Algolia search integration for Orchard CMS

If you haven't heard of it, Algolia is a pretty neat hosted indexing/search service; it's a bit like Lucene in the cloud, but extremely fast. Now thanks to our new Algolia Search module you can very easily plug in Algolia search into Orchard CMS!

Orchard has a search and indexing infrastructure built in. The out of the box concrete indexing implementation you can enable is built on Lucene. The Algolia Search module plugs into the framework similarly to Lucene: you can use all the existing Orchard search features but now in the background Algolia will index and fetch everything, not Lucene. Furthermore, we've overridden how the frontend search works, so it utilizes Algolia's key feature, its speed, presenting search results instantly.

Also, the Algolia Search module is also available now for all sites on DotNest, the Orchard SaaS! So if you're a hardcore Orchard developer head over to the module's repo and dig into the code or if you'd just want to play with it, check out how to use it on DotNest!

zoltan.lehoczky Orchard module Algolia Search

Other recent posts

The European Accessibility Act came into effect today. Should you care?

With the European Accessibility Act coming effect into today (June 28th, 2025), we've reached an important milestone in (web) accessibility. As the official announcement states:

"The Act mandates that a range of products and services such as consumer electronics (TVs, smartphones, computers, gaming consoles, etc.), ticketing and vending machines, websites and mobile acts, among others, comply with accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities."

An important clarification here is that the EEA "applies to businesses operating in key sectors such as banking, transport, telecommunications, e-commerce, and consumer electronics [...] for new products and services introduced after 2025."

Now, you might think that "OK, but my service has been running for years and I know my customers, do I really need to worry about this?". Of course, you should! New products/services launching under the effect of the EEA have a competitive advantage of catering to a wider audience, including those not directly affected, but caring about (or taking care of) those who are.

Since Lombiq is a web software/services agency, we'll focus on one particular aspect of accessibility: web content accessibility. We started rewriting all our websites 2 years ago and web content accessibility has been a guiding principle of our UI/UX design from the very beginning (you can also check our case studies). We can't really put any metrics behind its usefulness and we didn't care about the ROI; our open-source DNA compelled us to do so to make sure that the knowledge we share is as widely available as possible.

But: Making your website accessible is not a one-off effort - you also need to make sure that your website remains compliant. Fortunately, neither did we or you have to start from scratch with all this: Compliance with EEA is covered by compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA (at the time of writing this article) and there are a multitudes of tools to help you in this effort.

That's why we developed a component of our UI Testing Toolbox library to easily integrate automated UI tests into any ASP.NET Core application that allows you to verify WCAG-compliance. Check out our sample UI test - it really is this simple! We continuously run such tests in our own CI workflows, as well as in our clients' projects.
Let us help you help us all!

Happy complying and compiling!

Migrating the homepage of the Orchard Core SaaS DotNest to Orchard Core
Following the migration of lombiq.com, Git-hg Mirror, Hastlayer, and Orchard Dojo from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core (and also the redesign of lombiq.com and Orchard Dojo), we had only one site remaining that was still running on Orchard 1: DotNest.com. While you could create Orchard Core sites on DotNest for years, until now, the DotNest website itself still ran on Orchard 1.This marks the end of an era. Now all of our sites are running on Orchard Core, which offers better performance, modularity, and development experience than Orchard 1.Furthermore, we fixed some web accessibility problems on the site and added UI tests to make sure nothing breaks and affects you as a user.We utilized many of our open-source modules, including Lombiq Privacy, Lombiq Helpful Extensions, and utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions. For the themes, we built upon the Lombiq Base Theme. Lombiq Helpful Extensions played a crucial role in this project (and in the other ones too), as there was a significant amount of content to migrate. Leveraging the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature, we transferred Orchard 1 content items—such as blog posts, pages, and even users—to Orchard Core. Additionally, we retained the search functionality on the Knowledge Base page, now powered by Elasticsearch and the commenting on blog posts with Giscus. Of course, while working with these modules we always make sure that any enhancement that comes to mind is added to them and any bug that we find is patched. So, the wider Orchard Core community benefits from each of these projects too.This is a migration, where if you notice nothing it’s great because we migrated a lot of backend code and the goal was to keep the functionalities of DotNest, without breaking or changing anything.Migrating to Orchard Core not only brought performance increases but also added quality of life and security features, like two-factor authentication. The new foundation of the site opened new possibilities for us to bring you a better version of DotNest.With DotNest now running on Orchard Core, we’ve completed our journey of modernizing all our sites. This migration wasn’t just about keeping up with technology—it was about ensuring a smoother, more secure, and future-proof experience for our users. Although most of the changes were behind the scenes, the result is a faster, more reliable DotNest that preserves all the features you rely on while setting the stage for future enhancements.Are you still running Orchard 1 apps? Contact us to see how we can help you migrate it to Orchard Core too.