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

You can try it for free on DotNest.com or on Microsoft Azure by clicking on this button.

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.

Orchard is delivered under the .NET Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI.

Our mission is to empower our users and foster a dedicated and diverse community that builds the CMS that we all want to use.

Orchard is currently in version 1.10.3: It contains bugfixes and the more impactful changes and new features added in the latest major version (1.10).

We invite participation by the developer community in shaping the project’s direction, so that we can publicly validate our designs and development approach. All our releases are available on our Releases page, and we encourage interested developers to check out the source code on the Orchard GitHub site and get involved with the project.

• Download the latest release
• Feature roadmap
• Docs and designs/specs

We hope that by engaging with the community we will continue to shape Orchard into a valuable set of tools and applications. The Orchard team is committed to open community participation and accepts code contributions. We encourage community participation at all levels from general project feedback to bug fixes and patches.

There are many ways you can contribute to Orchard:

• Check out the code
• Write documentation
• Find and file a bug
• Propose a feature idea
• Ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow
• Participate in our gitter.im chatroom
• Submit a pull request
• Translate Orchard
• Contribute modules and themes to our gallery

As the underlying frameworks (.NET, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC) are constantly evolving, Orchard of course keeps track of the changes and improvements of these: Orchard Core is the next generation of Orchard releases that is based on ASP.NET Core. Just like the current Orchard project, it's fully open-source and is publicly available on GitHub. Orchard Core (as a framework) is being built from scratch: it's still in development and does not share any of its code base (at least directly) with the current versions (1.x) of Orchard.