As announced recently a theme for Orchard community sites, as well as free custom domain usage for them is now available on DotNest. The first such community site to be moved to DotNest is the Orchard Project Indian Community website: Abhishek migrated the website from Azure to DotNest very quickly. You can read about his experiences in this blogpost!

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!

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!

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!

As you surely know there are a variety of options to theme your DotNest site, including going hardcore and writing templates with Liquid markup. Now if you're among those hardcore developers who want to write code even for their DotNest sites, good news: Liquid just good a lot smarter!

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:

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!