Introduction

In this article, you will learn how to send email in Orchard CMS using it’s out of box services

Steps to send email in Orchard CMS

• Create Email wrapper template
• Create Email Template
• Inject required orchard services in the Controller or Custom Service
• Specify email template to use and pass data
• Sending email using MessageService

To demonstrate the scenario, we take the example of sending a challenge email to verify the user email address. In Orchard. Users module, you will find all this code to send an email using orchard services.

Steps 1 - Create Email wrapper template

It applies default Body alteration for SmtpChannel which create the body of HTML template. create a new file “Template.User.Wrapper.cshtml” under Views folder.

@* Override this template to alter the email messages sent by the Orchard.Users module *@ @Display.PlaceChildContent(Source: Model) 

Steps 2 - Create Email Template

Now create the content of the email. It applies default Body alteration for SmtpChannel which create the body of HTML template. create a new file “Template.User.Validated.cshtml” under Views folder. It is the same razor view page where we can pass the data and place on the place holders. e.g. Model.ContactEmail is the address of the contact person of the website.

@T("Thank you for registering with {0}.<br /><br /><br /><b>Final Step</b><br />To verify that you own this e-mail address, please click the following link:<br /><a href=\"{1}\">{1}</a><br /><br /><b>Troubleshooting:</b><br />If clicking on the link above does not work, try the following:<br /><br />Select and copy the entire link.<br />Open a browser window and paste the link in the address bar.<br />Click <b>Go</b> or, on your keyboard, press <b>Enter</b> or <b>Return</b>.", Model.RegisteredWebsite, Model.ChallengeUrl)
@if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(Model.ContactEmail)) {
    @T("<br /><br />If you continue to have access problems or want to report other issues, please <a href=\"mailto:{0}\">Contact Us</a>.",Model.ContactEmail)
}

Steps 3 - Inject required orchard services in the Controller or Custom Service

To render the email template, we need to use a few orchard services. In Orchard CMS every view object is a shape so we need to create a shape using our created template views. We need to inject IShapeService and IShapeFactory to create the shape for the email content. IMessageService required to send the email through the SMTP channel.

namespace Orchard.Users.Services {
    public class UserService : IUserService {
        private readonly IMessageService _messageService;
        private readonly IShapeFactory _shapeFactory;
        private readonly IShapeDisplay _shapeDisplay;
        public UserService(
        IMessageService messageService, 
        IShapeFactory shapeFactory,
        IShapeDisplay shapeDisplay) {

            _messageService = messageService;
            _shapeFactory = shapeFactory;
            _shapeDisplay = shapeDisplay;
        }
        ...

Steps 4 - Specify email template to use and pass data

At this step, we specify the email and wrapper template to create the Shape for HTML content. In below line of code ShapeFactory.Create method takes the first parameter for the email template then we add email wrapper template in the template metadata. Along with this, we pass the model data using the anonymous object.

var template = _shapeFactory.Create("Template_User_Validated", Arguments.From(new {
    RegisteredWebsite = site.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().ValidateEmailRegisteredWebsite,
    ContactEmail = site.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().ValidateEmailContactEMail,
    ChallengeUrl = url
}));
template.Metadata.Wrappers.Add("Template_User_Wrapper");

Steps 5 - Sending email using MessageService

Now specify the mail message Subject, Body and Recipients of the email message. You can also specify attachments also. Just add the “Attachments” key and List as value to the parameters dictionary. Attachment should be the file path to attach with the email message.

var parameters = new Dictionary<string, object> {
                    {"Subject", T("Verification E-Mail").Text},
                    {"Body", _shapeDisplay.Display(template)},
                    {"Recipients", user.Email}
                };

        _messageService.Send("Email", parameters);

Below is the complete code for method which sends the challenge email:

public void SendChallengeEmail(IUser user, Func<string, string> createUrl) {
    string nonce = CreateNonce(user, DelayToValidate);
    string url = createUrl(nonce);

    if (user != null) {
        var site = _siteService.GetSiteSettings();

        var template = _shapeFactory.Create("Template_User_Validated", Arguments.From(new {
            RegisteredWebsite = site.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().ValidateEmailRegisteredWebsite,
            ContactEmail = site.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().ValidateEmailContactEMail,
            ChallengeUrl = url
        }));
        template.Metadata.Wrappers.Add("Template_User_Wrapper");
        
        var parameters = new Dictionary<string, object> {
                    {"Subject", T("Verification E-Mail").Text},
                    {"Body", _shapeDisplay.Display(template)},
                    {"Recipients", user.Email}
                };

        _messageService.Send("Email", parameters);
    }
}

Conclusion

I guess that’s all to send an email in Orchard CMS.

After using Windows Live Writer, now I have start using Open Live Writer to do remote blogging. Right now WLW is not able to connect with few blogging platforms like blogger.com and also Microsoft has stopped putting efforts on the amazing tool for the bloggers.

OLW is an open source tool which is developed by the contribution of the developer community. Lots of features of this tool is under development. It has the main advantage that there are many tools available as compare to the HTML editor on the remote blog. You can work offline, which might be good if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a decent internet connection or not able to connect to internet for days. It will let you write blog posts and save them to draft for later publishing.

In this article, you will go through the steps to configure Open Live Writer for the Orchard CMS. This provide support for remote bloging through XmlRcp. Both WLW and OLW are able to connect with the Orchard CMS blog using this feature.

Orchard provides this XML-RPC feature out of the box and You have to enable it in the Modules section inside your Orchard CMS Orchard admin panel.

Prerequisites:

1. You have setup Orchard CMS on your web hosting or local IIS and created a blog on website.
2. Installed OLW on your computer.

If you have done pre work then go to the Administration Dashboard of Orchard and click the Modules. There you will find Remote Blog Publishing feature under the Content Publishing section. It is dependent on XmlRpc so if you enable it then XmlRpc feature will automatically enabled.

To enable Remote Blog Publishing click the Enable link. After clicking the enable link you will see both of them enabled at once since they are dependent features. After you click Enable, if everything is Ok then you will see following message:

After enabling these modules you are ready to configure Orchard blog in Open Live Writer. Now, launch Live Writer from your Start menu in Windows.

In Blog Accounts section, click on 'Add blog account'

When you choose “Add blog account” then you will see below prompt to select the blog service. Choose “Other blog service” from the available options and click Next.

Type the URL to your Orchard blog, along with the admin user name and password that you defined when you set-up Orchard for the first time.

Click Next. Open Live Writer will connect to your blog in order to read the XML-RPC capabilities that Orchard supports and download the current Theme (for previewing posts before publishing). If you are prompted to create a temporary post during this step, select "Yes" in the dialog.

After that it will complete downloading supporting files and template for making blog post writing intuitive.

Once it finishes, you will have window where you can specify the name of your blog you have just configured in Open Live Writer, click Finish.

Now you are ready to write blog post for your Orchard CMS blog.

CodeProject

Recently I try to learn about the CMS which are developed in Microsoft technologies as there are lots of mature CMS available like joomla, Druple etc. These are based on the PHP and mostly hosted on apache(Linux based web server). Though I am working on .net stack so I decided to start with some open source CMS developed in ASP.net technology and I decided to start learning with Orchard.

What is Orchard:
Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused Content Management System built on the ASP.NET MVC platform.

Orchard is built on a modern architecture that puts extensibility up-front, as its number one concern. All components in Orchard can be replaced or extended. Content is built from easily composable building blocks. Modules extend the system in a very decoupled fashion, where a commenting module for example can as easily apply to pages, blog posts, photos or products. A rich UI composition system completes the picture and ensures that you can get the exact presentation that you need for your content.

Here are few learning resources that I want to share with others also:

• Orchard CMS: Up and Running - Ebook - 132 pages
• Orchard Fundamentals - Pluralsight video Training - 2h 57m -Beginner - Sep 2011
• Advanced Orchard - Pluralsight video Training - 4h 12m - Advanced - Apr 2012
• Orchard Documentation - Tutorial Videos (Orchard TV)
• Orchard Documentation
• Udemy Orchard Courses (currently 4 )
      Workflows in Orchard CMS
      Orchard CMS Theme Development Tutorial For Beginners
  Here two free courses for beginners:Orchard CMS Tutorial for Absolute Beginners
  Orchard CMS Tutorial : Recipes In Orchard CMS