As promised, Project Orchard reached with Alpha milestone just now with the downloads available at http://orchard.codeplex.com

Among the features included in this release

• The core module API is mostly baked
• Data migrations for updating database schema on module activation and upgrade between versions of modules
• Basic command-line scaffolding of modules and data migrations
• Dynamic compilation of module source, for notepad-style development
  • Defining custom content types, parts, and fields
  • Define new content types (admin panel or code)
  • Add fields to content types (admin panel or code)
  • Associate content parts to types (admin panel or code)
  • Add fields or parts to existing content types (admin panel or code)
• Packaging and installing modules (as zip files) – can include source, binaries, or both
• Sharing modules via an ATOM feed (to be exposed on OrchardProject.net), and installing from the feed using a new “Gallery” module
• Enabling, disabling, and upgrading module features and their dependencies (admin panel or command-line)
• Search
• Localization support for both the Orchard application and database-driven content items
• Azure support
• Multi-tenancy support
• Interactive command-line support for many administrative tasks
• Some basic reporting/logging functionality
• Everything from previous Mix release: pages, blogs, comments, tags, users/roles, media, menu navigation, and basic theme support