DotNest has been available in the Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource for quite a while. Both of these marketplaces are for people looking for Microsoft-adjacent technologies, and you could discover DotNest there. However, until now, you couldn't actually create and manage DotNest sites within the Azure Portal. But now you can!With this new integration, you can go to the Azure Portal, click "Create a resource", and from the search feature look for "DotNest" or "Orchard Core": There, you can subscribe to the Free plan, and create an Azure resource for your site:Once subscribed, you'll be able to create your site on dotnest.com by clicking the "Configure account now" button: After that, you'll be able to create your site with the familiar site editor as usual: Such sites function in exactly the same way as sites created right from dotnest.com. You get access to all the same features and pricing plans. Additionally, the site you created like this will be available as an Azure resource, just like other resources like virtual machines, Web App, SQL Server databases, or anything else. You can check it out by going back to the Azure Portal and browsing to the resource: You can get to the site editor from the "Open SaaS Account on publisher’s site" link, or by opening the Site Management Dashboard on dotnest.com. And canceling the subscription on the Azure Portal deletes the site.All of this makes it a lot easier for you to create and manage DotNest sites along your existing Azure services, and thus integrate DotNest-hosted sites into your infrastructure better. So, check it out on the Azure Portal!

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!

Updates are not always flashy spectacular new features - sometimes they're just things that work the best if you don't even notice them. In the last months we've deployed a lot of these (hope you didn't notice!), so let's quickly see what we've been working on to make DotNest better for you! Infrastructure improvements DotNest, as the biggest multi-tenant Orchard installation out there, is sometimes not simple to operate. During the last few months, we've worked through fixing several randomly occurring problems one by one. These caused service interruptions before, but they won't anymore! We've also implemented an ultimate failsafe which will be triggered when everything else fails, bringing the platform back to life within a few minutes even if things go very, very south. Safer payments with PSD 2 You may have heard of the new EU Payment Service Directive, i.e. PSD 2. Its point is, among others, to make card payments (and financial services in general) safer. To make this a reality it requires online merchants accepting card payments, like DotNest, to implement a revised payment flow. We're among the elite club of services who have indeed done this until the official deadline of 14 September, with the help of our payment processor Braintree. You may notice that the payments area of DotNest got a little bit nicer on the side as well. We hope you continue to use DotNest and if you find any issues just let us know!

As you've surely noticed now, also from the barrage of privacy policy updates you should've received, in the EU the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, takes effect today. This greatly enhances how your personal data should be protected by companies, but if you're a company, you also need to make sure you comply with it (if you manage EU citizens' data then you should, even if your company is not incorporated in the EU). DotNest itself is compliant with the GDPR; read our updated privacy policy here. However, as an owner of a DotNest site it's your responsibility to make your site compliant too. How this affects you and how we help you with this you can learn more about on this Knowledge Base article. Make sure that you check our updated privacy policy and that your company is prepared!

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!

There are a lot of modules available on DotNest, but not that many themes to style your sites. You asked for more, and we listened: the Basic Blog Theme by Márk Bartha is now available for all DotNest sites! The theme is simple but good-looking, and is (surprise!) especially well suited for styling a blog. Did you procrastinate on starting your own blog just because "nah man, DotNest still doesn't have a theme that I'd use on my blog"? You don't have to wait any more, add your blog for free!

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!

It was a recurring request we received from all of you people running Orchard sites on DotNest that it should be easier to build image carousels/sliders. So we listened and added a module to allow just that! The newly released Lombiq Layouts module is now available for all DotNest sites. The module contains a Slider Element feature which, not too surprisingly, adds a slider/carousel Element to the Layouts editor. So now you can use the familiar layout editor you've already seen when editing pages to drag-and-drop a Slider Element onto the canvas. Then you can go on and drop Image Elements or really any other Element onto the Slider to build a configurable, easy to use carousel. Sounds good, right? So go ahead and add some kick-ass sliders!

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!