We have recently updated DotNest with a few general performance improvements and two new modules (that actually work even better together) adding cool features to your DotNest sites: Forum and Watcher!

Ever wanted to see colourful 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.

Until now if you wanted to use your own domain names with your DotNest sites you had to go with monthly payments. Listening to our beloved customers we implemented yearly payments, giving you a much more convenient option! And not just that: if you pay yearly you'll get one month of custom domain usage for FREE!

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!

We've announced yesterday on the community meeting a new "feature" of DotNest (which is actually available for a little while now): localization packages. We've added the translation files of built-in modules for the following languages: French (fr-FR), Italian (it-IT), Russian (ru-RU), Simplified Chinese (zh-CN), Spanish (es-ES) and Hungarian (hu-HU). You can change the localization settings of your tenants under on the Settings page.

When hearing about DotNest and trying it for the first time, you must have a lot of questions about it and its capabilities. Our fellow Orchard Dojo trainer, Abhishek Luv is here to answer them with a series of video tutorials! Currently there are 3 of them (introduction, tenant management, Theme Override), but there are more to come, so stay tuned!

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.

We're pleased to announce a brand new DotNest site that will be a massive help for Orchard newcomers: Orchard Beginner! Orchard Beginner really aims to help those who're just starting with Orchard. The site's content is still being expanded rapidly but it already gives Orchard rookies some very essential guidelines.