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!