title: Building a site with Orchard CMS
body: <p>I'm in the early stages of trying to learn Orchard, and I'm still seem to be struggling with the basics on how to build a page containing a multitude of various content that can be easily managed by non-technical users.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally, what I'm trying to do is the following, I just can't figure out how to fit it into the Orchard architecture using Content Types, Parts, Fields, Widgets, Zones, etc.  Also, since I'm still learning, I'm also trying to avoid any custom modules, or hard-coding content into the site (though I'm open to the idea, if that's the best way to get it done!).</p>
  
  <p>Goal: Create a "home page" layout containing a Menu, Image slideshow, and several feature descriptions.  For each image in the slideshow, I need a title, sub-title, description, and an image.  To make this easy for non-technical users to manage, I would like to define the HTML template (custom Content Type, Part, or whatever), and allow authors to specify just those well-defined properties.  I tried using Content Parts for this, but unfortunately, I can only have one Content Part of a particular type on a piece of Content.  I also saw recommendations to create multiple Content Parts with the same set of properties, but I don't know how many images will be displayed (and I don't want to assign an arbitrary number).</p>
  
  <p>I need to do something similar for feature descriptions, allowing authors to specify an image, title, description, and a page to link to.  I'm running into the same problem as above, I'm not sure how to allow authors to specify a finite list of content, but have each content item be well-defined.</p>
  
  <p>So far, the best option appears to be creating some sort of custom widget to "host" the content, but for some reason, my gut tells me that creating a custom layer for a single page just to specify which content to display is abusing the purpose of layers, which is begin able to customize a particular layout based on some criteria (whether or not the user is authenticated, for example).</p>
  
  <p>I hope that made sense, and I apologize that it took so many words to explain my issue, I've just really reached my peak of frustration, and although I think that the Orchard guys definitely have it figured out in terms of architecture, I just can't get past these seemingly simple problems to build a simple website.</p>
  
  <p>I greatly appreciate any tips, suggestions, advice this community has to offer!</p>
  
  <p>TIA, -Jeremy</p>