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!)

If you run a local Orchard community website or want to launch one there's some good news for you: on DotNest there's a built-in theme for you as well as the treat that you don't need to pay for custom domain usage! Abhishek Luv (Indian Orchard community member and Orchard Dojo Trainer) asked us about moving the Orchard Project India website to DotNest. So we added the freshly released Orchard Community Theme to the DotNest selection: If you run an Orchard community site (like we do it ourselves with Orchard Hungary) then get in touch with us and we'll enable the theme for you as well as you'll get to use your custom domain with your site for free. So where is your local Orchard community?

After some other recent improvements theming a DotNest site is now even closer to writing standard Orchard themes: with some complicated fixes around how URLs are handled (you don't want to know details, trust me!) writing a Media Theme is now a lot better experience. Templates and URL helpers in them will behave like you're used to, not to mention they will work in the same way locally during development as on DotNest. So go on and write a theme for that DotNest site of yours!

As you surely know you have complete control over theming your DotNest site, including using custom templates written in the Liquid language. The latter got some important updates now: If you have errors in your template then it will be shown in place of the template and also logged with the Reports feature (which entries you can view from your site's admin). No more ugly generic error pages, you'll know in an instant if something went wrong with the template. You can now select if a template is rendered on the frontend, the admin or both. Media Themes that you can deploy from source control will behave like a standard theme and thus their templates will be only active for the frontend. Before this they were also displayed on the admin which caused quite some confusion. So do some theming!

As you may have heard, Ryan Drew Burnett, the guy behind Show Orchard released a new theme aimed mainly at blogs, Bindery. Good news! Thanks to Ryan the theme is now also available on all DotNest sites! What's more it seems that this theme will be just the first in a series of themes developed by Ryan and offered on DotNest, so stay tuned. For now you can also check out the theme in action on its demo site. Create a DotNest site for free and you can start writing your own blog with Bindery!

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!

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

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

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!