// the find
OrchardCMS/OrchardCore
Orchard Core is an open-source modular and multi-tenant application framework built with ASP.NET Core, and a content management system (CMS) built on top of that framework.
Orchard Core is a modular, multi-tenant CMS and application framework built on ASP.NET Core, from the team behind the original Orchard CMS. It's aimed at .NET developers who need to run several distinct sites off one codebase/deployment, or who want a content-type system (parts, fields, display drivers) they can extend in C# rather than fight against.
Multi-tenancy is real, not bolted on — each tenant gets its own shell, database, and feature set, which is the kind of thing that's painful to retrofit later. The recipe system lets you provision content types, settings, and even whole sites declaratively as JSON, so environment setup is repeatable instead of click-ops in an admin UI. Modules plug into standard ASP.NET Core DI, so you can add or strip functionality (GraphQL, workflows, media, localization) per tenant without a full redeploy. The .agents/skills directory is unusually thorough for an OSS project — dozens of documented skills covering migrations, display drivers, recipes, and module scaffolding, which suggests the maintainers are actively investing in making the codebase legible to agent-assisted contributors, not just humans.
The content model (ContentPart, ContentField, display drivers, placement.info) is powerful but verbose — defining even a simple content type touches several files across different concerns, and the learning curve before you're productive is steep. It's fundamentally a server-rendered Razor CMS at its core; using it headless or as a pure API backend means working against some of its defaults rather than with them. The repo itself is huge — hundreds of first-party modules in one solution — so a new contributor has to learn a lot of surface area before a small fix feels safe to make. Multi-tenancy and modularity both add real operational complexity (shell warmup, per-tenant recipes, feature dependency graphs) that a single-site project doesn't need and will pay for anyway if it picks this up.