Our second Orchard university course finished - but this time it was also a massive online course. With the free and open Dojo Course we reached more people than we ever could with an on-site course. You can read the full case study for the Orchard Dojo Course and the Orchard university course on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.

Orchard, the beloved content management framework we built Lombiq on admittedly has a steep learning curve. Well, with great investment into learning Orchard comes great power or something, but still, how can we make some simple, everyday development tasks in Orchard easier? Can we also give beginner developers a tool to quickly flush out some simpler modules with only understanding the basics, leaving some more time to learn the whole system? We created the Orchard Abstractions module as a proof of concept. The module enables you to write content parts extremely easily. You remember (or if you're beginning with Orchard: you'll soon learn) that to write a custom content part you have to think about not just the part itself, but also about data storage (either with records or through the InfosetPart), migrations, drivers, handlers, you have to understand shapes (with intricate but awesome details like shape factories) and placement. With Abstractions we made this easier: as the bare minimum you only have to write a content part class (basically a simple POCO with virtual properties) and a display and/or editor template for it. That's it. If you want to be more advanced and display something through the part that should be calculated somehow you can attach such logic by implementing a simple interface. All this is what we called Quick Parts. On top of that Abstractions also contains Quick Widgets: by deriving your content part from a specific class you'll get your part set up as a widget for free. How about that? :-) Also everything you write using Quick Parts or Quick Widgets uses standard mechanisms in the background. So if you decide to go hardcore and customize everything you can do that by gradually enhancing what you've written to the point where you have the whole module done in the standard way. Your parts' data won't get lost, there is no data migration needed. Most of your code will remain intact and the remainder should just be copy-pasted elsewhere. If you feel adventurous take a look at the separate samples project and begin to write your parts - quickly.

Last weekend we've taken part on the Greenspiration startup competition in Budapest, Hungary. And we've won! You won't believe, but the green (i.e. sustainability, environment-friendliness) idea what we developed and then pitched is some hardware. So what was the big idea? Stay tuned, we'll tell you but beware that it's ridiculously simple. Meanwhile here's a picture of half of the team (Márk and Zoltán) looking concerned: The competition took place during the whole weekend, starting from Friday and ending with every team's pitches on Sunday. There was a jury of six renowned Hungarian venture capitalists, startuppers and even a counsellor from Hungary's National Innovation Office. They told that there was an agreement on our pitch being the best one. The three days were really awesome, we learned a lot as a team and got to know some great like-minded people. A big thank you for the organizers and congratulations to the other teams!

Recently the maintainers of the big Greek news site Parapolitika, the guys from the Greek subsidiary of Tatchit contacted us asking for our help: the site was going down routinely for some reason after going live (it was rewritten on Orchard from the legacy engine). The Orchard application was sometimes using up all of the server's CPU (despite it being a 24-core beast) and crashing the IIS worker process in the end. This needed some urgent fix because websites tend to be only worthy if they're alive... We immediately jumped into the task of getting the site stable! Neither the Orchard logs, neither the Windows Event Log revealed anything interesting. However soon we could experience the phenomena live: the worker process was eating up memory until at around 3,8GB while the CPU started spinning like mad and finally the process died. The Event Log told that ImageResizer.NET was running out of memory. Seriously? There are 32GBs of it, damn it! The culprit was the worker process running on 32b, thus not able to use the whole huge memory. While such big memory usage is not something Orchard does everyday (a vanilla Orchard instance in a 32b worker process uses about 80MB) this solved the immediate issue quickly. Together with some other tweaks to the server config the site was now running stable, quickly reaching new uptime records (although the previous uptimes weren't too hard to beat). In the newly gained peace we finally upgraded the site to Orchard 1.7.1 from 1.6 (the new version doesn't only give many features but also performs a way better). Meanwhile we also fixed an issue that could cause OutputCache to serve expired content. To quote Sotirios Roussos, CEO of urbanIT whom we worked with closely on this emergency: "After making some not demanding sites using Orchard, we decided to use it as CMS for creating the new parapolitika.gr, a really huge news site with more than 100.000 visitors daily and over 20 editors and a lot of content. It was a challenge for us and Orchard as well. Unfortunately, the first days were tough. Sudden breakdowns of site were appeared and the pressure was high. Orchard seemed to have limits, or maybe not? That's why we asked help for Lombiq, due to their experience into Orchard infrastructure. Fortunately, they did respond quick and spent hours and nights with us. Until we reach our goal. A stable and quick site. And, we did it. Thanx Lombiq! Keep up the good work!" It was a rush but we're really glad that we see a happy ending to this story!

We now have a consulting ethical hacker on board: László Erdődi, PhD. With his information security expertise and our in-depth knowledge about Orchard we can provide you with advices about how to make your Orchard application more secure. Is your app secure enough? Are your users' data safe? Why not let a second pair of eyes check it? Contact us for a tailor-made advisory.

In the spring semester of 2013 we started the world-first university course on Orchard at Óbuda University. The students were guided through the usage of Orchard as well as the basics of theme and module development and in the end presented their project work created with what they've learned. You can read the full case study for the first Orchard university course on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.

We were contacted by the British government agency National Institute for Clinical Excellence for an on-site Orchard training in Manchester (at the time our team being just a group of freelancers). The training was held in January 2013, with users and developers participating. Attendees learned a lot and with their newly gained knowledge were able to make NICE's work-in-progress internal and external website better. You can read the full case study for the NICE training on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.

We are very happy to announce that we just opened our free and open Orchard course, Dojo Course on our Orchard training site Orchard Dojo. The course runs in parallel with our Orchard university subject on Óbuda University: students and online participants will receive the same tutorials, same notes and supportive materials and they also have to deliver the same project work to complete the course. The course's syllabus is what we'll follow this semester until December. This all is very exciting, and we hope not just for us! If you'd like to learn Orchard from the ground up, this is a good opportunity to do so! How about enrolling?

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.

A bit more than a week ago we demoed a new Orchard module of us on the Community Meeting, Antispam. The module contains only one small but useful feature, a content part (JavaScript AntiSpam Part): this part prevents clients not running JavaScript from posting content item editor forms. What this means is that content item forms (like comment forms or contact forms) employing this part can't be posted by spambots, since spambots commonly don't support JavaScript fortunately. Following the decision on the meeting we also quickly added this feature to the built-in Orchard.AntiSpam module, so if you're running the latest Orchard source (like the Lombiq sites do) you can already use JavaScript AntiSpam Part! We use it and it really works!