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.
Preventing skin cancer with Orchard: The Skin Cancer Foundation's website
We should really take better care of our largest organ, the skin. The Skin Cancer Foundation, a non-profit from New York City, helps by educating people on skin cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment - it's actually the only international organization to focus on this. And as you may have guessed, their website runs on Orchard CMS! So they got in touch with us and we worked together on a series of tasks to upgrade the site a bit. The Foundation's website has previously run on Orchard v1.4. If you're not entirely familiar with Orchard's release schedule then now you'll know that 1.4 was released in 2012. That was quite a while ago, so an upgrade was due: Our first task was to upgrade the site to 1.10, the current version. Secondly the site was not very convenient to use on small screen mobile devices. To mitigate this we've implemented a responsive retrofit, only changing what was really needed and keeping everything else from the original theme intact. Now if you check the site from a mobile device it will work as you expect it. We worked together with Victoria Silecchia, Skin Cancer Foundation's Digital Content Manager and Mae Fang, the Foundation's Web Developer to deliver the updates to the site, which were rolled out at the end of 2017. Victoria summarized the project as following: Going into this project, we weren't quite sure where to start or what the best approach was to meet our needs (and our budget). From our first interaction with Zoltán and team, we were put at ease. They presented us with a number of options that would allow us to achieve our goal, and they helped us understand the pros and cons of each. Once we were ready to move forward, the Lombiq team was always available to answer questions we had and kept us informed of the progress. At the end, they delivered exactly what they promised. We are really satisfied with their work and appreciate that we have a trusted go-to Orchard expert, just an email or Skype call away! Do you have an Orchard site that would really benefit from an upgrade? Just send us an e-mail!
A new website for .NET Foundation, using Orchard of course
If you're a .NET developer, you must have heard of .NET Foundation: they basically take care of a lot of legal and administrative stuff for you if you're running an open source .NET project. They needed a new website, they wanted to use Orchard, they came to Lombiq! The old .NET Foundation website also used Orchard CMS (though an outdated version), but the project was a complete rewrite: new content structure, new theme, and new modules. Two of the modules are also open source, of course: Repository Markdown Content allows you to sync content in form of Markdown files to Orchard from a GitHub repository (much like the External Pages module does for Bitbucket repos). Feed Aggregator let's you sync content from RSS feeds. So you can hook up blog feeds for example and aggregate blog posts into an Orchard blog. The site is running on Azure in an App Service with staged publishing, using Azure SQL and Blob Storage. When due to the article about Google joining .NET Foundation the site experienced the "Slashdot effect" it was still no issue: configured with the out of the box Output Cache module the load was not even showing on the server's resource utilization. So what does Martin Woodward, Executive Director of .NET Foundation say? When looking for an Orchard expert to help us implement the new .NET Foundation site it was important that we worked with a team who had experience setting up Orchard to run at scale. We also needed some custom development done in the Orchard way, but it was important to us that the development work live on as open source modules so that all the work had some contribution back to the Orchard community. Lombiq were the perfect choice for this and I’m thrilled with the results. Martin Woodward also talks about the website in a Channel 9 video (and mentions Lombiq around 00:34:00). Are you also looking for a team to build an Orchard website for you? Get in touch with us!
Helping GI Joe Search & Rescue get back on track with their website
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!