Migrating the content of an old version of an Orchard Core website with a custom theme and with modifications in the business logic of the Orchard Core Commerce module to DotNest? Yes, it is possible! This case study explores how we achieved this with Ik wil een taart, a confectionery in the Netherlands, by migrating the content of the website running on the RC2 version of Orchard Core to the latest one, on DotNest. The site is a client of Princen group, which is a Dutch company, specialized in web development since 1992, offering secure, user-friendly, and scalable digital solutions. 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!

Do you have a simple static website that you want to spice up with proper content management? Orchard Core is a CMS that you can quickly migrate to, and DotNest can host it with two clicks. This is what we did for Xero4PowerBI too! 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!

Do you want to host an Orchard Core site on DotNest for your company, club, NGO, or otherwise do you want to use something like mysite.com for it? Now, this is available!For just $25/month, you can not only use your custom domain instead of the default mysite.dotnest.net one, but you can also remove the DotNest footer from it. Unlimited customization for your Orchard Core site! If you run an open-source project that you'd like to host your site for, then let us know, because we can provide you this service for free. 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.

You have quite a lot of options if you want to start a personal website, or something like a blog nowadays. You can use services like Medium or Substack, but my problem with those is that ultimately, you don't have complete control over how your content is published and how people may consume it. Monetization wasn't my concern either. I wanted something simple, where I can be sure that people will be able to read my quips without any of the contemporary online marketing tools intruding (hello, profiling and soft paywalls!). Having been an Orchard developer for more than a decade, perhaps let's just use Orchard Core for this too? So, I quickly created a DotNest site and got going. 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: 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. 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. 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!

Back in 2021 we announced the beta of the Orchard Core edition of DotNest. Since then, both Orchard Core and the DotNest platform matured a lot, and we added much-demanded features for e-commerce and theming. You could get Orchard Core sites on DotNest, of course, but not in a completely self-service manner. This has now changed, and creating Orchard Core sites is just two clicks! 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!

When you run your Orchard Core site on DotNest, there are some limitations that you need to keep in mind. These are inherent to the multi-tenant nature of DotNest: We can provide you with super-simple, fast, convenient Orchard Core hosting because when you set up your site, you'll get a slot in the same app as everyone else. We always want to push boundaries though. So now, we introduce full theming for your DotNest sites with Media Theme! The Media Theme concept is about storing a kind-of-theme in the Media Library (but still safely, so nobody can see your code). What matters more for you though, is that with this, you can now create proper Orchard Core themes in your favorite IDE with Liquid templates and all the client-side web technologies. And when you're finished, you can deploy it from the command line or a CI build automatically to your DotNest site! Here we also have a quick demo of how this works. Also, check out the DotNest Core SDK: You have all the instructions there to have a local development environment ready, to work on your site locally as you'd on any Orchard Core app, and then to deploy it to DotNest. We're also working on a couple of case studies since there are some sites we're already created with this new approach. Would you like to run your Orchard Core site on DotNest? Sign up for the beta! (We'll soon be out of beta, promise!)

While for a little bit more DotNest Core remains in beta, we've continuously worked on improving the platform. Keeping up to date with the latest Orchard Core releases, adding smaller new features, improving the hosting story so we can provide a more reliable platform for you... But now we have a big new feature to announce: Orchard Core Commerce, the e-commerce solution for Orchard Core, is now available on all DotNest sites! Orchard Core Commerce was initially started by community member Bertrand le Roy, and over time, it was gradually improved by its growing community. We announced in May, that, after a request from Bertrand, we'll provide stewardship for the project, meaning code contributions, reviews, and general oversight. Since then, we've worked towards an MVP feature set. Now Orchard Core Commerce is a basic, but already quite feature-rich e-commerce solution, offering a product catalog, shopping cart, and Stripe payment integration. Now if you have a DotNest site, you can start using Orchard Core Commerce, and building your Orchard Core-based e-commerce site for free! And if you don't have one, just take 45 seconds to sign up for the beta here, and we'll unlock a new site for you soon!

Orchard Core, the next edition of Orchard CMS built on .NET Core/.NET 5 reached v1.0 last week. This is then probably the best time to build the Orchard Core version of DotNest - which is here! DotNest Core is a complete redevelopment of the DotNest platform, all on the latest version of Orchard Core. We've been running it with a couple of select few customers for a while now and it's time to open it up a bit more. While you can't yet just simply create an Orchard Core-based DotNest site, you can sign up for our limited beta here. You'll soon be able to get a fully functional, reliably hosted Orchard Core site on DotNest where you can build your personal website or something to showcase your Orchard skills with. Sign up for the beta and get your hosted Orchard Core site for free!

Updates are not always flashy spectacular new features - sometimes they're just things that work the best if you don't even notice them. In the last months we've deployed a lot of these (hope you didn't notice!), so let's quickly see what we've been working on to make DotNest better for you! Infrastructure improvements DotNest, as the biggest multi-tenant Orchard installation out there, is sometimes not simple to operate. During the last few months, we've worked through fixing several randomly occurring problems one by one. These caused service interruptions before, but they won't anymore! We've also implemented an ultimate failsafe which will be triggered when everything else fails, bringing the platform back to life within a few minutes even if things go very, very south. Safer payments with PSD 2 You may have heard of the new EU Payment Service Directive, i.e. PSD 2. Its point is, among others, to make card payments (and financial services in general) safer. To make this a reality it requires online merchants accepting card payments, like DotNest, to implement a revised payment flow. We're among the elite club of services who have indeed done this until the official deadline of 14 September, with the help of our payment processor Braintree. You may notice that the payments area of DotNest got a little bit nicer on the side as well. We hope you continue to use DotNest and if you find any issues just let us know!

It's always great to see when the technologies developed by us are serving scientific research, something we at Lombiq are quite keen on. This time Orchard and DotNest proved to be useful for the Virtual Photonics Technology Initiative, who work on open-source computational (virtual) technologies for the Biomedical Optics community. So let's see what they have built! This is a guest post by Lisa Malenfant, Specialist at the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic, who developed the original and the new DotNest sites as well. The Virtual Photonics project website is a portal into our resources. We manage Open Source software that is hosted on GitHub and distributed via NuGet. We have several applications that use our core library, which are also available on GitHub. We have extensive documentation for using the software and the applications. Every year, we host a short course and after the event we make the education materials available online. The Virtual Photonics Technology Initiative was established in April 2008 and the first project website was created and launched in 2009 using one of the first versions of Orchard CMS. We customized one of the basic themes and created a simple website that served us well for the past 10 years. We discovered DotNest while searching for a replacement solution for our WikiMedia based education site that had become difficult to maintain. We created a site on DotNest and selected the PJS.ReTouch theme. We then started to migrate the content from the existing site: We had 9 years of content from 3 workshops and 6 short courses that we have hosted over the past 10 years. Although the migration was a manual process, we were able to simply cut and paste the content over to new pages created in Orchard. The theme was responsive and clean, but it was very different from the theme on our project site. We were initially only looking to find hosting for our education site but since the process was so straight-forward and our existing site was already using Orchard CMS, we wanted to see what it would take to migrate our project site to DotNest also. We created a second DotNest site and then researched how to customize existing themes. All that was needed to create an identical Orchard site was to enable the “Theme Override” module, select the empty theme, add all the image assets and then drop the stylesheet into the style section of the Theme Override Settings. The stylesheet needed updating with the new image paths but that was the only required change. Our existing project site was not responsive so once we had recreated the existing design we worked on making our site responsive. We added jQuery to the Head script URLs section of the Theme Override Settings and created a jQuery and CSS hamburger menu for small screens. We placed the JQuery code in the Custom head script section along with code to add a meta tag to enable responsive behavior: $('head').append('<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">'); Our project site does not have many pages, so we decided to recreate the content manually to allow us to update all links and content. Once the project site was built, we were able to take the styles, hamburger code, and images and create an identical looking education site. Although our site looks like a single website it is 2 sites working seamlessly together. Are you working in academia as well, and are looking to host course or research group websites? Create one on DotNest and let us know if you miss something!