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.

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.

Kast is an Australian company and one of their primary goals is to implement the Kast platform with the Kast Group Finder component. We worked together with Seth Cleaver (Co-founder and Director of Kast) on this tool to be able to create an intuitive self-service process that enables people within a church to easily find a suitable group to attend, simplify the administrative processes required for getting people into groups, and provide information to the group co-ordinators that might assist in planning and measuring effectiveness. Background information Every tenant of Seth's platform has a complex architecture that consists of two huge components: Event Management and Group Finder. Besides multiple church services, the Kast platform has a lot of events, including youth groups for a range of different ages, interest groups such as dances and art, men's and women's events, and so on. Some of these are single events and others are recurring. The Event Management component is responsible to provide the community and the members to easily discover these events using an attractive and easy to understand platform. They have two websites, all running on Orchard Core: https://www.kast.io/: The homepage of the Kast Group Finder. https://demo.kast.io/groups/: A demo website where you can experience the demo about the Group Finder. Since March 2019 we've been helping Seth to build the Kast platform. Before starting to code together, we started with a training to give an overview of what can be achieved with Orchard Core, how can you do the content modeling, build your own custom theme from scratch and use Vue.js in Orchard Core to create multiple apps. But what does Seth say about this? The team at Lombiq have been an integral part of the delivery of the first release of our SaaS product in 2019. Lombiq's unique combination of expertise, talent and experience mean that they not only understand the requirements of the project they are undertaking but how it contributes to the wider vision for your product. The value of this can not be overstated. Having personally been in the web development space for over 16 years, I have found that Lombiq are one of those rare finds that consistently deliver more than expected in all that they do. Now let's have a closer look at the Group Finder! But before doing that we have to get a deeper knowledge about how groups are made up. Overview of what we've developed First of all, every group has gatherings at different times. For example, a group could have gatherings every Saturday or every second Saturday at 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. To store the frequency of the recurring events that can be added to the user's calendar we decided to use RRULE strings. By using that we can programmatically define recurring and scheduled events. But of course, the users don't want to enter this kind of strings on the admin side of the site when creating happenings for the groups. We needed to implement a UI, where they can easily set up the start date and time with the end date and time and of course set the frequency. To solve this issue we implemented a form something similar that you can meet with on this page. This event date editor is created by using Vue.js. Many churches already maintain group information and more in a church management system (ChMS), therefore our next task was to do the integration between Seth and his company and Elvanto. Calling Elvanto APIs and parse the JSON response could be not so tricky, but constructing the Group content types based on the input data involved more work. The Group Finder app itself is a Vue.js application responsible for returning groups based on various search conditions. First, users have to provide a few details about themselves, then choose the relevant group types to show the right groups. For this, we needed to provide different pages with different kinds of forms. The Vue Router (which is the official router for Vue.js) is responsible for the navigation between the pages and to build this Single Page Application for easy usage. We used our open-source Vue.js module for Orchard Core to add the Vue.js component templates to Group Finder. If you are curious about how to use Vue.js within Orchard Core, you could see some great examples in our Orchard Core Training Demo module. There are many times when building an application for the web that you may want to consume and display data from an API. There are several ways to do so, but a very popular approach is to use axios, a promise-based HTTP client. When users get the list of the groups they can choose between them to find the relevant groups. When users would like to connect to a group, they need to send an expression of interest first with a personalized message. This means that the user, the group coordinators, and the group leaders will get an e-mail notification about the new person who would like to join the group. Conclusion The platform for Seth and his company involves lots of settings using the dashboard. By using Orchard Core, we could implement an interface for users with higher permissions to easily access the settings they need (and not more) without building the whole backend of the platform from the ground. Thanks to our new custom workflow tasks that users could easily set up, sending emails to the preferred addresses are solved in a very extensible way. And because Orchard Core itself also using Vue.js in some of the built-in modules, we didn't have to go far if we needed to find great examples to solve a given problem. Is your company also ready to make the Orchard leap? Let's have a call!

Unemployment is thankfully not something you need to worry about too much if you're an Orchard developer and you're doing your job well. But if things do go south it's good to get some help, the kind that the Employment Security Department of Washington State offers, among a lot of other services. And maybe they'll hire you as an Orchard developer since their website also runs on Orchard! What's more, the website now includes a module developed by us too. That the ESD website runs Orchard you may have heard, since we've added it a while ago among the showcased Orchard websites on Show Orchard. While previously we've done some work on the State's Paid Family & Medical Leave portal as well the news is that the ESD website now also includes a 1.x port of the Orchard Core Content Preview module. If you don't know the Content Preview module allows you to open a live preview window of a content item in Orchard Core. With this, you can see how the content will look like in the context of the site's frontend, not just in the editor. It's very useful to get an actual "what you see is what you get" experience on each keystroke. We've ported this module from Orchard Core back into Orchard 1.x, taking care to also make it support TinyMCE and the Layouts module. It's now available in the official Orchard source so you can run it on your Orchard site today! Do you run an Orchard 1.x site but would like to see some new Orchard Core feature ported over? Let us know!