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!

DotNest sites now run Orchard 1.10.1!

The latest version of Orchard, 1.10.1 was released not long ago (just very little after the latest major version, 1.10) and now all DotNest sites are also upgraded: so DotNest is fully 1.10.1! It took us some time to apply this upgrade, but hey, if you have almost 1000 sites to care about it's a delicate process! So what's new in Orchard 1.10.1? In short: lots of smaller improvements, tons of bugfixes and a heap of changes that aren't visible for users but improve Orchard a lot as a software framework. So while probably this time you won't be astonished by some completely brand new features like Layouts or Audit Trail you'll notice that Orchard still got better and faster - not to mention it's now also an improved foundation for us to build a better DotNest for you. Also see the official release notes on what is new. So if you already have sites on DotNest, good news for you! If you don't, why don't you head over and give the 1.10.1-powered DotNest a test drive?

Voting and favoriting modules added

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!

User profiles and avatars just arrived!

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!

Beautifully simple Bindery theme available

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!

New content fields, social meta tags and a Bootstrap theme

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!

A lot of new features for your DotNest sites!

We just updated all of your DotNest sites with some cool new features! These give you some more tools to customize your sites. Let's see what's in the box: Target: Blank module was added. After you enable it all the outbound links on your site will open in a new tab. Helpful Extensions module is here as well. It adds, among others, some useful tokens and extends Projections with new filters. NogginBox Owner Queries feature is now available: this adds the ability to filter on content by its owner to Projector. The Orchard Liquid Markup module was updated and thus allows you more complete customization options with Liquid Markup templates: now Orchard WorkContext is accessible as well as dynamic content item expressions now work. This means that you can now e.g. completely override content shape templates or can do some fancy things based on the current user! With all this you'll need to think twice before hosting Orchard yourself!

DotNest sites now run on Orchard 1.9

The Orchard 1.9 release brought a lot of improvements a few weeks ago: apart from tons of bugfixes and smaller enhancements it also contains three new modules, Audit Trail, Layouts and Dynamic Forms (just to name what you as a DotNest user will mostly see). 1.9 is a great release, a large milestone that makes Orchard a mature CMS. And now you have it on DotNest! We needed to do loads of compatibility and bugfixes as well as a lot of testing to ensure that once your sites run 1.9 you'll be only affected by the positive changes. For the last weeks we've run all of our own sites at Lombiq (including DotNest.com) on 1.9 to iron out issues before upgrading all DotNest sites. But it's done, so enjoy all the good things that 1.9 brought! For a full overview of all the changes in 1.9 check out the release notes. And by the way since DotNest sites now run on 1.9 of course Try Orchard! also lets you do a test drive of Orchard 1.9.

Hosted Orchard sites a click away: now you can create DotNest sites from within Microsoft Azure!

It wasn't exactly easy to do, but now DotNest is even more integrated into Microsoft Azure: you can created DotNest Orchard sites as an Azure App Service, from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

Collect usage data for your DotNest sites with Azure Application Insights!

Ever wanted to see colorful interactive charts about your DotNest sites' usage that you can pan around and impress your coworkers, clients with? Now it's here, and it's not just cool but also very useful: Azure Application Insights. With Azure Application Insights you can measure your sites' performance, collect all kinds of usage data and even see client-side errors. So no more JavaScript errors that go undetected! What's more, using Azure Application Insights is free and also all DotNest sites just got it for free too! Check out how to use it. The Application Insights integration on DotNest uses our Application Insights Orchard module, which you can install to any custom Orchard app too.

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