Help us build better Orchard Core recipes

[barthamark]

Hi everyone,

As part of the survey we at Lombiq recently ran on the Orchard Core starting experience, one of the strongest requests was for better starter recipes. Many respondents said recipes are powerful but often tricky to create, and having more ready-made ones would make onboarding a lot smoother.

We’d love to hear from you:

• What kind of starter recipes would have helped you in a past project?
• Are there recurring site types or use cases where you always end up rebuilding the same basics?
• If you could have downloaded one recipe at the start of your last project, what would it have included?

A couple of quick ideas to get us started (more to come):

• A conference website where admins can manage speakers and events, and organize them into time slots on specific days.
• A corporate/marketing site with home page, about page, and a contact form already configured.

And these don’t always need to be full “starter sites.” We can also think about smaller recipes that add specific improvements, like a contact form workflow or a sample query setup.

Please share your thoughts and ideas below. Whether it’s workflows, content types, queries, or sample data, we want to know what would save you time and frustration.

Once we gather suggestions, we will start working on a small set of recipes that can serve as solid starting points (or handy building blocks) for new Orchard Core projects.

And don’t forget to contribute to the documentation thread as well, where we discuss how to improve the Orchard Core docs.

Thanks for helping us making Orchard Core better!

[Buzz-Al]

@barthamark It came up in the call last night that no one really uses the dashboard space. This seems like a missed opportunity. I wonder if a few of the recipes could configure the dashboard in a manner that makes it more useful out of the box for the specific aims of the recipe. For example the marketing starter could provide an analytics overview or a list of new contacts acquired through the contact form. The conference dashboard might provide a list of speakers and their contact details for quick look up.

[barthamark]

@Buzz-Al I agree, for some reasons we almost never make use of it. Thank you for your ideas. A couple more that comes to my mind (few might require module development though):

• Recent Activity: If Audit Trail is enabled, show the latest events.
• Quick Actions: Like "Add New Blog Post"
• Latest N of given content type could be useful, e.g. Latest Blog Posts, Latest Messages (i.e., contact form submissions, if stored in the CMS)
• Editorial to-dos: For marketing or blog sites, show “Drafts awaiting publishing”, “Scheduled posts”, or “Unpublished changes”.
• Failed or Latest Workflow executions

[Buzz-Al]

Great additions. I would be more than happy to get involved if there is some module development required.

[Piedone]

This is the start screen of Zoho Sites, the website builder that's part of Zoho's business suite:

Maybe we can take inspiration from this?