Lombiq is 8 years old!

Today is the 8th anniversary of founding Lombiq! On this special occasion, we have gathered 8 important factors of our company's life. We are glad that we took these steps at that time otherwise we might not be able to celebrate with our strong community here today.

Is this your first time here? We at Lombiq Technologies are a software, training, and services company focusing on web development with open Microsoft technologies. Our main area of expertise is the Orchard Core CMS. We provide custom development, training, hosting, and consulting services, and we are behind the first (and only) Orchard CMS SaaS - DotNest.

1. 27.05.2013: Lombiq is founded by benedek.farkas and zoltan.lehoczky! The story just begins. Lombiq's zero-day service is Orchard Dojo (containing among others the vast knowledge base of Dojo Library; Orchard Dojo's content is entirely structured in the semantically searchable Dojo Graph). Orchard Magyarország is taken over by Lombiq and then Orchard Hungary is created. During the development of Lombiq's sites, Lombiq created and also released on the first day the Bootstrap-based theme Pretty Good Bootstrap Base Theme and the Read-only module for putting an Orchard site into read-only mode.

2. From 13.07.2013 Lombiq’s team has been constantly expanding with new members. A lot of talented Orchard developers joined also from university courses held by Lombiq. Students can join these courses since the spring semester of 2013 when we started the world-first university course on Orchard at Óbuda University. After joining our team, a 3 months long mentoring period helps the new members to get used to the new working environment and to take the first steps in their careers. For today, our team’s size has reached 18 members already, making us the biggest Orchard consulting team in the world. We're constantly seeking like-minded individuals to join our expanding team of developers and non-developers. 

The Lombiq Team in 2020

3. When we have a chance, we are trying to give back not just to open-source projects we love, especially Orchard, but also to local communities of ours. In a Hungarian town, Solymár an initiative, Fészek Waldorf School was started, that we decided to support with part of our corporation tax. Together with Parthus Sports Association, we wanted to build a new gymnasium, which now not only serves the school's pupils but also the town's 10 000 residents. 

Moreover, since the first wave of the pandemic we have already delivered 3800 reusable, washable textile face masks to the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta by joining forces with the artisan clothing small business Pacuha (they provided the masks on cost price that we paid for). The Malteses are a 1000-year old, global charity organization and one of the strongest, most impactful ones in Hungary: They have thousands of employees and volunteers operating hospitals, retirement homes, schools, and work hard on the field for the benefit of disadvantaged communities all across Hungary.

4. On 02.09.2015 our Hastlayer project is published for the first time at the FPL 2015 conference hosted by the Imperial College of London. Hastlayer is a tool that can automatically turn your .NET software into a hardware implementation, so basically a computer chip. This way your algorithm can potentially run much faster but still consume less power, especially if it's massively parallelizable. And we also want to put on a satellite!

Hastlayer showcase

5. During Lombiq's 8 years we had many chances to take part in conferences, where we could build our professional network, present our work and get opinions and feedback on it. Conferences have been always excellent places for meeting with people in our field from different geographical areas. Lombiq has been introduced already in the United States, India, Singapore, Japan, and many countries within Europe.

Hastlayer keynote

6. Since 16.05.2017 we have an event series, called Lombiq Talks out of the Box. Here anybody from our team can share something remarkable or any useful knowledge with others. If any of us is really good at something outside daily work, this is the place to show it. We have already had presentations about nutrition, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, a homemade sourdough workshop, and also personal finances workshop series. We are looking forward to have many more of these occasions! 

7. The Lombiq Offline programs started back in 2013. Sometimes it's not just about work but doing something just for fun. These events are specifically for this: we get together, have to do something cool like breaking out of an escape room, going for a go-kart ride, or playing paintball. On these occasions, we can give space to increased communication, team building, and gather memories as a team in different fields. 

Lombiq visits Cern

To highlight one of these events, from the 13th to the 16th of September 2019, we visited the CERN Open Days and had a trip to Geneva. On these special days CERN, the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research opens its doors to the public at the heart of one of the world’s largest particle-physics laboratories.

8. Last, but not least we are grateful for our partners. Our success is built and shared with the many partners we have worked with over the last 8 years. We can proudly state that we are working with international clients mostly from Western Europe and North America. We have already partnered with 110+ corporate clients from 17 countries in the world and successfully delivered over 300 projects, mostly from recurring customers.

Viktória Magyar Orchard Open source Orchard Core Anniversary

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Why create separate accounts in different systems when you can use a single, trusted source for all of them?

Instead of asking people to create yet another account, you can let them sign in with the Microsoft account they already use at work. This can be a Microsoft 365 account or an account managed through Microsoft Entra ID.

For users, this feels familiar. For administrators, it keeps account management closer to the systems they already use every day.

Managed CMS Hosting Now Available in the Microsoft Marketplace — Powered by DotNest
Microsoft customers worldwide can now discover and use DotNest, a fully managed website hosting platform, through Microsoft Marketplace, accessing trusted solutions that accelerate innovation and business transformation with unified integration across Microsoft productsBudapest, Hungary — June 23, 2026 — Lombiq Technologies today announced the availability of DotNest, a fully managed content management and website hosting platform, in the Microsoft Marketplace, the unified online destination for customers to buy trusted cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet their business needs. DotNest customers can now discover and deploy trusted solutions through Microsoft Marketplace, with smooth integration and streamlined management across Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft products.DotNest is the only fully managed hosting service for Orchard Core, the open-source, modular content management system (CMS) framework built on ASP.NET Core. Built and operated by Lombiq Technologies, a major contributor to the Orchard project for more than a decade, DotNest brings enterprise-grade Orchard Core hosting to organizations without the complexity of running their own infrastructure. Today, DotNest powers more than 6,000 websites worldwide.DotNest delivers Orchard Core as a fully managed SaaS on Microsoft Azure, removing the infrastructure burden of server management, security patching, and version upgrades. Now available in the Microsoft Marketplace, organizations can procure DotNest directly through their existing Azure subscription and manage their websites from the Azure Portal alongside their other cloud resources. Key capabilities include:Zero technical maintenance: Hosting, monitoring, and platform updates are handled automatically so teams can focus on building, not operating.Native Azure integration: Sites are provisioned and managed from the Azure Portal, backed by Azure security, point-in-time backups, HTTPS, and geo-redundant storage.Complete design freedom: Full Orchard Core customization is preserved, with automatic theme deployment from source control and support for custom content types and modules.Built-in ecommerce: Organizations can launch online stores using the integrated Orchard Core Commerce suite without additional platform setup.Enterprise performance: Optimized infrastructure with CDN, caching, Elasticsearch, and email delivery requires no infrastructure configuration from the customer.GDPR compliance: DotNest is compliant out of the box with privacy-focused defaults suited for EU organizations.The offering is designed for IT teams looking to reduce infrastructure overhead, marketing teams that want to launch and update web properties without depending on development cycles, and digital agencies that prefer to focus on customization rather than operations. "Bringing DotNest to the Microsoft Marketplace is a natural step for us,” said Zoltán Lehóczky, Co-Founder and managing director of Lombiq Technologies. “We have spent over ten years building DotNest and contributing to Orchard Core itself. Listing in the Microsoft Marketplace means any Microsoft customer can now provision a fully managed Orchard Core site in minutes, using the same Azure subscription they already rely on for everything else, no separate procurement, no infrastructure work, and no compromise on the flexibility of the open-source platform.” “Microsoft Marketplace helps organizations and partners move faster, work smarter, and grow by connecting them with the right solutions—all in one trusted place,” said Cyril Belikoff, vice president, Microsoft Azure Product Marketing. “We’re happy to welcome Lombiq Technologies’ DotNest solution to the growing Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem.” Microsoft Marketplace is a single destination to find, try, and buy trusted cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet your business objectives. Choose from a growing collection of solutions tailored to your unique needs, available both in Marketplace and directly within Microsoft products. DotNest is available now in the Microsoft Marketplace at https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/lombiq.dotnest-production. To learn more about DotNest, visit https://dotnest.com. Lombiq Technologies is a software, training, and services company focused on web development with open Microsoft technologies, predominantly the Orchard Core content management system. With more than a decade of contributions to the Orchard Core ecosystem, Lombiq provides custom development, training, consulting, and hosting services to clients worldwide. The company is the team behind DotNest, the only Orchard Core SaaS. Learn more at https://lombiq.com. For more information, press only: Lombiq Crew, Lombiq Technologies, [email protected]

Long-term Orchard Core maintenance for the City of Santa Monica

Back in 2021, we wrote about helping the City of Santa Monica move santamonica.gov from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core. Since then, we have continued working with the City's team.

In the last couple of years, much of that work has been maintenance: upgrading Orchard Core, improving tests, making local development easier, cleaning up the codebase, and fixing performance issues.

The Orchard Core upgrade was an important part of this. Keeping the CMS version current helps the site stay on a safer and better-supported foundation. It also brings in fixes from Orchard Core itself, including fixes for issues that could otherwise affect users, editors, or developers.

The other changes support the same kind of work. Automated tests help catch problems before deployment. Auto Setup makes local development more predictable. Static analyzers, codespell, and Renovate make the codebase easier to maintain. 

Most of this is not visible from the outside, but it is important for keeping a long-running website working well.

Rebuilding DotNest.com: Orchard Core, Tailwind 4, and a more maintainable workflow
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It also reflects how we approach building maintainable Orchard Core platforms. If the site itself is hard to update, every future improvement becomes slower and more expensive than it should be. So we treated the rebuild as more than a visual refresh. It became a chance to rethink the site’s structure, front-end workflow, and development process in a way we can reuse on future Orchard Core projects. Building landing pages around reusable sections One of the main changes was how landing pages are structured in Orchard Core. Previously, the DotNest pages used simple Liquid widgets for page sections. This was quick and flexible while most changes were made directly by developers, but it also meant that the page structure was less explicit and harder to evolve consistently over time. Around the same time, the Orchard Core community was also moving toward more reusable “Blocks”-style page structures, which aligned closely with the direction we already wanted to take for DotNest. 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