With a strong background in migrating websites to Orchard Core, we embarked on a journey to revamp hastlayer.com, the home of our cutting-edge .NET hardware acceleration project Hastlayer. This transformation was not merely a migration from the older Orchard 1 CMS; it was an opportunity to embrace Orchard Core's superior performance, modularity, and development experience. However, this migration was more than just a technical upgrade. It was a chance to refresh our website's appearance and align it with contemporary design trends. Hastlayer’s website was due for a facelift, its design needed a modern touch to resonate with current web aesthetics. Leveraging our expertise and experience, we utilized several of our own open-source projects developed over the years. Key Orchard Core modules such as Lombiq Privacy and Lombiq Helpful Extensions, along with utilities like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, played a pivotal role. The Lombiq Base Theme as well as the theme of our company website served as the foundation for our theme, providing a robust starting point for customization. A distinctive aspect of this project was the creative process of reimagining hastlayer.com. Unlike client projects where we respond to external requirements and feedback, this was an internal endeavor. Collaborative brainstorming sessions shaped the vision and identity we wanted to communicate to our audience. We aimed to maintain a visual coherence with lombiq.com’s design, simultaneously, we aspired to inject a sense of uniqueness and distinction into hastlayer.com. To maintain simplicity, we reused numerous design elements and built upon them. Aligning the team's diverse perspectives required several iterations, but it ultimately led to a cohesive design that represented Hastlayer's ethos. The result is a revamped site that we are immensely proud of. It reflects our identity and the services we provide. We invite you to explore the new hastlayer.com and experience the innovation that defines us. As we revel in the success of this project, we look forward to future opportunities to renew and refine our digital footprint. Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Hastlayer, and more Orchard Core migration projects!
Git-hg Mirror is a site of our own, that was previously built on Orchard 1 and was migrated to Orchard Core. The site is a simple-to-use (at least this is the intention) web application to automatically keep a Git and a Mercurial repository or two Mercurial or two Git repositories in sync. This allows you to create mirrors of repositories in the other version control system. The site’s FAQ page provides more information about the site’s purpose and functionality. This case study delves into the intricate journey of transforming Git-hg Mirror from its original Orchard 1 roots to the contemporary Orchard Core, highlighting the technical challenges and solutions that made this transition possible. Migrating a site from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core is beneficial because it allows you to take advantage of the latest features, improved performance and a more modern architecture, ensuring your website remains up-to-date and competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. As usual, we leveraged many of our own open-source modules that we've built and refined over time, such as Lombiq Helpful Extensions, utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, Lombiq Base Theme as a base for the themes, Lombiq Hosting Tenants for tenant management, and Lombiq Helpful Libraries, as the name suggests, for generally useful libraries. The migration needed some work with User accounts (mainly a converter from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core and depersonalization maintenance, which is responsible for replacing the registered user's sensitive data like email address, the repository URLs or access tokens with randomly generated data for privacy reasons) thus this resulted in new additions to our open-source modules. Feel free to check these out, the User converter is now part of the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature and the depersonalization maintenance is included in the Lombiq Hosting Tenants project. Because of the user account migrations, the previously registered users will just have to reset their password the first time they try to log in, but they will get a notification about it and once they have done it, they will be good to go, nothing else has changed. We are happy with the results and the additions to our open-source modules and stay tuned, as we keep the migrations rolling.
WTW is a multinational company that provides businesses with various services such as insurance brokerage, risk management, and human resources consulting to help them manage risks and optimize their operations. Recently we had the opportunity to implement a specialized Orchard Core-based Client Portal for them. This portal, targeted towards insurance companies, was intended to be a replacement for an old portal used to download on-premises software & license keys, raise support tickets, and read knowledge base articles. WTW chose us to be partners on this project because we are large contributors to the open-source community, and found us to be knowledgeable and experienced based on our previous work. Our flexibility during the initial conversations was also a huge factor in their decision. With this opportunity, we got the chance to improve our experience in developing a user-friendly portal with a modern front-end framework and how it can be integrated into Orchard Core’s content management capabilities. The Client Portal, which was designed to be used by the customers, is just one crucial component of an overarching system architecture. The rest of the systems were responsible for managing software and license keys by administrator users. WTW specifically chose Orchard Core for this portal because of its robust content management capabilities. Content manager users now create announcements, external training materials, manage the product and services catalog, and arrange different widgets throughout the webpages using the Admin UI. Other components on the platform pull in information like product download links or license keys from other parts of the WTW system using web APIs. Given that it's a customer-facing portal, user experience was a priority. While it’s always a good idea to rely on Orchard Core’s display management the only way to use that is with page reloads during navigation between pages or filtering. Paginations are filters on the pages that should always be asynchronous, so we had to come up with a solution that uses modern front-end technology along with Orchard Core’s great features. During the course of this project, we’ve developed an open-source Vue.js module for Orchard Core to make user interactions smoother while still maintaining the built-in display management capabilities, such as widget and menu functionality. For quality code and maintainability, we utilized Lombiq's .NET Analyzers, Gulp Extensions, Helpful Libraries, Helpful Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets. Stability was critical, so we implemented several UI tests using the UI Testing Toolbox, ensuring they were executed before introducing a new feature using our reusable GitHub Actions. It was an exciting project and we delivered it on time. While the final steps on the rest of the architecture are being completed the whole portal is gradually being rolled out to users during the summer of 2023. If you're thinking about integrating a powerful CMS like Orchard Core into your architecture, we're here to help. We can either do the work for you or guide you through it in our consulting calls, just get in touch with us!
Are you in the construction industry and looking for a digital platform that can integrate with third-party apps and streamline your workflows? Or are you simply looking for an example of our coding expertise being put to good use? Either way, look no further than Aptix by Topcon Positioning Systems, a SaaS platform that offers a range of digital integration services to help construction professionals work smarter, not harder. And it's recently been spiced up with a touch of Lombiq! Construction works better digitally. Earlier this year, the Topcon Integration Services development team approached us at Lombiq to contribute to several key features on the Aptix platform. Over the course of several months, the two teams worked diligently on the platform to ensure Topcon meets their site functionality goals in time for their important platform demo at this year's ConExpo event. The Topcon Integration Services team at ConExpo. Our team primarily worked on the platform's integrations and workflows features, the former of which allows integrating various third-party construction-related apps, while the latter is built on top of the underlying framework with additional improvements. These tasks primarily included working with JavaScript front-end technologies and CSS theming tools to make the project more efficient. Joining a project with its own conventions and distinct technologies is always a challenge, but it's one we were happy to take on. While our involvement with the platform's development was relatively brief, it was also exceedingly productive, and the collaboration allowed the Topcon team to meet vital deadlines leading up to their presentation at ConExpo. Here's how Arra Derderian, Senior Director at Topcon Aptix, experienced our collaboration: The Lombiq team was able to ramp up quickly and help us meet a tight release deadline. The developers were knowledgeable and able to take instruction without a lot of overhead from our team. We appreciate the help they gave us to meet our milestone. Our expertise is available for both long-term and shorter projects. Should the opportunity interest you, here is where you can learn more about how we can help you work more efficiently and effectively.