Further reading
This is our blog. It contains the latest news and announcements about our open-source projects, services, and products; not least, there are gripping case studies, customer projects, and much more.
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.
Helping the City of Santa Monica with Orchard Core consulting
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!