Most of the time you don't just want to have a website standing alone but you also want to hook it up with other services, social media integrations being the most basic example. Now we added the Feed Aggregator module to give you more options: It allows you to automatically sync content from RSS and Atom feeds to your DotNest site. So if you want to import content from other blogs, embed images from a remote image gallery or list videos from a YouTube channel, now you can do this easily. The new module also runs Orchard Blogs: Think of it as your Orchard-related feed reader. It automatically syncs blog posts from the Orchard blogosphere. So go ahead, create a DotNest site and check out how to sync some feeds!

Algolia is a pretty neat hosted indexing/search service, it's a bit like Lucene in the cloud, but extremely fast. Now it's available for all DotNest sites! Lombiq created the Orchard Algolia Search module, so now using Algolia search in Orchard is just a matter of installing and configuring a module. This module is also available now on DotNest, so you just need an Algolia registration to start! So if you want to play with the module, just create a free DotNest site! Oh, and what if you're even lazier then this? Then check out the Orchard Algolia Search Demo site here on DotNest!

As you surely know there are a variety of options to theme your DotNest site, including going hardcore and writing templates with Liquid markup. Now if you're among those hardcore developers who want to write code even for their DotNest sites, good news: Liquid just good a lot smarter! The Liquid Markup module is available on all DotNest sites and it enables you to create templates either from the admin or deploying them from source control (see who this works on the Writing a theme from scratch Knowledge Base article). In these template you can use the Liquid Markup language, which is a bit more restrictive than e.g. Razor what you may usually work with when developing Orchard. However still it's quite powerful and now we have the following new features: Variables, not just fixed strings can be used when passing parameters to tags. So e.g. you can create a custom dynamic title for your pages. Accessing items of collections in the view model are now supported. E.g. from a template now you can selectively display the second and third image attached to a content item, not just the first one as before. The antiforgery token can now be displayed so you can write completely custom forms. Orchard-aware relative links can be easily constructed, so you can construct dynamic URLs that will work in any environment. Custom link and meta tags can be registered. This way e.g. you can add multiple shortcut icons for your site or add custom meta tags for Facebook sharing. Custom CSS classes can be added to shapes to improve how you can style those elements. Furthermore CSS classes can now also be added to the HTML document. For the whole list of features and examples covering every scenario take a look at the module's Readme. So brush up your Liquid skills and start coding!

Three new modules arrived to all DotNest sites today to allow your users to vote content up/down and mark them as their favorite! Namely, these modules are now available on DotNest: Favorite by Nick Mayne: users can mark content items as their favorite. Vote Up/Down by Nick Mayne: users can vote content items up/down with arrows to show if whether they like it. Voting API by Sebastien Ros: provides basic voting-related services that are used by the Favorite and Vote Up/Down modules. So this should cover a lot of voting-related interactions you'd like to provide to your users. Let's decide with a vote!

It's not a bad thing if your website is actually used by people. And now on DotNest you have the tools to improve your user's experience and make them feel home with custom profiles and avatars! For this we just added two modules, available on all DotNest sites: Profile: this is the module that allows your users to have their own profiles. By editing the User content type you can add fields like "bio" which are then editable by everyone for themselves. Avatars: the Avatars module builds on the Profile module and lets your users upload avatars (profile pictures). These can then be displayed under their contributions. E.g. blog posts' author profiles will be linked from posts, where their avatar will be also displayed. With these we now have you better covered, so create your social DotNest site for free!

We constantly strive to make DotNest even better for you. So if you give us some feedback, we'll gladly listen. This time we listened to three enthusiastic DotNest users and thus added three new extensions to the DotNest selection! Lombiq Fields module: adds some useful content fields, including Media Library Upload Field so Media items can be uploaded attached to content items and the Money Field to store money amounts. You can also see the module in action in the Orchard Communtiy Meeting's podcast. Social Meta Tags module: adds meta tags for various social networks (Open Graph Tags for Facebook/Google/Pinterest/LinkedIn and Twitter Card Tags) and Google Authorship tags. PJS.Bootstrap theme: a great theme by Philip Senechal. Create your DotNest site for free and try out these new features!