Orchard Training materials and corresponding module releases (introducing the External Pages module)
As you may noticed we have a new menu item: Training. There we collect all the topics and supporting materials not just for our Orchard course but also generally for Orchard trainings. So if you'd like to hold an Orchard training for your colleagues or fellow tech enthusiasts in you local community don't hesitate to use our materials. Just drop us an e-mail first as per the licence, we'd really like to know who teaches Orchard around the world.
The training materials are really Markdown files stored in a Mercurial repository on Bitbucket (it also contains some sample files like an import file, make sure to check it out!) but are pulled in and converted to content items by our new External Pages module (demoed at the community meeting, from 47:55).
Mainly so that module can work safely by crunching repo-downloading background tasks even in a multi-server environment I've updated Helpful Libraries with a new feature: Jobs. Jobs includes among others a job manager service where if you take a job (i.e. acquire a task) no other process can take it. This may sound banal but is really challenging to do in a transactional web application like Orchard especially if it runs on multiple nodes. The solution involves the usage of lock files to overcome the issue. I've updated the Helpful Libraries documentation with plenty of samples to give you an idea.
Aaaand because all this came together with an Orchard 1.5 to 1.6 update Combinator had to be updated as well: thus the 7th alpha. Since in 1.6 scripts are shapes too (just like stylesheets) the ordering of scripts was messed up with Combinator 1.4 if there were excluded ones. The new Combinator release fixes this and has many other improvements as well. Also I will provide a migration path from this version to future versions if necessary, so you can use it in production if you feel like it.