Orchard PHP scripting demo on the Budapest PHP Meetup
Yesterday's PHP Meetup in Budapest also featured Orchard. This is not a mistake: I demoed the PHP scripting engine we recently developed.
Reception of the project was varying with the majority of those who asked questions being sceptical about the usability of such an engine for serious development. I hope that in the end I made it clear that this scripting environment we developed was never meant as a way to develop complex logic; its purpose is to provide a tool for tasks that are not possible to solve just from the admin UI but where the overhead of creating a new module for them would be an overkill - especially if one is not experienced in Orchard and/or .NET development but is in PHP (and even if one is not a developer at all: the level of effort needed to start writing PHP scripts for Orchard is orders of magnitude lower than starting to develop .NET modules). Of course the same applies for all flavours of our scripting toolbox, and also generally for scripting: you essentially have a developer's toolbox but in kind of a sandboxed environment; you can abuse it to write complete applications but that would be the wrong use of the tool.
All in all it was an interesting new experience and after the session a couple of attendees were expressing that they're interested in Orchard and in our activity.
The session was also recorded and the video is available on Ustream. However, since it is in Hungarian if you don't speak the language you may want to get a protocol droid first :-).