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!

At Lombiq we believe in open source and empower it how we can: for example we routinely release open source Orchard modules that are freely usable by anyone on their Orchard-driver websites. Recently we created two modules: Watcher and Route Permissions. Watcher enables users to "watch" content items, i.e. subscribe to notifications if the item changes. The module integrates with the new Orchard 1.7 module Workflows and is thus very generic: you can e.g. send e-mails to subscribed users when a message is posted to their watched forum or if a comment appears under their watched blog post; but not just e-mails, you could set this up to send private messages, sticky notifications, anything that is usable from a workflow. You can get an idea of how Watcher works from its readme. The Route Permissions module enables you to configure access control for URL patterns defined by regular expressions. This is convenient if you have sections on your website defined by a directory structure (e.g. blog/private vs blog/public) as you can use such URL patterns to quickly restrict access to a bigger part of the site. If you have any questions about our modules or need help about something don't hesitate to drop us a mail. You can view all of our open source modules under our company profile on GitHub.

On Friday we completed a short but important emergency assignment: getting the GI Joe Search & Rescue team's website back online. The website was moved to a new hosting company but wasn't feeling all right (the standard IIS 404 page greeted the visitors). This was especially problematic given that the team needed the website for their communication on the weekend. That's when we got contacted on behalf of the team and started investigating. After checking the logs and verifying the integrity of the deployment we recognized the source of the error: although the site's database was seemingly restored all the tables were empty! Running the restore again fixed the database and thus solved the issue altogether. Naturally we didn't charge the team for this emergency fix: they don't charge you when you need their help either!

We applied to participate in Microsoft's BizSpark program and found to be eligible for participation. This is great news since with BizSpark we've won the opportunity to get enough support for making our services better. We'll embrace this awesome program and try to make the most of the BizSpark-backed year!