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.

You could access your DotNest sites securely through HTTPS from day 1; however, this required you to use a custom port. E.g. when accessing your site "mysite.dotnest.com" securely you would have used the URL "https://mysite.dotnest.com:8443" with that ugly "8443" at the end. But not any more! All DotNest sites can now be accessed securely without using a custom port, as it would be natural, e.g. like "https://mysite.dotnest.com". Much more convenient, as this doesn't require you to do anything special. Don't be afraid if you have links pointing to the old URLs: those will get automatically redirected to the new ones!

You probably heard about Try Orchard!: it's a free service where you can test drive Orchard on demo sites, without having to register, download or set up anything. Now Try Orchard! just got smarter with an Orchard walkthrough. When you visit a Try Orchard! demo site you'll be greeted by a tooltip that offers you a guided, interactive walkthrough showing you how to use the basic features of Orchard: publishing pages and blog posts, commenting, user management... This way newcomers will get a glimpse of using Orchard, without reading any documentation or getting any help or training. By the way Try Orchard! is also featured in the official Orchard documentation and on Orchard Beginner. Enjoy your walkthrough!

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

As you may know, all DotNest sites have the Combinator module enabled (and configured) by default. This module automatically bundles and minifies static resources (like stylesheets and script files) to enhance client-side performance. Now Combinator got a lot faster with a feature called resource sharing. Resource sharing enables tenants in a multi-tenant Orchard application (like DotNest) to share processed resources with each other through the Default tenant. This means that if a resource was already processed for any of the tenants all other tenants will just use that without having to re-process it. In practice this means that e.g. admin pages will load much faster for tenants the first time: you don't have to wait for Combinator to process the resources (unless you're the first one to look at that page) since they will just be fetched from the shared location. So how much time did we manage to save you?

The Preview phase of DotNest ends today. We're very excited to take DotNest to the next level, because we really strive to provide an awesome Orchard SaaS for you! The end of the Preview also means that custom domain usage is not free anymore. But we value that you were among the early adopters of DotNest: so as we promised everybody who is already registered on DotNest as of today still gets custom usage free for three months! Please send us an e-mail to guys at dotnest dot com and we'll set up your custom domain usage. Let's keep your DotNest sites going!

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!

Search engine optimization (i.e. tuning your site to be on top of Google pages) is not so "in" than a few years back, but it still matters a lot, and not just for search engines, but for the general user experience. We added the SEO module by Onestop to DotNest, available to everybody! You can use the SEO module to fine-tune your home page, automatically generate suitable titles for pages using tokens or manually setting the title and description for a specific page. Most importantly even if you just enable the SEO module it will at least reverse the order of title segments: Orchard by default uses the "[site name] - [page title]" pattern for titles but much better is to start with the page title since this is what visitors care about. The SEO module was not compatible with the latest Orchard version what DotNest uses so we had to make some upgrades in a fork: we made it compatible with Orchard 1.8 and migrated the content parts to use infoset storage so it runs much faster. If you were using Onestop.Seo before there is also an Upgrade feature that you just have to enable to migrate all of the module's site settings to infoset storage when you upgrade it. Since we use Mercurial for source control we've also created an open Mercurial repository for the upgraded module. Now go and optimize the hell out of your site!

As you may know from the relevant Knowledge Base page output caching for DotNest sites are managed by a reverse proxy: this means that a server is sitting in front of DotNest, caching pages and serving cached pages instantly. This proxy cache now got smarter: by utilizing the services of the built-in OutputCache module cache entries are now evicted immediately if a change is published! Caching still happens on the proxy, but now if you e.g. publish a new blogpost then all the relevant cache entries are cleared so your users can see the change instantly! Best of both worlds!