Combinator Orchard module

About

An Orchard CMS module that combines and minifies external stylesheets and javascript files to cut down on load times.

Features

• Combines and minifies css files
• Combines and minifies javascript files
• If local and remote resources are mixed (like a local js files with one from a CDN) preserves their original order
• Preserves conditional resources and minifies (if multiple with the same condition are after each other, also combines) them
• Can combine remote (CDN) resources
• Can embed images into stylesheets as data urls
• Experimental image sprite generation support
• Resource sets can be defined for better client-side caching: you can create sets of resources that are combined separately (e.g. all jQuery scripts can be in their individual file)
• Ability to share processed resources between tenants in a multi-tenant application so a set of resources is only processed once, not for every tenant (resource sharing)
• Busts browser cache when resources are updated (with a query string parameter containing a time stamp)
• Ability to set custom resource domain
• Exposing resource processing events
• LESS and SASS preprocessors, contribution of Onestop Internet, Inc.
• Command line command for emptying cache ("combinator empty")
• Info comment in bundled resources about which resources were combined
• Tuned to be fast
• With custom IStorageProvider can work in cloud hosting too (if there is no write access to the Media folder anyway)
• Import/export settings
• Administration page:
  • Adjust combination exclusion filter
  • Enable/disable combination of CDN resources
  • Set up resource domain
  • Enable/disable minification and adjust exclusion filter
  • Enable/disable image embedding and adjust exclusion filter
  • Enable/disable image sprite generation
  • Define resource sets
  • Enable/disable for admin site
  • Empty cache
• The Combinator cache can be emptied when the Activated shell event fires if:
  • A marker file with the name _ClearCache.txt is present in the Orchard.Web/App_Data/Sites/<tenant_name>/_PiedoneModules/Combinator folder. This file will then be deleted to have the cache cleared only on the first shell start, e.g. after a new deployment.
  • The CombinatorCacheClearingShellEventHandler class's IsDisabled property is set to false (default is true) by adding the following section to Orchard.Web/Config/HostComponents.config:

    <Component Type="Piedone.Combinator.EventHandlers.CombinatorCacheClearingShellEventHandler">
      <Properties>
        <Property Name="IsDisabled" Value="false"/>
      </Properties>
    </Component>
    

    Alternatively, the same can be achieved through a file transformation (see this for details) to only activate this feature for a given build configuration, e.g., by adding the following to HostComponents.Release.config for Release mode.

    <Component Type="Piedone.Combinator.EventHandlers.CombinatorCacheClearingShellEventHandler" xdt:Transform="Insert">
      <Properties>
        <Property Name="IsDisabled" Value="false" xdt:Transform="Insert" />
      </Properties>
    </Component>
    

The module is also available for DotNest sites.

You can download an install the module from the Orchard Gallery.
For known issues and future plans please see the Issue Tracker.

Please make sure to read the Documentation!

Contributing and support

Bug reports, feature requests, comments, questions, code contributions, and love letters are warmly welcome, please do so via GitHub issues and pull requests. Please adhere to our open-source guidelines while doing so.

This project is developed by Lombiq Technologies. Commercial-grade support is available through Lombiq.