Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. The Orchard project as a very active and vibrant community that is actively developing and also using it for personal and commercial offerings.
Iron Foundry is an open source project that extends .NET to Cloud Foundry (The Open Platform as a Service). available for the Windows Server Environments with the ability to run the full spectrum of .NET Web Applications, SQL Server, and more. Iron Foundry places the Microsoft tool stack on an even footing with the Linux-based stacks. This platform is all open source and can be deployed anywhere. Today we are going to use the free trial environment provided by the Iron Foundry project.
With Iron Foundry and Cloud Foundry Orchard can scale within minutes to handle load on the system. This also gives an environment for rapid testing and staging of your application.
In four easy steps you can deploy and start configuring your Orchard CMS instance on Iron Foundry:
Step 1: Download Orchard CMS
To download Orchard just go to the Download Page and then select the “Download as a zip” it is about 8MB in size. It will then ask you to agree to the terms.
Step 2: Make changes to be supported on Iron Foundry
Go ahead and unzip it to your temporary directory. You can read more about the manual install here: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file
Step 3: Sign up and Deploy to Iron Foundry
Upon startup, use the gear icon to add a connection to api.gofoundry.net:
You will be presented with the "Manage Clouds" screen (new in 1.6.0). To add a well-known cloud, use the dropdown at the bottom of the left side of the screen, with the cloud-plus icon. Select "Iron Foundry" to add a connection to this cloud. The url will be pre-filled to http://api.gofoundry.net
Enter the email address and password credentials that were mailed to you upon signup. Use the "Validate Account" button to double-check your entries
When you choose "Ok", you will see this new cloud connection added to your explorer window.
Step 4: Setup your new Orchard Instance
You should be able to browse to your new orchard install at your application url (http://APPNAME.gofoundry.net) where you will see a getting started page:
When you get to the screen below you are going to want to select to deploy SQL server and put in the connection string. To get the connection string you need to do the following: