Canopy Realtor® Association represents more than 13,000 Realtors® across Carolinas and beyond, with its subsidiary Canopy MLS serving more than 22,000 subscribers, serving buyers, sellers, and real estate professionals across three websites: CarolinaHome.com (the Association's main site), CanopyReInstitute.com (its real estate school), and CanopyRealtors.com (the local Realtor® member site).

A decade-long partnership

We've worked with the Association since 2014, when we helped their IT team launch these sites: a thorough code review, upgrading the codebase from Orchard 1.7.0 to 1.8.1 and then to 1.10.1, building a data sync daemon that keeps real estate listings synchronized from a legacy database into Orchard, and ongoing Orchard consulting. See our previous case study about that project in this blog post.

Upgrading to Orchard 1.11

The community kept releasing newer Orchard 1.x versions, and in early 2026, Orchard 1.11 arrived. Upgrading to it mattered, because the release includes security fixes, performance improvements, new features, and bug fixes. The Association has been running on Orchard 1.10.1 since 2016, meaning they've used the platform for more than 10 years now, a track record that shows Orchard can support solutions built to last. Staying on the version-upgrade path let the Association pick up current security and performance improvements while keeping its three sites, content, and integrations exactly as they were.

A simpler theme, fewer dependencies to maintain

The upgrade also let us simplify the custom theme. Orchard ships with third-party client-side libraries like Bootstrap and jQuery, and because the site was on an older Orchard version, we'd had to bundle newer versions of those libraries into the theme ourselves. Orchard 1.11 updates them out of the box, so we could remove that custom bundling entirely, less code for the client to maintain going forward. The built-in Font Awesome update also lets us use fresh, visually appealing icons effortlessly.

Updated custom modules

We also updated the custom modules in the solution alongside the core upgrade. These are the key ones, though there were several others:

  • The Target Blank module, which opens outgoing links in a new tab.
  • The Lombiq Helpful Libraries module, which supplies extension methods and helper utilities used throughout the codebase.
  • Onestop.SEO, an SEO module originally built by Onestop Internet, now maintained by Lombiq, which handles meta tags for the homepage and other content types. It's now fully compatible with Orchard 1.11 and live on all three sites.

This is what Harman Gill, Director of Software Engineering at Canopy Realtor® Association / Canopy MLS, says about our work together:

Lombiq has been an exceptional partner in maintaining the three websites that serve our members and the public: CarolinaHome.com, CanopyRealtors.com, and CanopyReInstitute.com. Their deep expertise in Orchard CMS was evident from the start, and they consistently found sound, well-architected solutions to the complex requirements of a multi-site REALTOR® association and MLS environment.

What set Lombiq apart throughout this long-running project was their attention to detail and their patience. Across many phases, they remained thorough, responsive, and professional, catching small issues before they became big ones and never letting the pace of a lengthy engagement compromise the quality of their work and project budget. We're grateful for their dedication and would confidently recommend Lombiq to any organization looking for a skilled and reliable Orchard CMS partner.

We keep decade-old Orchard 1.x deployments secure, fast, and maintainable, the way we did here for Canopy Realtor® Association. When a version upgrade isn't the right long-term move anymore, we also migrate Orchard 1 sites to Orchard Core, as we did for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and for Lombiq.com itself. You can find more Orchard Core migration case studies here. Get in touch to talk about your upgrade or migration path!