We have recently updated DotNest with a few general performance improvements and two new modules (that actually work even better together) adding cool features to your DotNest sites: Forum and Watcher! The Forum module (created by Nick Mayne) filled a huge gap in the module ecosystem of Orchard, giving you the ability to create Forums for your site. The content structure is pretty straightforward: Forums at the top, which contain Threads, which contain Posts. Of course these 3 levels of content are actually driven by their individual content parts, so you can create your custom content types and configure a chain between them, just like the default one. "Post" also supports various flavors for editing (html, markdown, etc.). The Watcher module (created by Lombiq) is a Workflows-integrated module that enables you to watch/unwatch content items. After configuring email notifications (as described in the readme), users can receive notifications when content items they are watching are changed/created (depending on the workflow configuration). The neat thing here is that this process bubbles up to a maximum of 3 levels in the content-container structure, meaning that you can configure a workflow to send a notification when a new Post was added to a Thread, even if the user is watching the parent Forum of the mentioned Thread (and not the Thread itself, for example). Stay tuned for further updates! Here's a sneak peek: We'll soon a release an extensive case-study, describing the heavily customized content and permission configuration of an actual DotNest website. Orchard 1.8.2/1.9 was just released a few hours ago, so we'll go ahead and test it to make sure it's working great with DotNest - after that you will be able to enjoy the fixes, improvements and new features of the latest Orchard version on your DotNest sites!

Ever wanted to see colorful interactive charts about your DotNest sites' usage that you can pan around and impress your coworkers, clients with? Now it's here, and it's not just cool but also very useful: Azure Application Insights. With Azure Application Insights you can measure your sites' performance, collect all kinds of usage data and even see client-side errors. So no more JavaScript errors that go undetected! What's more, using Azure Application Insights is free and also all DotNest sites just got it for free too! Check out how to use it. The Application Insights integration on DotNest uses our Application Insights Orchard module, which you can install to any custom Orchard app too.

Until now if you wanted to use your own domain names with your DotNest sites you had to go with monthly payments. Listening to our beloved customers we implemented yearly payments, giving you a much more convenient option! And not just that: if you pay yearly you'll get one month of custom domain usage for FREE! So have you registered your domain yet?

You could access your DotNest sites securely through HTTPS from day 1; however, this required you to use a custom port. E.g. when accessing your site "mysite.dotnest.com" securely you would have used the URL "https://mysite.dotnest.com:8443" with that ugly "8443" at the end. But not any more! All DotNest sites can now be accessed securely without using a custom port, as it would be natural, e.g. like "https://mysite.dotnest.com". Much more convenient, as this doesn't require you to do anything special. Don't be afraid if you have links pointing to the old URLs: those will get automatically redirected to the new ones!

We've announced yesterday on the community meeting a new "feature" of DotNest (which is actually available for a little while now): localization packages. We've added the translation files of built-in modules for the following languages: French (fr-FR), Italian (it-IT), Russian (ru-RU), Simplified Chinese (zh-CN), Spanish (es-ES) and Hungarian (hu-HU). You can change the localization settings of your tenants under on the Settings page. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the translations!

When hearing about DotNest and trying it for the first time, you must have a lot of questions about it and its capabilities. Our fellow Orchard Dojo trainer, Abhishek Luv is here to answer them with a series of video tutorials! Currently there are 3 of them (introduction, tenant management, Theme Override), but there are more to come, so stay tuned!

You probably heard about Try Orchard!: it's a free service where you can test drive Orchard on demo sites, without having to register, download or set up anything. Now Try Orchard! just got smarter with an Orchard walkthrough. When you visit a Try Orchard! demo site you'll be greeted by a tooltip that offers you a guided, interactive walkthrough showing you how to use the basic features of Orchard: publishing pages and blog posts, commenting, user management... This way newcomers will get a glimpse of using Orchard, without reading any documentation or getting any help or training. By the way Try Orchard! is also featured in the official Orchard documentation and on Orchard Beginner. Enjoy your walkthrough!

We're pleased to announce a brand new DotNest site that will be a massive help for Orchard newcomers: Orchard Beginner! Orchard Beginner really aims to help those who're just starting with Orchard. The site's content is still being expanded rapidly but it already gives Orchard rookies some very essential guidelines. Orchard Beginner is maintained by the well-known Orchard Dojo trainer Abhishek Luv!

So what if you're a total newcomer to Orchard but want to see it in action, without having to download, install, set up anything or signing up anywhere (not even DotNest)? You can Try Orchard! Try Orchard is just a quick prototype right now, but you can see that it's a set of periodically re-installed DotNest tenants that you can play with. There is also a possibility to have an interactive walk-through for users to get an overview of Orchard, as you can see from the three inline popups that greet you. You can also see a demo of the demo site (yes :-)) on the recording of the weekly Orchard Community Meeting, although screen sharing didn't work for the first half. So Try Orchard! is just in its infancy but it works! Now if you want to convince your buddy to take a look at this awesome CMS just tell them to Try Orchard!

BindTuning, a well-known company of theme designers and web developers from Portugal contributed some of their themes so that they are available to DotNest users for free! Metro: a theme with clean and elegant design, following the principles of the Modern UI. Terra: clean and flexible design with a pastel color palette. The Bootstrap Theme: this is the theme for you if you're looking for a basic Bootstrap theme. You can customize TheBootstrapTheme for free at http://bindtuning.com, creating a personalized theme that adjusts to your branding. Since it's a free theme, you can create unlimited customizations of this theme at no cost. Go ahead and customize your DotNest site even further! Happy Orcharding,the DotNest Guys