I’ve read the docs but I’m still a bit lost on how to integrate Orchard with my existing solution.
Currently I have a Solution containing an Azure Project with a WCF Service WebRole and a Worker Role. What I want to achieve is to add another WebRole containing an Orchard powered Website + custom modules (that yet have to be written) and deploy the whole thing to Azure in one go from the Visual Studio Publish feature (ordinary publish – not web deploy). The WCF Service would listen to https://api.example.com while the website would be reachable under http://www.example.com (note no SSL here).
Is this possible and if yes, could someone provide some rough guidance?
The trick here is that the typical Orchard download is loaded into VS as a Web Site Project (WSP) instead of a Web Appliation Project (WAP). Azure web roles are WAPs, not WSPs, so you have a couple of choices:
If you’re starting with a brand new Orchard site, download the Orchard source code (instead of the zip) and use the Azure solution from in there. You can either integrate your two existing roles into their Azure project, or move all the Orchard stuff over to your sln. I would think it’d be easier just to use their sln, and add your two projects to it.
or, If you’re starting from an existing Orchard site, you’ll have to convert it to a WAP using techniques similar to what is outlined at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2009/10/29/converting-a-web-site-project-to-a-web-application-project.aspx. This will be a bit more work, as the sample is moving a WebForms site over, so you’ll need to pick the MVC3 project template instead, and add all the NuGet packages in yourself, etc.
Either way, it’s not trivial, but if you’re lucky enough to fall into the first category above, it shouldn’t take too long to do.