After supporting the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta in taking care of Ukrainian refugees earlier this year, we again asked the Malteses about what we can help them with. It turned out that they are in no shortage of pandemic (epidemic?) resources or help for victims of the war in Ukraine. So, they said that blankets though, for homeless people in Hungary, would be useful. So, we delivered. We again collaborated with the artisan clothing small business Borsika Portéka: They manufactured the 300 polar blankets at cost price, and we purchased them. The Malteses will use these blankets to take care of homeless people during the winter, which starts to get pretty chilly here in Hungary. We hope that this donation will make the situation of many unfortunate people a bit more bearable. If you can, we encourage you to donate to the Malteses too! Update 06.03.2023: In the meantime, we've donated a further 200 (actually 196) blankets to the Malteses.Update 03.04.2023: And we've donated another 240 blankets!

If you like music – and, truthfully, who doesn't? –, we have some good news for you: you can now browse and license music on an Orchard Core-based platform! This is brought to you by the long-standing collaboration between Lombiq and the Smithsonian Institution, which has been engaged in a working relationship with us for several years now. The sites of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage were made using Orchard 1, which we had a hand in creating all the way back in 2017. These Orchard-powered sites also include the home of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which is now running on Orchard Core instead! Folkways, with music and Orchard at its core With Orchard Core offering an ever-growing number of benefits over its predecessor, including various performance improvements and a more user-friendly UI, the time to upgrade from Orchard 1 drew near by the end of 2021. Due to our long history with the Institution, we had the opportunity to participate in this project too. Lombiq took a major part in the migration process that was ongoing earlier this year. This included updating the existing codebase to modern standards using the latest C# language features, re-implementing our Content Editors module to make it Orchard Core compatible, as well as adding UI testing to easily spot regressions. The application also makes use of several of our open-source projects such as Helpful Libraries, Helpful Extensions, Gulp Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets. The new Folkways site launched in July and can be found on our showcase website Show Orchard as well. This is what Toby Dodds, Technology Director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, had to say regarding our collaboration: During the past year we’ve had the pleasure of working collaboratively with Lombiq to upgrade our backend CMS from Orchard’s 1.x to its more modern 2.x version Orchard Core – based on Microsoft’s Dot.Net Core. This was a complex and difficult project, but essential as well, and once again we feel lucky to have been able to work through it with Lombiq. Anyone who works around Web or IT systems knows that they are not static and always grow and expand in complexity. Collections of data grow as do the number of fields. Our collection database, which is now 20 years old is at the core of our whole enterprise and represents millions of pieces of information. Years ago, we determined that we could leverage Microsoft technologies and Orchard’s CMS to manage that data while simultaneously supporting our website. This strategy has paid off and we have been able to thrive as a business, generating revenue through sales on our website, licensing opportunities, in-kind donations, and through the distribution of our catalog to outside digital music services. All this business is data-centric and working with Orchard has given us total control of our data landscape. A big challenge, and a breakthrough, of Orchard Core is that data is accessed in a code-based way which results in better performance but required us to complete a complex migration of our data from our 1.x database held in MS SQL Server. Thankfully Lombiq was ready to take this on, helping us build a data migration process that worked like a charm and was a bridge between the old and the new. We were also able to retain access to our data in SQL, allowing us to keep our existing integrations, and the ability to query our data directly when necessary. Because data is managed within the application layer now, we have also leaned on Lombiq to develop a set of tools to Import, Export, and Update our collection using Excel spreadsheets. Our data life has gotten easier as a result and we are now better prepared to acquire, process, and distribute recordings and collections moving forward. Orchard Core represents not only a step forward for our website but also for our collection management work as well. Specifically on the website we have also been able to take advantage of Orchard Core’s improved speed to produce new tools for browsing the collection. Being able to browse and filter thousands of releases in a nanosecond is cool, no matter how you slice it. Additionally, this new speed on our website is opening a door for us to introduce a streaming audio player that depends on AJAX to maintain a persistent audio listening experience while browsing the site. This only works well if pages load quickly and do they ever! Getting to streaming is a key priority for us and now we expect to make that available to the public next year. In summary, this has been an innovative and productive period for Folkways and now that we are in Orchard Core, we are looking forward to all the benefits that will come from this hard-fought upgrade. Our success here is thanks to Lombiq who’ve had the skill, vision, and patience to work with us to overcome big challenges and get the job done. You can also check out a demo video of the app and our experiences developing it here. As Orchard Core grows in popularity, so does our experience with it. If you too would like to enjoy the various improvements the platform offers, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

When Global Health from Australia approached us with the request to build an advanced form builder using Form.io, it promised to be an interesting project. They were looking to integrate this new form builder deeply into MasterCare+, their Multi-Tenanted SaaS-based platform for Health Care which is built on Orchard CMS. It would allow creating custom forms for a wide range of scenarios in the health care domain, using the advanced editing capabilities of Form.io. The solution built by Lombiq was an important step in bridging the gap between paper forms and electronic health care management. At Lombiq, we already had hands-on experience with SurveyJS from a previous project, and we were looking forward to getting to know Form.io this time. Integrating and extending it to the special needs of our client was a fun challenge. As with any complex system, MasterCare+ required us to dive deep into its architecture to be able to enhance the system with the desired form-building functionality. Providing a smooth user experience was just as important as a flawless integration with business logic and data persistence, all the while adhering to Global Health's and our own high coding standards. A few of our other open-source projects proved very helpful in achieving the above, like Lombiq .NET Analyzers, Helpful Libraries, Gulp Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets. Working with the Global Health team was a pleasure. Here's what Damon Groenveld, Head of R&D at Global Health, has to say about our cooperation: Lombiq has gone above and beyond to ensure that the work done in our engagement with them not only met our expectations but also surpassed them. Are you looking for a competent partner to integrate a special tool into your complex system architecture? Get in touch—we at Lombiq are ready to take it on.

Almost half a year passed since the war in Ukraine broke out and the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta is still deeply involved in providing humanitarian aid to those seeking help in Hungary. After donating money, and then donating polar blankets in the cold season, the next installment of our collaboration is donating 800 child-sized hats to protect against the sun. Just like the blankets (and the reusable/washable textile masks during the COVID-19 pandemic), these hats were produced at manufacturing cost by the artisan clothing small business Borsika Portéka, and fully sponsored by Lombiq. The Malteses also published an article about our donation here. We still encourage you to support important causes and reliable organizations in these extraordinary times - we at Lombiq (as individuals as well as a company) will continue to do so and we are proud to give back!

As we've published in our previous blog post week, when the war in Ukraine broke out, we immediately provided a monetary donation to the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta for humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees. Now, we announce two more measures to aid the victims of the war, as we strongly feel that it is our responsibility as well to take advantage of our lucky situation since we are not being directly affected: Just as during the pandemic to manufacture reusable textile face masks, we've again partnered with the artisan clothing small business Borsika Portéka: This time, they've produced more than 200 large-sized polar blankets that Maltese social workers will hand out to refugees at the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. The blankets were produced at manufacturing cost, fully sponsored by Lombiq. See the pictures below! We hereby offer direct help to Ukrainian refugees coming to Hungary: Are you a software developer working in .NET and/or web development, or work in similar areas (you can check out our open-source activities here)? Or do you think we could otherwise work together? Then we can provide you with work and figure out your and your family's stay in Hungary. Contact us! We encourage you to donate as well to a sympathetic and reliable organization helping alleviate the humanitarian crisis. Our recommendation, as usual, is to help the Malteses. Update 27.03.2022: The Malteses have written an article about our donations too, check it out here.

The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war put everyone in Europe, and globally as well, on the edge. As a company headquartered in neighboring Hungary, but with colleagues from multiple European countries, we're especially shaken. Seeing this level of military aggression is not something we believed can happen even two weeks ago. Fortunately, we have no team members in, or economic relations with any of the affected countries, and are safe under EU and NATO skies. We can continue to operate normally, as far as normalcy goes these days. Our lucky situation is also a responsibility, however. This is why we've answered the call of the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta and made our largest donation yet from our financial reserves. As a charity NGO, the Malteses provide humanitarian aid in the field, with their members helping Ukrainian refugees not just within the Hungarian borders but also in Transcarpathia, Ukraine. We're donating to the Malteses routinely due to their unfaltering professionalism and proven track record of alleviating social issues, thus providing help to them was an obvious quick choice. We also encourage you to donate to the Malteses for this cause here. To say that we're closely monitoring the situation would be an understatement. As the events unfold, we'll see when and where our help may be needed, or if we need to adjust how we run Lombiq.

We have more than 160 open-source repositories under our GitHub organization, out of which more than 140 are somehow related to Orchard (including Orchard Core and 1.x). Up until now, if you wanted to utilize our projects in your own ones, you could only reference them as Git submodules or copy over the source files. Now, however, all the Orchard Core-related projects of ours, as well as several others, are available as NuGet packages! For those projects that are available on NuGet, now you'll see a NuGet shield in the Readme, like it's visible under Helpful Libraries (and for that, there is even more than one package!). Installation instructions and user guides were also updated to reflect that now you can use these projects both from NuGet and as the full source as Git submodules. Do you want to easily publish your projects to NuGet as well? You can build on what we've created for that: Take a look at our new GitHub Actions project that we developed with the help of Orchard community member Dean Marcussen. Here, among others, you can also find a GitHub workflow that fully takes care of publishing your project to NuGet for you. You just have to push version tags to your repository, and in a few minutes, the new package will appear on NuGet. This was a huge piece of work, but we're not fully done yet. Some of our projects aren't published on NuGet due to some specialties which cause projects depending on them to have a sub-optimal publishing story as well. You can track this effort here. We hope that this way, more people can make use of our open-source work, strengthening the Orchard ecosystem. Go check out our projects under the Lombiq NuGet profile!

Did you visit Santa Monica before, either in real life or by checking out Del Perro Pier in the video game GTA V? If you did, then you know that the city is famous for its sandy beaches, palm trees, sunshine all year round, and... A new Orchard Core website! The website of the City of Santa Monica is under santamonica.gov. Before migrating it to Orchard Core it was running on Orchard 1, actually. That's when the City's government contacted us to request some Orchard consulting. The occasion was mainly that their new website was already in the works, though initially planned to be built on Orchard 1 too. We discussed the option to use Orchard Core instead, and the City, showing quite some courage to jump into a CMS new to them, opted with it. Orchard Core it is, then! During the better half of 2021, we've worked with the City as consultants. We gave recommendations, helped with blockers, did smaller development work (including a module to integrate the digital asset management platform Bynder, something we hope can be open-sourced), while the Santa Monica development team rolled out the new website. It launched not long ago, as we also published it on our Orchard showcase website Show Orchard. Just on the side, this was part of a move from on-premise to cloud hosting with Azure too, something we helped with as well, including setting up Azure Active Directory authentication. A wealth of telemetry collected with the help of our Azure Applications Orchard Core module assures that no error goes undetected, and the overall performance of the app can be closely monitored. The site also uses our Helpful Libraries, Helpful Extensions, Gulp Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets projects. We really enjoy working with the team at the City! This is what Prasanna Joshi, the City's Enterprise Architect and Digital Development Manager says about our collaboration: Lombiq is very helpful to get us where we are today. Lombiq not only provided development consulting but also answered our developers’ questions on time. They were instrumental in helping us set up an Azure environment for the Website. Lombiq also assisted in creating short-term and long-term solutions for our approach. We continue to rely on Lombiq's expertise as we move to the next phase of the project. Do you also run an older Orchard 1 site that could benefit from the move to the latest Orchard Core? Drop us a line and we can help you make it happen!

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. 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! 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. 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. 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.

While we had and continue to have smaller online mentoring projects, as well as bigger trainings covered by NDAs that we can't talk about, here's finally a training that we can disclose: We recently had the opportunity to provide a five-day intensive Orchard Core training for the team of In Motion. Due to the pandemic, this happened online of course. Read more on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.