The Outercurve Foundation has announced version 1.1 of the Orchard project, a free and open source community-based project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform. Orchard 1.1 was announced during the Microsoft Mix 2011 web development conference in Las Vegas this week.

One of five projects in the foundation's ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, Orchard 1.1 is essentially a .NET-based CMS application intended to allow users to create content-driven websites. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery and is licensed under the OSI-approved New BSD license.

The new Orchard offering includes an extensibility framework, which will allow developers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes -- although more detailed information regarding these extensions has not been offered at this stage of the news announcement.

Orchard 1.1 includes a number of new features and enhancements, including a fresh design of the administration panel, a rapid way to set up a new Orchard site using so-called 'recipes', additional extensibility hooks for developers, and flexible 'shape tracing' tools for designers to inspect and customize the rendering of an Orchard site.

"Our goals with Orchard 1.1 were to address community feedback, improve design and usability of administration, and simplify setup and reduce the time it takes to configure a new site. We streamlined the workflow to install modules and themes, manage widgets, and create lists of content. We also made improvements targeted at deployment and hosting," said Bradley Millington, project lead and manager of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery.

"We are excited to make this announcement at MIX11, and also to announce the winners of the Orchard Module Challenge. We are very impressed with the modules and websites participants created, and pleased to see them contributed to the Orchard Gallery for everyone in the community to enjoy," said Millington.

The Outercurve Foundation has three galleries and 11 projects. Galleries include the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery (five projects), the Systems Infrastructure and Integration Gallery (three projects) and the recently-announced Research Accelerators Gallery (three projects).