I am currently developing a very simple website in Orchard, which however required me to extend it both with themes, and with content types/widgets. Now this is as far as I went - Content Types and Widgets, because they were the only ones to be explained in detail in the official documentation. I've looked A LOT for answers to other questions, like How to override the default layout of a list, or How to use a custom field inside a content type, and refer to it in the code. The later is actually the motive I decided to open this thread.
How to use a custom field inside a content type, and refer to it in the code? It's fairly simple: I got a widget, which should support image attachment functionality - the author uploads an image - it gets shown to the user in a specific spot. I found the Image Field module, and I want to use that. So I figured out that I should enumerate the dependencies, but what next?
I've wasted already 2 days (14 hours each) of my productive time on stuff like this. Not reading an indexed guide, but reading tons of code, googling hundreds of blogs, in other words searching for a needle in the haystack. Do I have to understand the whole code to extend it? I want to be an implementer, not a developer for this product, and I'm sure that a lot of people also do.
What's wrong? I see people developing some pretty nice stuff on Orchard. And from what I see - they are free people - not affiliated with the project. They learned it from somewhere. I tried to learn from them, but their code has almost nothing to do with the tutorials. I feel totally lost and frustrated. Please help me beat the situation.
Is there somewhere I could find a more complete guide to Orchard CMS? To read the specs, like in MSDN, to see what the hell I am doing while writing that code from the tutorial.
Thank you.
P.S.
I know that on this site I am expected to expose the question about the concrete difficulty I am having. However I have not one, but many, and they all seem trivial. They are the kind of questions that usually get answered with a "RTFM". So I decided to take the problem from the top and ask you all if anyone of you has seen that "FM".
- Orchard CMS: Up and Running - Ebook - 132 pages -may 2012
- 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
- Orchard Documentation - Getting Started With Modules - Course
Udemy Orchard Courses (currently 4 )
Some self-advertising but I think understandable: there is the Orchard Training Demo module that's a thoroughly commented module specifically aimed to walk you through the most important aspects of Orchard development.
Guide to Creating Modules From Scratch
The tutorial is well done and will definitely enlighten you what Orchard needs (development-wise) and offers.
Orchard does indeed have a rather steep learning curve. It also took me a while to figure out the basics. What I do remember is that the people in the forums are really helpful and responsive. I learned a lot from there forums. Orchard is rather new so again there are no books out yet. If you have not used their forum I encourage you to do so: orchard forum
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8206182/a-full-guide-to-orchard-cms