I’ve been working on a project based on the Orchard CMS for a travel agency. We chose Orchard because of the modularity; four different travel sites will be based on this same architecture. Different themes, different modules, but one codebase.

Last week the first site went live: check it out at http://www.charmequality.nl!

We faced some interesting problems and came up with creative solutions. A few key learnings:

• The modularity is indeed amazing: on a live site en- or disable a feature and the site can get changed in many different ways
• The learning curve for developing Orchard is quite steep, not easy to step in. The cms is using some complicated techniques that take some time to fully understand. But once you get to know them, you’ll also have improved your c# knowledge!
• Orchard’s performance is far from optimal. Outputcaching is needed to make it work and we still have CPU spikes when visitor counters rise. When you need live data on your outputcached page, consider using Ajax requests to load the uncachable data and scatter it on the page
• The gallery has loads of good stuff! Some modules don’t work perfectly out-of-the-box, but can usually be fixed without much hassle. Don’t give up too easily! Fixing the issue also helps you better understand the inner workings of Orchard.

All in all I’m glad to have had this experience. And it’s not over yet, there’s a 1.1 version in the making and after that we’re starting on the second travel agency site.