At Lombiq we believe in open source and empower it how we can: for example we routinely release open source Orchard modules that are freely usable by anyone on their Orchard-driver websites. Recently we created two modules: Watcher and Route Permissions. Watcher enables users to "watch" content items, i.e. subscribe to notifications if the item changes. The module integrates with the new Orchard 1.7 module Workflows and is thus very generic: you can e.g. send e-mails to subscribed users when a message is posted to their watched forum or if a comment appears under their watched blog post; but not just e-mails, you could set this up to send private messages, sticky notifications, anything that is usable from a workflow. You can get an idea of how Watcher works from its readme. The Route Permissions module enables you to configure access control for URL patterns defined by regular expressions. This is convenient if you have sections on your website defined by a directory structure (e.g. blog/private vs blog/public) as you can use such URL patterns to quickly restrict access to a bigger part of the site. If you have any questions about our modules or need help about something don't hesitate to drop us a mail. You can view all of our open source modules under our company profile on GitHub.

Helping GI Joe Search & Rescue get back on track with their website

On Friday we completed a short but important emergency assignment: getting the GI Joe Search & Rescue team's website back online. The website was moved to a new hosting company but wasn't feeling all right (the standard IIS 404 page greeted the visitors). This was especially problematic given that the team needed the website for their communication on the weekend. That's when we got contacted on behalf of the team and started investigating. After checking the logs and verifying the integrity of the deployment we recognized the source of the error: although the site's database was seemingly restored all the tables were empty! Running the restore again fixed the database and thus solved the issue altogether. Naturally we didn't charge the team for this emergency fix: they don't charge you when you need their help either!

Lombiq is now a BizSpark startup!

We applied to participate in Microsoft's BizSpark program and found to be eligible for participation. This is great news since with BizSpark we've won the opportunity to get enough support for making our services better. We'll embrace this awesome program and try to make the most of the BizSpark-backed year!

Our new Orchard module, Associativy Internal Link Graph Builder released

We recently released a new module of ours, Associativy Internal Link Graph Builder. This module lets you automatically build Associativy graphs by parsing internal links between content items. Associativy graphs are networks of connected content items that can be visualized, explored and searched in many ways, creating a unique form of content display. The Orchard Dojo Graph runs on Associativy too and uses our new module.

Orchard Harvest logo - a sneak peek

This is the Orchard Harvest logo that Apor Püspöki, our associate designer created: This logo will be printed on the Harvest t-shirts too, that Lombiq is sponsoring. Apor by the way designed also two of our websites: Lombiq.com and OrchardDojo.net.

Lombiq sponsors Orchard Harvest!

This year's Orchard Harvest conference in Amsterdam is something we are really looking forward to. That's why we also decided, despite our company being in its infancy, to sponsor it: Lombiq will provide the Harvest t-shirts for the attendees this year. We can't tell you how excited we are: and we really hope you'll like the t-shirts we'll bring to the conference!

Lombiq announced on the Orchard Community Meeting

As you may know, Orchard's community meets on Tuesday every week at 20 o'clock GMT in a Lync meeting room. On today's meeting we took the opportunity to announce and also a bit present Lombiq and Orchard Dojo. The meeting starts with us: By the way the meetings are recorded by Benedek since a long time.

Lombiq just started to boil!

Hello and welcome to the beginning of the existence of Lombiq - a company we want to be something inspiring, exciting and innovative. Our main focus in the beginning will be on Orchard-related services like consultancy and training - something we already have done for a long time. We also start off with own online services: Orchard Hungary (what we were maintaining for long as individuals) and Orchard Dojo. To show our dedication to Orchard we also provide sponsorship for this year's Orchard conference, the Orchard Harvest in Amsterdam. We want to be fair and remain open. Let the journey begin!

Lombiq's first open source projects

Lombiq maintains and/or provides commercial support for multiple open source projects, Orchard modules and themes, as you can see under our GitHub profile. There are two projects that we actually published along with the founding of Lombiq: Pretty Good Bootstrap Base Theme and Orchard Read-only. PGBBT is an Orchard theme that is intended to be used as a base theme. It contains Twitter's Bootstrap CSS framework and adapts it to be used with Orchard. Styles are packaged as individual files so you can use only what you really need. The theme employs a minimal amount of shape template overrides for maintainability and LESS for helping re-usability. PGBBT is the base theme under the themes of Orchard Dojo and Lombiq.com itself. Read-only is a simple module for a simple task: to switch your Orchard site into "read-only mode". That means, with this module you can put your site into a state where no content item can be saved. Instead, a customizable message is displayed. This is useful if you want to freeze your site's content for a short time for some reason - we use it for seamlessly updating our sites' code (more on that later). We hope you find our open source project useful!

Further reading

New Orchard modules: Watcher and Route Permissions