We haven't told you here yet but recently we released two new Orchard modules! Orchard Liquid Markup is a module that extends the built-in Orchard.Templates module and allows you to write shape templates right from the admin by using the Liquid Markup language. The module is also included on DotNest sites! Associativy Taxonomies Adapter is the other new module: extending the Associtiaty knowledge graph engine it provides an automatic way of building cool graphs by using existing taxonomies (coming from the built-in Orchard.Taxonomies module). Which one got you interested?

Ever wanted to send some persistent notifications to the users of your Orchard site? This is now very easy with our new User Notifications module that we developed for RealtyShares: with User Notifications you can send notifications to individual users or groups of users, regardless the number of recipients. Tracy Gonzales, the Lead Engineer of RealtyShares said this about our work: This module has been in production on www.realtyshares.com for several months, and it runs without a hitch. Not only is it easy to use, but it's also very efficient. RealtyShares is able to send batches of notifications on the order of tens of thousands without straining the web server or interrupting the user experience. Scaling isn't a concern either, as the module was designed to handle much higher volume. The notification content is also token aware, so it's possible to send personalized messages addressing the user by name. This feature is very handy. If you're looking for easy ways to engage users on your site, this simple yet powerful module is an indispensable tool. Check out User Notifications so your users always can know what's up!

Our new Download as... Orchard module brings the ability to download content items as files: currently HTML or PDF. This means you can give automatic download links for your contents on your Orchard sites (something that's our profession to develop). The module even cares about flattening hierarchies of content that are defined with container-contained connections. We already use the module so you can download the vast knowledge collection of Orchard Dojo Library. You can see a demo of the module on the Orchard podcast.

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.

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!