You may have heard of Show Orchard, but only if you've been in the Orchard CMS community for a longer time: Show Orchard is a showcase for great Orchard websites, but has been down for the better part of the last year.

Now it's back online, but as a DotNest site, with a Media Theme, and maintained by Lombiq. Check it out for some of the nicest Orchard websites and if you know one that's not listed send it to guys at showorchard.com!

Also, a case study is coming!

We've talked about this idea within Lombiq for quite a while and it's finally here! The DotNest SDK is the easiest way for developing themes for DotNest sites before deploying them as a Media Theme. It contains the same Orchard code base and all the open-source modules and themes on top of that as what's running on DotNest, so you can run your site locally with confidence that it's going to behave almost exactly the same as the live one. We also have a nice developer story with automatic updates from the SDK to your repository to make sure that you're able to work the latest code (make sure to read the Readme!). The DotNest SDK is available as a Git repository on GitHub and as a Mercurial repository on Bitbucket with continuous bi-directional synchronization powered by Git-Hg Mirror, another awesome Lombiq project.

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.

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!

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!

There is a blog for the Hungarian Microsoft Student Partners developed by Márk Bartha and Dominik Földi here on DotNest which is a great proof of how far you can get using only the built-in DotNest features and Media Theme for theming. Microsoft Student Partners are a group of university students who are enthusiastic about Microsoft technologies, regularly organizing meetups and workshops in their country. This blog has been written in Hungarian but it's still a really good example of a nice and heavily customized DotNest website.

After introducing our (yet small) Support page the most important thing you'll notice that we retired the forum and introduced GitHub! More specifically you can add feature request and other ideas, ask questions, and post bugreports under the DotNest Support GitHub repository.

George Roubie, an Orchard developer from Greece runs his personal development blog on DotNest as Orchard Tricks. Now he has summarized how he has created his site in this detailed case study. Enjoy!