for a beta release or a code release of any kind. You can view some of the code and documentation on the CodePlex website. But if you want to comment or contribute, you now have to follow the rules and guidelines of the CodePlex Foundation.

Interesting to note that the Orchard website is making it clear that Orchard is not competition for SharePoint or other open source .NET web content management systems like DotNetNuke. With Shaun Walker, Chief Architect and co-founder of DotNetNuke on the Board of Directors for CodePlex Foundation, we may very likely see some synergies arise sometime down the road.

It was only yesterday that we gave you the goods on the new open source content management project named Orchard (news, site). But we didn't know everything we wanted to know. So we reached out to Bertrand Le Roy, Program Manager for the Orchard project. Here's what he told us.

So the truth is, Orchard is not Microsoft's newest dive into the world the open source content management. At least not officially. When the project is run by a group of Microsoft employees, you can't help but wonder what, if any, role Microsoft might have behind the scenes.

Word about the new ASP.NET based open source Web CMS appeared only last week and now the details have arrived on CodePlex.

Microsoft has a secret, although it's not completely secret. They are getting ready to offer a new open source content management application code named Orchard.

The project, which will be discussed at next week's TechEd Europe, is a "new effort to produce free, open source, reusable components and a full-featured CMS application built on these components to produce a variety of different types of web sites."

It's hard to tell from the session description if this project is already well underway or just getting kicked off at the conference. The session includes an interactive discussion that allows developers to get "in on the ground floor".

ZDNet's Mary Joe Foley tried to get more details from Microsoft, but they remain mum on the subject, even ignoring the question of whether Orchard is just a new name for Oxite, the open source Web CMS Microsoft announced back in December last year.

As Foley suggests, the timing is just right for Orchard as it could become one of the first projects announced for the new CodePlex Foundation. The Foundation, which has been established to "enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities", has released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines.

Microsoft is fairly good at keeping secrets, so we may just have to wait until November 11, when the TechEd Europe Session happens, to get all the details on Project Orchard. As soon as we get the goods, we'll pass them on to you.