Zablocki - Orchard CMS: up and running

A few months back, I wanted to create an online presence for my band, Daisys Gone. In the past, I would have started from scratch. But I remembered all the domains Ive accumulated over the years that are now nothing more than parking pages at my registrar. Its generally not hard to throw together a few simple brochure-ware pages. I certainly could have done just that for my bands site. However, even simple sites often have content and behavior that needs to be dynamic.

The obvious solution is to use a content management system (CMS). CMS platforms such as WordPress and Drupal offer users prebuilt functionality for everything from creating pages to managing site registration. A full-blown CMS will allow non-technical users to create and manage content and will allow programmers and designers to extend the out-of-the-box functionality by creating themes and modules, respectively.

With Daisys Gone, I was once again presented with the dilemma of whether to build a site from scratch or to use a CMS. Fortunately, I remembered how I had seen a then just-released Orchard CMS used at the NYC Give Camp a few months earlier. Give Camps match developers and designers with charities who have some unmet technical need, often a web presence. One of the developer groups built its charity a new website using Orchard.

I remember being quite impressed by how much this team accomplished in one weekend using this new CMS. So when it came time to start building the website for my band, I made the choice to use Orchard.

The original Daisys Gone website was not much more than a home page. It was primarily a sandbox for me to learn Orchard. As I write this book, Im going to create a new online presence for the band. Ill walk through the steps of creating a custom look and feel (themes) and extending Orchard with new functionality (modules).

Whether you are building a new corporate site for your company or a site for the local youth soccer league, you are likely to have many of the same needs of your CMS. Building a site for a band is no different. You may need to schedule events, manage user comments, support OAuth, or have a site map. The content will vary by your domain, the features much less so.