The new site is built with Tailwind CSS and a much more user-friendly content management approach. One takeaway surprised even us: accepting a “crude but workable” content management experience because “we’re developers, we don't care” is rarely a good trade-off. A clean, easy-to-use setup simply makes everyone more effective, including developers.

The site management experience has also been refreshed to better match what you’d expect from a modern SaaS: clearer structure, smoother workflows, and less friction overall.

Our goal was a simple, straightforward UX that stays out of the way of the content — no unnecessary fluff, just clarity and focus.

Stay tuned for an in-depth case study!

Fun fact: the name "hajosnep", or properly written, "hajós nép" means "seafaring nation". Something that Hungary, being a landlocked country, definitely isn't. However, the site's name is a homage to the time when Hungary in fact was a seafaring nation, with ports on the Adriatic sea and a shipbuilding industry that launched not only merchant vessels but also submarines, cruisers, and even a battleship for World War I. Something that TIT HMHE members research with scientific rigor.

This project focused on renewing the association's long-running website by rebuilding it on Orchard Core and deploying it to DotNest. The goal was to modernize the visual design, improve usability across devices, and merge previously fragmented blog content into a single, maintainable system.

This case study was written by Ádám Jakab, software engineer at Lombiq, who also carried out the technical implementation of the project.

Why modernization was important

The original website was launched in 2010, originally built with PHP and a custom CMS, to share news, activities, media about the association, and information about NAVIGA ship model competitions. While the site evolved over time, it had not received a major redesign since 2012, when it was migrated to Orchard (1) CMS. The passing of time resulted in an outdated visual appearance and a lack of mobile-friendly design, which made modernization overdue. In addition, blog content was split between the website and an external blogging platform, blog.hu, making content management fragmented.

For a direct visual comparison, representative pages from the old (top) and renewed (bottom) websites are shown below.

Technical details

The project was approached as a renewal rather than a strict migration. Instead of attempting to recreate the previous Orchard 1 setup feature by feature, the focus was on rebuilding the site using Orchard Core's modern capabilities while preserving existing content where it made sense.

Starting point

To establish the core structure, the association's other website, lajtamonitor.hu (which also runs on DotNest), served as a proven foundation. Both sites utilize Orchard Core's built-in Blog recipe, providing ready-made content types for blogs, posts, pages, and tag-based taxonomy.

Most individual pages were built using the standard Page content type with an attached Flow Part. This allowed me to compose pages using multiple Liquid Widgets, with each widget representing a distinct section of the page. To ensure a consistent design, I used Lombiq's Base Theme, which provides reusable mixins and shared components that keep the styling maintainable.

Developing for DotNest

Building an Orchard Core application for DotNest primarily focuses on custom theme development. To achieve this, I used Lombiq's DotNest Core SDK, which is specifically designed for building themes and sites in a SaaS environment. Because DotNest is a restricted SaaS platform, I utilized Lombiq's Media Theme module. This allowed me to deploy the theme directly to the Media Library, giving me full control over the site's appearance while working within the platform's constraints.

Building on these foundations, the site's search functionality was implemented using Orchard Core's built-in Lucene during development, with Elasticsearch used in the production environment. To ensure a cohesive user experience, I applied consistent styling across the main search page, the blog search, and the various taxonomy-based results.

I also used custom Liquid templates and overrides to define the site's layout and content presentation. To manage static assets like SCSS, images, and JavaScript, I used Lombiq's NodeJS Extensions. This provided a modern asset pipeline with SCSS compilation, CSS minification, and npm dependency management, allowing me to easily integrate frontend libraries such as Swiper, Lightbox, and imagesLoaded.

As an example, here is the Swiper image gallery in action:

Key challenges and solutions

Developing for DotNest requires working within the platform's constraints, most notably the inability to use custom back-end C# code. To overcome this, the project was implemented entirely using built-in Orchard Core features, and Liquid templates, overrides and theme-level customizations. By using Liquid, I was able to handle complex tasks such as building dynamic breadcrumbs, managing resource injection, and creating sophisticated content, part, and field overrides. This project demonstrates that by using custom shapes and Orchard Core's flexible templating system, it is possible to achieve high-level functionality and design without the need for custom server-side logic.

Keeping accessibility in mind

Accessibility was an important consideration throughout the development of the site. The templates and layouts were implemented with semantic HTML, proper heading structure, sufficient color-contrast and keyboard-friendly navigation to support assistive technologies and improve overall usability.

To help ensure ongoing accessibility compliance, automated UI tests were added using Lombiq's UI Testing Toolbox. These tests integrate axe-core to validate pages against common accessibility rules and detect potential issues early during development. By running accessibility checks as part of the automated test suite, regressions can be identified quickly as the site evolves.

This approach helps maintain a consistent level of accessibility across the website while reducing the manual effort required to validate changes.

Migrating blog posts from blog.hu

A key part of the project was consolidating content from the association's external blog on blog.hu. Using the platform's export functionality and a custom-built Python script, I successfully migrated blog posts dating all the way back to 2010 into the new system.

The migration process involved several technical steps:

• Format Conversion: The original XML export from blog.hu was converted into an Orchard Core-compliant JSON recipe.

• Asset Management: I automated the download of all necessary images and files, migrating them into the new site's Media Library.

• URL Rewiring: To ensure a seamless transition and preserve SEO value, I rewired all content URLs and internal links to match the new structure.

By leveraging Orchard Core's recipe functionality and AI-assisted data transformation, I was able to preserve over a decade of history in a modern, unified format.

Future plans

At the time of writing, the website is primarily available in Hungarian. However, the site was built from the ground up with multilingual support in mind. The content structure and Liquid templates are fully compatible with Orchard Core’s localization features, allowing additional languages to be introduced without any structural or code changes.

An English version of the site is planned as the next major step. While the website already hosts a small number of English-language blog posts, extending full bilingual support will make the association’s research and nautical history work accessible to a much broader international audience.

Until then, here are few English blog posts for you to check out:

• https://hajosnep.hu/blog/book-about-the-history-of-the-yacht-rumija
• https://hajosnep.hu/blog/inspirations-japanese-naval-engineering-student-revives-long-forgotten-plans-for-the-steamship-nederland-of-1914
• https://hajosnep.hu/blog/the-success-of-scientific-activity
• https://hajosnep.hu/blog/inspirations-solving-the-puzzle-investigating-the-details-of-an-abandoned-project
• https://hajosnep.hu/blog/the-development-of-oceangoing-steamships-1840-1940

Summary

The renewed hajosnep.hu website now provides a modern, mobile-friendly platform for the association to share content, engage with the community, and showcase Hungary's maritime history. The site is fully maintainable, accessible, and prepared for future multilingual expansion, ensuring it can evolve alongside the association's needs for years to come.

If you are considering a website renewal or migration, especially on Orchard Core or DotNest, this project demonstrates how a robust theme foundation and an automated asset pipeline can help modernize even complex legacy sites in a maintainable and future-proof way.

In this case study, you’ll see how to create a user-friendly, visually engaging, and SEO-optimized marketing website that runs smoothly on DotNest, without the usual hosting headaches.

From Squarespace to Orchard Core

Judit already had a website on Squarespace, but she wanted a new, modern site that could better represent her services and brand, while offering more flexibility in design and features. She also had a free guide that she wanted to use as a lead magnet to convert visitors into subscribers as part of her marketing funnel.

Since her mailing system was running on MailerLite, she needed the subscription forms integrated directly into the website. Alongside these, she wanted several additional pages and a contact page where potential clients could easily get in touch. SEO was also important to her, and she wanted the entire site to remain simple and user-friendly to manage.

Designing the components: start in Magic Patterns, finish in Orchard Core

Judit already had a clear brand identity created by a graphic designer. However, there was no actual website design, so I needed to create one. Magic Patterns proved to be one of the best AI-based design tools for this. By providing prompts that described the brand’s visual style, including colors and typography, it was possible to generate a beautiful, on-brand website design. With the help of ChatGPT for crafting the prompt and Magic Patterns for design generation, we arrived at a look and structure that both Judit and I were happy with.

Magic Patterns generates a React application using Tailwind CSS for styling and Lucide for icons. These designs then needed to be adapted into Orchard Core templates. Each section of the generated design was translated into a Template item in Orchard Core, starting from the Layout template and continuing with widget-specific templates such as Section, Button, and Icon.

Pages and widgets with flexibility in mind

To bring the design to life, I created a set of modular content types that represented the core elements generated in Magic Patterns. The aim was not just to replicate the design but to build a flexible and reusable foundation that allows the site to grow and evolve.

For example, the Section widget includes four visual styles — two light and two dark. Instead of hardcoding these variations, the styling was made dynamic so Judit can switch between them directly in the admin interface. This makes it easy to experiment with colors and contrast while maintaining brand consistency across the site.

Each widget was built with reusability in mind. While the templates follow Shoogr’s unique visual identity, the underlying structures are generic enough to be applied to other projects. The Button widget, for instance, has fields for text, link, icon, and style type. These widgets could be reused across different websites or even serve as part of a shared recipe kit for quick project setup.

To keep the editing experience simple, key configuration fields were moved to the Properties tab. This keeps the Page and Flow editors organized.

Integrating subscriptions and contact forms

One of the key goals for Shoogr was to connect the website with MailerLite, which handles all newsletter subscriptions and lead magnets. MailerLite provides an embedded form that can easily be added through an Embed widget, making the integration simple and reliable. After a visitor subscribes, they receive a short automated email sequence. The first message directs them to a page on the Orchard Core site where they can download the lead magnet file stored in the Media Library. This way, the entire flow, from signup to content delivery, stays within the Orchard environment.

The contact page is powered by Orchard Core’s Forms and Workflows modules. A Google reCAPTCHA protects the form from spam submissions. Once the form is submitted, the workflow validates the input and sends an email notification to Judit.

To ensure compliance with privacy regulations, the site also uses the Lombiq Privacy module to display a consent banner and manage user consent consistently.

Optimizing for SEO

A marketing website like this can’t succeed without proper SEO configuration. Using the built-in SEO module, Judit could easily set page titles, meta descriptions, and Open Graph values such as featured images for each page.

The Sitemaps module was used to automatically generate a sitemap, which is also referenced in the site’s robots.txt.

To fine-tune the setup, I used Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to audit the site. It provided clear, actionable insights on what could be improved — and best of all, it’s free.

Hosting on DotNest with Cloudflare

There was never any doubt about where to host the website. DotNest, the largest Orchard Core SaaS platform, offered everything needed, including custom domain support and all the essential modules, even third-party ones.

The hosting experience was smooth and performant, which also benefits SEO. The DotNest documentation made it easy to connect the site with Cloudflare, handling the custom domain setup, CDN, and caching. Cloudflare adds another layer of performance optimization and security, helping ensure that Shoogr loads quickly and reliably for all visitors.

Summary

Shoogr is a small but complete example of how Orchard Core and DotNest can power modern marketing websites that are both visually engaging and technically solid. The project demonstrates how AI-assisted design, flexible content modeling, and a thoughtful editor experience can come together to create a fast, maintainable, and conversion-oriented marketing site.

Thanks to Orchard Core’s modularity and DotNest’s managed hosting, Judit now has a website that’s easy to update, scalable for future needs, and perfectly aligned with her brand.

If you’d like to build something similar, you can create your own Orchard Core site on DotNest and start experimenting right away.

Check out the new "Guided walkthrough" button on the homepage. If you click it, you'll get a site set up with the Walkthroughs module, without touching Orchard's setup screen. Useful if you've just begun learning Orchard, or if you want to help somebody get acquainted with its basics. And feel free to play around with it in any way you like, because such sites are deleted after 24 hours.

Let the walkthroughs begin!

We at Lombiq, the company behind DotNest, use AI tools in our day-to-day software development workflows all the time. However, we also know that you have to be very critical of the output these tools generate, and you have to use them wisely, otherwise they'll actually slow you down. We also don't like if the programs we need for our work try to force us to engage with their AI features: Please, we'll use your AI stuff if it's indeed worthwhile, but let us decide for ourselves, thanks.

So, we think about AI on DotNest in a similar way too: Here it is, we think it's cool, and feel free to use it if you'd like, but it's up to you. Keep in mind though, that this is currently experimental.

Mike Alhayek, who is an exceptionally active Orchard Core contributor, is active in his CrestApps - Orchard Core project too. This contains a wealth of AI features as part of its Artificial Intelligence Suite. Mike has demoed these as progress went on, and you can find the videos under the Lombiq YouTube channel. And now you can use them right from your DotNest site!

The features include support for all the major AI models that you can then use to manage the content or configuration of your Orchard Core site, or to simply chat with the model from the Orchard admin. Let's see how you can create a simple setup.

1. Go to your site's admin area, to Configuration → Features, and enable the following features (you can just tick the checkbox to their left, and enable all at once with Bulk Actions in the top-right):
   • AI Chat: To have a chat window on the admin.
   • AI Connection Management: This contains the basics of setting up connections to hosted AI models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or DeepSeek models.
   • Orchard Core AI Agent: Now, this is the actual secret sauce (well, as secret as something open-source can be). This is the feature that integrates the modules with Orchard Core, letting you manage your site with AI.
   • And one of the features that support a concrete model family. Let's go with "OpenAI Chat" for this demo.
2. You'll notice a new Artificial Intelligence item in the admin menu. Go to Provider Connections under it, then click Add Connection → OpenAI. Here, you need to set up a connection to an OpenAI model. We'll use DeepSeek for this example:
   • Technical Name: DeepSeek.
   • Display text: DeepSeek.
   • Deployment name: "deepseek-chat". This is important, because this points to the specific model of the provider. This value points to DeepSeek-V3-0324 as of writing this. DeepSeek also accepts "deepseek-reasoner", which points to DeepSeek-R1-0528. You can check out the current possible values in the DeepSeek docs.
   • Tick "Is default" for the sake of simplicity.
   • Endpoint: "https://api.deepseek.com/v1".
   • API key: You can create an API key on the DeepSeek Platform. Be sure to top up your account, even if it's just like $2.
3. You can now add a Profile. This will be the configuration for the model, and thus affect how the model behaves and what it can do. Go to the Profiles menu, then click Add Profile → OpenAI. First, let's check out the Content tab (you should also see a Capabilities tab at the top):
   • Display text: DeepSeek. You may notice a pattern here!
   • Technical Name: DeepSeek.
   • Deployment name: Default deployment.
   • Profile type: Chat. This will allow us to chat with the model from the admin.
   • Tick "Show on admin menu"
   • Everything else is not mandatory, but you can customize how the model will work for you.
4. Now you can go the Capabilities tab: Here is where the Orchard Core-specific, well, capabilities can be configured. These define what the models can do with the Orchard Core site, like managing content type and content items, turning features on or off, or managing users. Tick everything you're curious about and click Save!
5. There will be a new admin menu under Artificial Intelligence now, called DeepSeek. This is where you can chat with the mode. Enjoy!

For example, we can start by making the model praise DotNest!

These models are great sycophants. But something slightly more useful is cross-checking what it can do. This should match the Capabilities we selected under the Profile:

And then we can actually ask us to do things for us:

There's a lot more things possible to do here, but you get the idea. It's the power of AI, but it can also work for you right there in your app.

We also updated the SDK with the same modules, so you can use them to build your site locally too.

What will you use AI for on your own DotNest sites?

With this new integration, you can go to the Azure Portal, click "Create a resource", and from the search feature look for "DotNest" or "Orchard Core":

There, you can subscribe to the Free plan, and create an Azure resource for your site:

Once subscribed, you'll be able to create your site on dotnest.com by clicking the "Configure account now" button:

After that, you'll be able to create your site with the familiar site editor as usual:

Such sites function in exactly the same way as sites created right from dotnest.com. You get access to all the same features and pricing plans. Additionally, the site you created like this will be available as an Azure resource, just like other resources like virtual machines, Web App, SQL Server databases, or anything else. You can check it out by going back to the Azure Portal and browsing to the resource:

You can get to the site editor from the "Open SaaS Account on publisher’s site" link, or by opening the Site Management Dashboard on dotnest.com. And canceling the subscription on the Azure Portal deletes the site.

All of this makes it a lot easier for you to create and manage DotNest sites along your existing Azure services, and thus integrate DotNest-hosted sites into your infrastructure better. So, check it out on the Azure Portal!

Coming from version 1.8.3, it was a fairly large task as both .NET/ASP.NET Core and Orchard introduced tons of changes: Some of them breaking, but also a large number of bug fixes, improvements and new features. Version 2.0 was especially impactful, as it includes important changes under the hood that increase the overall performance and reliability of the whole application. We are thankful for the huge (and ongoing) community effort that went into these releases!

Besides making everything more stable and better overall, how does this affect you as a site owner/operator? There's no easy answer, because it depends on how your site is configured, but we encourage you to check out the Orchard Core 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 release notes. Here are some of the highlights:

• We disabled the Email feature on sites that do not send emails (e.g., for user registration, password recovery, workflow email activity) so it won't bother you. Please let us know if this happened on your site by mistake.
  
• The Twilio SMS provider is no longer enabled by default, so if you use it to send text messages, enable it under the SMS settings.
• Media Indexing is now split up into a handful of features specific to a file types, so enable those if you want to keep indexing PDF, plain text, and Office files.
• Improvement: Dashboard Widget stereotype makes it easier to create dashboards.
• New features:
  • Azure AI Search
  • User Localization (on the Admin Dashboard)
  • Secure Media Files give you control over how your media files are accessed.
  • URL Rewriting for improved SEO.
  • Workflow Trimming cleans up workflow instances beyond a specified retention period. This feature cannot be disabled and the retention period is maximized in 180 days.
• New workflow event: User Confirmed
• New permissions:
  • Disable Two-factor Authentication
  • Apply Theme
• Site Owner permission is deprecated, Administrator role is now a system role.
• Improved culture support in Liquid. Also see our tips on customizing the theme of your site.

How do you like this upgrade? Let us know in the comments below and thanks for using DotNest!

You'll get the familiar DotNest experience, nothing new to learn. There are a couple of notable improvements, though:

• You can now secure your account with two-factor authentication. Check it out here.
• The new site is much faster, you'll like it!
• And finally, you'll be prompted to update your password on the next login - just something we needed to migrate the accounts to the new site. All your data is intact, especially your sites, which had nothing to do with this migration anyway (they run in a different app).

Enjoy, and our case study is coming soon!

As most of what we at Lombiq do, this project is also open-source. If you’d like to follow along, you can have a look at the theme’s source code here.

This is a post by Márk Bartha, software engineer at Lombiq.

Introduction

GPU Day is a conference organized by the Wigner Scientific Computational Laboratory that focuses on massively parallel computing, visualization, and data analysis in both scientific and industrial applications. We also presented our Hastlayer .NET hardware accelerator project many times there too.

The website serves as an information hub for these annual conferences. It was initially running on Orchard 1 DotNest, but now it was time to migrate it to Orchard Core. While these migrations always come with certain challenges due to the new features introduced in Orchard Core, we tried to keep things easy by not changing the frontend of the site, even though it's somewhat outdated.

Rethinking content types

Each GPU Day event needed to display various types of information, such as the schedule, speakers, and location details. Previously, with Orchard 1, this process required creating separate content items for each type of information and then linking them using the Projection or Content Elements in the Layouts editor. However, Orchard Core offered a more streamlined approach and we could simplify it.

First, there was no real need for the option to organize the elements' position, so we didn’t just replace it with FlowPart. We used content fields instead, for example, the "About GPU Day" section is now just an HtmlField instead of a separate content item.

For organizing the event schedule, we introduced an Event Day content type to represent each day of the event, capturing its title and date. Additionally, we created an Event content type for each specific activity, detailing its time and other relevant information. There’s another content type called Event with their details along with the date and time of it. With all this information we were able to add a BagPart called Schedule to the GPU Day type and let the admins add Event Day items. Then, there was a query responsible for fetching all the Event items where their day matches with the one set to the Event Day item.

The Speaker items, similarly to the Event items, are managed separately, but we also use a Taxonomy called Year. It’s the same implementation we had on the Orchard 1 site: if the Year value matches with the one selected in the Year TaxonomyField on the GPUDay type, then a query can fetch the related speakers.

Migrating the old events

While we didn't utilize the migration utility, we still needed to transfer all the past events. Although there weren't many content items, recreating the events manually would have required us to also create all the speakers and scheduled programs, and there were around a hundred of them. Considering these events are already in the past, the easiest solution was to create a content type called Old GPU Day with an HtmlBodyPart and simply grab the markup from the live site. The only adjustments needed were to the image URLs. The relative paths were fine since we copied the entire media library, but in the old system, they were prefixed with "https://dotneststatic.com/”. We had to replace this with a Liquid media filter (e.g., https://dotneststatic.com/media/images/wigner-logo.png became {{ "~/mediatheme/images/wigner-logo.png" | href }}). Finally, we ensured that these are rendered exactly the same as the normal GPU Day items and that the queries listing the old events capture both the old and new ones, ensuring that a visitor won’t notice any discrepancies.

Keeping the original styling completely

Back then, the theme was originally built on a third-party template. We implemented multiple shape templates where the markup followed the original design. With the migration, we didn’t aim to overhaul or modernize the styling. We still wanted to use our NodeJS Extensions for asset compilation, though. So, we simply copied over the old .scss files along with the third-party assets and ensured they compiled, resulting in the same styling. It was more or less straightforward; however, we had to fix a few breaking changes with the new compiler, such as using math.div() instead of a slash (see more about this here).

To keep the markup as it was, we copied the original Liquid code into their corresponding templates. The Liquid code had to be modified since it is not entirely compatible with Orchard Core, which uses a different library and set of filters. For example, the {% Href "~/Themes/GpuDay.Theme/Images/wigner-logo.png" %} code was changed to {{ "~/mediatheme/images/wigner-logo.png" | href }}.

Lombiq modules and utilities involved

During development, the NodeJS Extensions utility proved invaluable, as it automatically compiles all assets during the build process. The Lombiq Media Theme is an ideal choice for developing a media theme for DotNest, compiling your templates and assets into a deployable package; refer to the documentation for further details. Lastly, we used the Lombiq Privacy module to ensure GDPR compliance.

Summary

Migrating old websites from Orchard to Orchard Core doesn’t have to be a huge hassle if you're willing to make some compromises. We were content to use the old markup and assets, and we managed to store the entire HTML markup of the old events in an HtmlField to keep the process simple and less labor-intensive. Ultimately, the admins can now enjoy the more user-friendly content editing capabilities of Orchard Core to create this year's GPU Day event – see what Balázs Kacskovics told us about it:

Our work became much easier with the new admin panel. With fewer menu items, it became much more transparent and intuitive than before. Now, finding the relevant options and content items is a simple task. Also, fewer content types mean less hassle for us, e.g. the editing of the new GPUDay content item is more efficient and less time-consuming, also we can make fewer mistakes with the new frame.

If you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to DotNest Core, this is an excellent time. Should you have any questions or encounter challenges don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We're always ready to bring our expertise to your unique project needs. Get in touch with us today, and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better!

You can create an Orchard Core site on DotNest any time for free. However, we offer some premium features too. The most popular paid feature is the ability to use a custom domain name (like example.com) with your DotNest site, instead of the default example.dotnest.net one. If you purchase that service for a whole year, then we give you a month for free. But now, to celebrate 10 years of us working together, for every new site you can have an additional 10% off of this yearly fee! Instead of $275, one year of custom domain usage now is only $248.

But this is not all. You can do a lot with your DotNest site, as you can see from the knowledge base. While we have everything documented, having a mentor for this, who gives you some guidance and a helping hand surely makes it easier. We've done this with many companies and individuals before, as you can see from our case studies. And now we'd be happy to help you, too: If you launch your new site, we'll provide you with one hour of expert one one-on-one consulting!

Do you want to launch your DotNest site and use this special offer? Be sure to do it before the end of March, because we'll have this in our birthday month only! Contact us to make use of this limited opportunity and we'll get you going.

We recently added the Lombiq Walkthroughs for Orchard Core module to the selection available to all DotNest sites. This module teaches you the Orchard Core fundamentals by guiding you through step-by-step tutorials right there on the Orchard Core admin. Popups and tooltips tell you what to look for and what to do, as well as they include links to further recommended resources. Check out a demo video of this module here.

And now you can use it right away on DotNest! Just create a new DotNest site, select the Walkthroughs recipe when running its setup, and you'll get a neat Orchard Core tutorial starting right on the homepage!

This is a post by Márk Bartha, software engineer at Lombiq.

Introduction

Show Orchard is an Orchard CMS showcase, displaying only the best Orchard Core and Orchard 1.x powered sites from around the web. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, now maintained by Lombiq Technologies. When we took over the project, we already implemented it on DotNest, but at that time it was an Orchard 1 site. Since DotNest fully supports Orchard Core, it was time to migrate it. However, since a lot has changed since Orchard 1, it required us to rethink a few widgets here and there, and also we had to take care of the existing content items.

Do you want to jump right into the code? You're lucky since the Media Theme-based theme of Show Orchard is open-source and available here!

Preparations

Creating a DotNest site is most efficiently done by utilizing the DotNest Core SDK. The SDK is an actual Orchard Core website that comes equipped with a preset of features and themes that are already available on DotNest. It also activates the Media Theme feature, a tool used for hosting your theme assets and templates conveniently in the Media Library. There’s also a handy utility known as the Media Theme Deployer that takes your Liquid templates from the Views folder and assets from the wwwroot folder, packaging them into a Media Theme recipe ready for import on DotNest. We used a fork of this SDK repository for our own DotNest sites and started to develop the theme as if it were a typical Orchard Core site, always mindful of the limitations.

Content types and UI components

The websites and their data (e.g., URL, developer name and contact, image, category) are stored using the Website content type. The AutoroutePart is attached for the friendly URL, and the HtmlBodyPart is included for the optional interview with the developer. The configuration of this content type, including the category taxonomy, aligns with the Orchard 1 version of the content type.

The header and the footer are implemented directly in the Layout.liquid file for simplicity. This approach has been effective, as it hasn’t required editing for years; if it did, we would have used a widget.

The menu is implemented utilizing the Menu feature and is displayed with the Menu shape. There is a specialized Categories menu that requires additional implementation. This menu lists all the terms from the Category taxonomy, each linking to a page displaying the corresponding content items. To accomplish this, we created a new menu item content type (the stereotype being MenuItem). We then used a Query to retrieve the Category taxonomy in the menu item's shape override, displaying the term items' display link.

The Queries feature proved invaluable for other components as well. For instance, the stepper on the Website content item detail pages and the listing of related Website items both leverage this feature to fetch the necessary content items.

Automated styling compilation

The original styling of the Show Orchard site was outdated. It was built on an old version of Bootstrap, utilized LESS for styling, and the classes didn’t follow our favored BEM conventions. To modernize and enhance the styling, we shifted to Bootstrap 5 and adopted Sass for styling. Lombiq’s Orchard Base Theme served as the foundation for the theme, offering helpful shapes, including the GoogleTag shape designed specifically for Google Analytics integration. Compilation of the assets was efficiently handled by Lombiq's Node.js Extensions utility.

Migrating Orchard 1 content items to Orchard Core

The Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature in the Helpful Extensions module proved to be extremely useful for this task. It’s a feature that adds a page to your Orchard Core website where you can import an Orchard 1 recipe, converting it into an Orchard Core recipe. However, there were a few challenges encountered. We had to create IOrchardContentConverter and IOrchardExportConverter implementations to address specific data needs. These providers are designed to extend the recipe converter logic with custom logic, either per imported content or after the whole export, to carry out additional tasks.

For us, it was essential to ensure the Category taxonomy terms were imported accurately, and their IDs were correctly assigned to the Category taxonomy fields. We also faced a task with the exported Media; in Orchard 1, Image and other content types represented a media item and had their ID referenced in Media Fields. In Orchard Core, it’s directly associated with a relative path to the media file. To address this, we used an IOrchardExportConverter to map the legacy IDs to the media paths and assign them to the new media fields. We decided against including the actual images with the media recipe step in the recipe, as it would result in a massive file size and a potential timeout. Uploading them manually to the appropriate Media Library folder wasn't a significant issue.

Conclusion

Though the Show Orchard website is simplistic in its design, migrating data and re-implementing various elements presented its own set of challenges. Nonetheless, we are pleased to announce that the site is now seamlessly operating on DotNest Core. Our next step is to transition all of our remaining DotNest sites to Core as well.

If you're considering migrating your Orchard 1 website to DotNest Core, this is an excellent time. Should you have any questions or encounter challenges don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We're always ready to bring our expertise to your unique project needs. Get in touch with us today, and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better!

The community recently released the latest 1.7 version of Orchard Core with several new features and additions! There's a new SMS and SMS Notifications module that provides a way to send SMS messages and notifications to users using SMS services. And by utilizing the new two-factor SMS Method feature, you can also transmit a two-factor authentication code to the user via SMS. And yes, this means that starting with version 1.7, Orchard Core is shipped with everything you need to secure your app with two-factor authentication.

The Lucene and Elasticsearch features are capable of searching within PDF files because PDF files are indexed by default. As an enhancement, we added a new feature called Media Indexing which extends the media indexing capability to also encompass searching within files with the following extensions .txt, .md, .docx, and .pptx. And we have a lot more to cover! Check out all the details of the release in the official release notes.

All of the DotNest sites can now use these new features, and the other improvements that the new version brings, because we upgraded the platform to Orchard Core 1.7 too. Actually, your site already used a pre-release version of 1.7 for a few weeks, due to us updating to it to get some bug fixes.

Enjoy the latest and greatest Orchard Core version! There shouldn't be any problems apart from this obscure one, but if you notice anything, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us via our support channels.

When it comes to the availability of a web app, we're talking about it serving users (requests) with correct results (i.e. not just error pages but what they're actually looking for) within some performance metrics (like if a page takes a minute to load then technically it's working but we consider the app unavailable). If it does this almost every time, then we can say it's reliable. What does this look like for DotNest?

You may already know that DotNest runs on Microsoft's cloud, Azure. We collect telemetry data about how the platform performs with the Azure feature Application Insights: It's quite a useful tool to see all kinds of metrics and charts about how fast DotNest is, whether there are any errors, and all kinds of details down to the individual requests. It also immediately notifies us if something is off, even if you don't notice anything wrong with your site! But for cases when you do notice, we also use Application Insights availability tests: This pings endpoints of the platform periodically, much like an ordinary user would, and verifies that they load correctly and within 30 seconds (this is the minimum threshold that's possible to configure). It does this from multiple locations around the world, so we can also know if there are network issues.

For DotNest, Azure pings the app every 5 minutes from 5 locations. A failure means that the request's response is incorrect or takes more than 30 seconds. If it fails once, then it'll try again within 20 seconds, and then once more again; the app is considered unavailable if it still fails on the third try. Here are the availability metrics of one of those endpoints for the Orchard Core sites for the last 3 months:

Yeah, that's 17 failing availability checks in 3 months! The tiny blip you may notice on the chart around mid-July was because of that; this was the only outage we had, for a total of 5 minutes. Sounds pretty reliable, right? All this translates to an availability of 99.99% which is something we're quite proud of being able to provide for you!

BTW the reason why checks from the East US region are the fastest is because the app is hosted in the East US data center of Azure. For the rest of the locations, it takes this much for the data to travel back and forth via the internet.

If you don't done it already and want to host your sites on the hugely reliable DotNest, create your site here! We also guarantee reliability in our Terms of Service.

Cloudflare is a great service that can sit in front of your site and make it a lot better by providing the following and a lot more:

• Automatically renewed SSL certificates so the communication between users and your site can't be eavesdropped. We already had secure connections for your sites forever, but this is even better.
• Speed up by utilizing Cloudflare's worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN). When a user visits your site, instead of their browser downloading the content directly from DotNest's servers, which are on the East coast of the US, they'll now download it from one of Cloudflare's close CDN nodes. This can make things a lot faster, especially if that content was already requested by somebody else from the area, thus making it available from the local node's cache.
• Security features, e.g. masking e-mail addresses from spam crawlers, defending against spam pots, and offering DDoS protection.

And all of this is now available for all DotNest sites! BTW if you used a custom domain, our recommendation has long been to use Cloudflare for that too.

Do you want to see for yourself how a DotNest site works together with Cloudflare? Create one here for free!

This is a post by Krisztián Németh, software engineer at Lombiq and project leader of DotNest.

Theme Conversion

Initially, the site had a custom theme written in the Liquid templating language and several templates added via the admin UI too. Our primary objective was to transform this into a Media Theme. First, we focused on maintaining the theme without altering the unique business logic derived from custom modifications in the Orchard Core Commerce source code.

Commerce Features Enhancement

As stewards for the Orchard Core Commerce project, we saw this migration as a perfect opportunity to enhance the product based on real-world feedback. We added local tax calculations, net-gross prices, integrated Stripe payments, and made other minor adjustments. These improvements and many more led to the release of versions 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 of Orchard Core Commerce. You can explore the changes and releases here. Like many other projects of ours Orchard Core Commerce also uses Node.js Extensions to handle assets, and Helpful Libraries to reduce boilerplate. And of course, as this site will be part of DotNest it uses the Privacy module also.

Adding the Commerce Feature on DotNest

DotNest Tenants Core didn't have the Commerce feature, so we added it and deployed it to be available for everyone who wants to create a custom site on DotNest with an Orchard Core tenant. So, feel free to do it, it's there, ready to use!

Adjustments and Additions

After the Media Theme was ready and the new Commerce features were implemented, it was time to adjust the view logic in the Liquid files, leading to some small modifications in the Commerce module. This was exactly the moment where it came in handy that we had a live scenario, so the Commerce module could be enhanced in a very close and fast feedback loop. The biggest challenge was to have the new Stripe payments feature included in the site's custom theme and also because of the changed business logic on how prices were calculated we had to adjust the view logic where it was needed to show prices, sum prices, and tax sums. This was done in three different areas: On the cart summary page, on the successful order page, and in the email template which is being sent after a successful order by a workflow.

Content Migration

Next, we moved the old content and data to the new system. We did it by exporting everything via recipes from the old site and then importing them to the new site locally. Changed some content type and content part-related settings and fields due to the fact that the old site had a bit different structure for products than we have now in Commerce. We used Helpful Extensions for the Page content type, which includes a Title Part, Autoroute Part, and Flow Part. We also used the Helpful Widgets from Helpful Extensions for its Liquid Widget and Html Widget content types. After everything was set a final export was done to be able to deploy that data to the staging environment of DotNest.

Localization

Finally, due to changes in shapes and the addition of parts and view elements in the Commerce module, we had to add Dutch translation to the site using PO files with the help of OrchardCoreContrib.PoExtractor and the Orchard Core documentation about localization.

Conclusion

All in all, the project stands as a successful case of website migration and customization, meeting unique demands.

Feeling inspired by the transformation of "Ik wil een taart" and ready to take your own Orchard Core website to the next level? You're in the right place! Try out the improved Orchard Core Commerce feature on a DotNest site today!

And, if you have any questions or are facing challenges similar to those we tackled in this project, don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We're always ready to bring our expertise to your unique project needs. Contact us today and let's start making your Orchard Core website even better!

This is a post by Krisztián Németh, software engineer at Lombiq and project leader of DotNest.

Introduction

Xero is an excellent financial management system; however, providing access to your Xero data is difficult. Xero4PowerBI, developed by Paradigm BI, a boutique business intelligence studio, offers a cost-effective multiplatform reporting system that enables fast-paced reporting on your financial status.

Paradigm BI specializes in creating insightful business intelligence tailored to your needs, making your Power BI dashboards and paginated reports work for you. Xero4PowerBI is Paradigm BI's tool that facilitates sharing financial information across your organization using bookmarks and alerts on desktop and mobile devices, creating datasets that Excel users can easily use in pivot tables and charts.

The Challenge

The original website of Xero4PowerBI was a simple 4-page HTML site that needed to be migrated to DotNest and Orchard Core. The goal was to create a modern, flexible, and easy-to-maintain website while preserving the existing design and functionality.

The Solution

Our team at Lombiq migrated the website to Orchard Core by creating the pages and templates, maintaining the original design while slightly modifying it to fit the new Orchard Core Media Theme. This allowed for a better and easier structure of zones, and we also added a simple footer.

The site now can be viewed at https://xero4powerbi.com/. We set it up using the Blank Orchard Core recipe and enabled various features that were needed for the site using a predefined recipe. Mainly Lombiq Helpful Extensions were utilized for creating the Page content type, consisting of a Title Part, Autoroute Part, and Flow Part. We also used the Lombiq Helpful Extensions - Helpful Widgets feature for Liquid Widget and Html Widget functionalities.

In addition to the existing site, we implemented a blog using the Orchard Core The Blog Theme as a template for blog-related content definitions. The Media Theme was exported via a zip file, created by the Media Theme deployer dotnet tool.

The Media Theme, a feature developed by Lombiq, allows developers to host their themes in the Orchard Core Media Library, including templates and assets. This feature is especially useful in SaaS scenarios where full Orchard theming cannot be provided to every user, yet the theming experience must remain available. Thus, this was our go-to solution for creating a custom theme and hosting the site on our Orchard Core SaaS DotNest.

The Results

The successful migration to DotNest Orchard Core provided Xero4PowerBI with a modern, easy-to-use website that met their requirements. The site now offers improved functionality, flexibility, and maintainability.

Mike Allen, Principal Consultant at Paradigm BI, shared his positive experience working with Lombiq for the migration:

In the past I have used WordPress, Blog Engine, and hybrid .NET Razor and Blog Engine. I selected Orchard Core as my new CMS as I wanted a modern .NET platform that incorporated a blog. Creating a theme seemed difficult, so I asked Lombiq for some help, and as they say, the rest is history. I wanted a mixture of different types of widgets so that I could do HTML or Markup and the flexibility to add new features to the website.

Mike Allen Services trades as Paradigm BI, a registered business name in Australia. Paradigm BI has developed Xero4PowerBI and initially had an Azure Static website. Paradigm BI is a boutique business intelligence ISV located in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Are you considering migrating your website to Orchard Core or looking to enhance your site's features? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us and let our expertise work for you!

If you had a subscription during the DotNest Core beta, using the old Orchard 1 custom domain usage service, then don't worry, your fees won't change.

For more info on how you can use your custom domains, see this knowledge base article.

This is a post by Zoltán Lehóczky from Lombiq, but about his personal website.

I'll spare you the suspense, here's my site if you'd like to check it out: https://lettersfromfiume.com/. As you can see, it's a blog with an About page, a search feature, and that's it. Exactly what I needed!

After creating the site, I've set it up with Orchard's built-in Blog recipe. Initially, I didn't actually want to customize anything. But then I started to fiddle around, because of course I couldn't resist adjusting some things:

1. By default, blog posts use Markdown for their editor. While I like Markdown, I thought that I'll publish more than simple text, what may necessitate adding some HTML to your Markdown anyway, so let's just start with a full HTML editor. Thus, I've added HTML Body Part to the Blog Post content type.
2. This change required me to override the Content__BlogPost and Content_Summary__BlogPost shapes to display the text, so I did that with the Templates module from the admin.
3. Now I wanted to add a favicon instead of the default one with the Orchard Core logo, and also add a tiny bit of CSS...

At this point, things were starting to get a bit messy on the admin, and I figured that if I'm writing code, I might as well write it properly, in an IDE. So, I thought I'll utilize the recently available Media Theme approach.

I followed the instructions in the DotNest Core SDK, ending up with a GitHub repository that contained an Orchard Core app with which I could run my site locally and create a proper Orchard Core theme for it. The theme is nothing too special, it used TheBlogTheme as its base theme, and contains a couple of shape overrides, a CSS file, and some graphic files. It also has a setup recipe with a snapshot of my site's content, so with the help of Orchard's Auto Setup feature, the site runs right away if I hit F5 in Visual Studio. One particularly cool feature of the whole development story is that it also uses a GitHub Actions workflow from Media Theme to automatically deploy the theme if I push to the repository. The changes are out on the production site less than 30s after I've pushed!

The code is fully open-source, and you can check it out here for some inspiration.

Later, I also added a search feature with Elasticsearch. This was just a matter of running Orchard's built-in "Blog - Elasticsearch Search" recipe.

Overall, this was pretty straightforward. I quite enjoyed getting this little site up and running and customizing it here and there. Of course, it just scratches the surface of what DotNest can do, but this is what I needed.

You can also have your own Orchard Core site running hassle-free on DotNest, create one here!

To get your free Orchard Core DotNest site, just open the usual site creation screen here, and select Orchard Core as the Orchard Edition. You'll get the full power of Orchard Core right away! Check out the knowledge base to see what you can do on DotNest.

Note that you can't yet delete an Orchard Core site or use a custom domain with it in a self-service manner. However, both are coming, and if you'd like to use your custom domain right now, just let us know and we can set it up.

Are you ready for the easiest Orchard Core hosting ever? Create your site here!