We have released two Bootstrap-based themes that are available for every DotNest site for free: Philip Senechal, the well-known Orchard theme development professional and freelancer known for his cool Boostrap-based themes provided us with updated, Orchard 1.8-compatible versions for two of his themes: ReTouch: a multi-purpose theme with modern and clean design. FlatJack: a nicely customizable theme with options for selecting dark or light environment and different accent colors. Go ahead and customize your DotNest site! Happy Orcharding,the DotNest Guys

As you may know, all DotNest sites have the Combinator module enabled (and configured) by default. This module automatically bundles and minifies static resources (like stylesheets and script files) to enhance client-side performance. Now Combinator got a lot faster with a feature called resource sharing. Resource sharing enables tenants in a multi-tenant Orchard application (like DotNest) to share processed resources with each other through the Default tenant. This means that if a resource was already processed for any of the tenants all other tenants will just use that without having to re-process it. In practice this means that e.g. admin pages will load much faster for tenants the first time: you don't have to wait for Combinator to process the resources (unless you're the first one to look at that page) since they will just be fetched from the shared location. So how much time did we manage to save you?

The Preview phase of DotNest ends today. We're very excited to take DotNest to the next level, because we really strive to provide an awesome Orchard SaaS for you! The end of the Preview also means that custom domain usage is not free anymore. But we value that you were among the early adopters of DotNest: so as we promised everybody who is already registered on DotNest as of today still gets custom usage free for three months! Please send us an e-mail to guys at dotnest dot com and we'll set up your custom domain usage. Let's keep your DotNest sites going!

Until now you could only theme your DotNest site by using stylesheets. But now these dark days are over! We present you the power of Liquid Markup templates! What is Liquid? Liquid Markup is a templating language specifically developed for being able to write safe templates. It's "safe" because you can't just write arbitrary C# code, thus potentially endangering other tenants. But you wouldn't want to do that anyway, right? By making the Orchard Liquid Markup module available for all DotNest sites as of today you get an option to write templates from the admin site using Liquid, through the built-in Templates modules. These templates are then used just as normal shape templates. And not only this but you can add templates to your Media Theme (just files with the .liquid file format) and when the theme is deployed the templates will be deployed as well! There are constraints on what you can achieve from Liquid templates of course but it should be more than sufficient for theming your site. Also you have the power of Orchard shape composition at your hand too: go and read the readme on what power you can unlock! Also since the module was demoed on the weekly Orchard meeting you can watch iT in action in the recorded video (from 41:47). Oh, and by the way we also updated Orchard to the latest 1.8.x version so your site is now living on the bleeding edge! (Don't worry, we tested everything thoroughly.) Let's go and theme the heck out of that site of yours!

Client-side performance matters - of course. That's why we optimized DotNest to be fast out of the box not just when work is done on the server but also on the client-side. For example the Combinator module is enabled and configured on all sites by default to give CSS and JS bundling and minifications. All static resources are served from a cookie-less (practically a CDN) endpoint (dotneststatic.com). And some more tricks... YSlow is a very easy to use tool to get some metrics about the client-side performance of a site. The tool measures performance on a 1-100 scale, 100 being the best. Out of the box a freshly created DotNest tenant has a YSlow score of 98! This hardly gets any better. See the screenshot below! Don't take our word for it, check it out yourself!

As you all surely know, the third Orchard Harvest conference will be between 9-11 June in Seattle. If you attend (or watch the recordings later) you'll be able to also hear about what's under the hood of DotNest in our "Building an Orchard SaaS - DotNest" talk. We'll share the experiences of building and operating DotNest so you can make your own Orchard web apps better. See you at Harvest!

Search engine optimization (i.e. tuning your site to be on top of Google pages) is not so "in" than a few years back, but it still matters a lot, and not just for search engines, but for the general user experience. We added the SEO module by Onestop to DotNest, available to everybody! You can use the SEO module to fine-tune your home page, automatically generate suitable titles for pages using tokens or manually setting the title and description for a specific page. Most importantly even if you just enable the SEO module it will at least reverse the order of title segments: Orchard by default uses the "[site name] - [page title]" pattern for titles but much better is to start with the page title since this is what visitors care about. The SEO module was not compatible with the latest Orchard version what DotNest uses so we had to make some upgrades in a fork: we made it compatible with Orchard 1.8 and migrated the content parts to use infoset storage so it runs much faster. If you were using Onestop.Seo before there is also an Upgrade feature that you just have to enable to migrate all of the module's site settings to infoset storage when you upgrade it. Since we use Mercurial for source control we've also created an open Mercurial repository for the upgraded module. Now go and optimize the hell out of your site!

As you may know from the relevant Knowledge Base page output caching for DotNest sites are managed by a reverse proxy: this means that a server is sitting in front of DotNest, caching pages and serving cached pages instantly. This proxy cache now got smarter: by utilizing the services of the built-in OutputCache module cache entries are now evicted immediately if a change is published! Caching still happens on the proxy, but now if you e.g. publish a new blogpost then all the relevant cache entries are cleared so your users can see the change instantly! Best of both worlds!

Orchard Harvest is only a little more than a month from now and we are proud to announce that we have a new DotNest site to showcase related to that: the website of the Orchard Spring Harvest Challenge! The Orchard Spring Harvest Challenge is a module development competition with Orchard 1.8 compatibility in its center. For more information please visit the event's website. Do you want your site to be featured? Just get in touch with us!

In the series of featured DotNest sites we intend to give some publicity to the nicest DotNest sites: starting with Native Hungarian! Native Hungarian is a blog (with lots of own photos) about Hungarian (Eastern-Central Europe) every day. Yes, that country that managed to produce the Rubik's Cube (and where the inhabitants like to eat their food with paprika). All this published by a Hungarian photographer and arts student, Zita Gyurokovics. Through the lens of Zita's camera you can get a bit closer to Hungary if you ever wondered how life is going there. Maybe also fancy a visit? Check out the blog to find out! Do you want your site to be featured? Just get in touch with us!