The relationship between Atlantis Programs and Lombiq started in January of 2014 - less than a year into Lombiq's existence - when we migrated their website from Wordpress to Orchard with regards to theming and content. We have worked on a few other tasks regarding hosting and performance since then as well. In the second half of 2016 we were working on developing a new theme based on a sitebuild that was created with Foundation for Sites and we are in the process of developing other changes to the site: Some of them small, but one of them stands out by adding localization-related changes to make sure that an even wider audience of users can browse the site with ease (the first additional language to be added is French-Canadian with a lot of translated content). Here's what Mike Chan (Marketing and Promotions Manager) said about our recent work: Lombiq has taken us the final step in the launch phase of our new theme development. Providing strong programming knowledge and resources on their team, we feel confident that they will deliver the final outcome we hope and expect. So much so, that we have taken on another project to deploy a new localization project with their team.

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 The old .NET Foundation website also used Orchard CMS (though an outdated version), but the project was a complete rewrite: new content structure, new theme, and new modules.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!

It's called Lombiq Technologie_s_ for a reason: While day to day we are deep in Orchard CMS development we also strive to build our R&D bigger and bigger. Now Lombiq just got closer to the world of science! As facilitated by Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi, the group leader of the Wigner GPU Lab on December 2, 2016 together with Péter Lévai, Director-General of the Hungarian Wigner Research Centre for Physics we signed a partnership agreement, formalizing months of brainstorming around possible ways of cooperation. Wigner, being one of the biggest research institute in the region, from now on connects us to the natural science community. Those guys are not joking: Among others they also work with CERN, providing the second-biggest datacenter that crunches numbers for the Large Hadron Collider. You know, the one that's famous for not admitting they can create black holes not creating black holes. This partnership will allow us to begin fruitful joint projects, allowing us to help further science a bit. Our first collaborative efforts will be around Hastlayer, the tool that converts .NET software into specialized hardware, making it a lot faster and consume a lot less power: We'll test Hastlayer with highly parallelized computations of scientific models. We'll see what kind of results will come out, but exciting times ahead!

A Swiss company, inteno ag is some all around tech company: apart from custom software development services they offer product information management and publication management systems, as well as cloud computing resources. And they use Orchard, wouldn't you guess? That's how we met. Inteno runs three websites on Orchard: nuboserv.com, their main company website, nubosys.com for their cloud computing branch and acrossmedia.ch, a site developed for one of their customers, a Swiss media agency. These all run in a single multi tenant app. They got in touch with Lombiq to provide some Orchard expertise for these sites: upgrade them from Orchard 1.8.1 to 1.10.1, including some various content migrations from old modules to new ones, as well as to implement a localization infrastructure for nuboserv.com - as you may have noticed all the sites are in German, English versions are now due. Oh, and a fourth Orchard website is coming! This is what Matthias J. (Software developer at inteno ag) has to say: We highly appreciated that during Concept, Implementation and Support phase we had always one reliable person to talk to. That decreased the administrative effort and maximised the output. Lombiq is Orchard. They know everything about it. No Emmentaler cheese was harmed during the project!

The Charlotte Regional Realtor Association®, or more precisely Carolina Multiple Listing Services® got in touch with us to get some hands-on help with launching their new Orchard-based websites. The Association represents more than 9000 Realtors® (real estate professionals) in the Charlotte (North Carolina, USA) region. The new web presence, launched recently, consists of three websites: CarolinaHome.com (the Association's main website), MingleSchool.com (real estate school and training) and CarolinaRealtors.com (local Realtor® member site). Lombiq helped the small IT team of CarolinaMLS® with Orchard advisory and development: this consisted of, among others, a thorough code review, upgrading the websites' code from Orchard 1.7.0 to 1.8.1, then to 1.10.1, a data sync daemon that constantly synchronizes real estate listings from a legacy database to the Orchard site and various Orchard advisory. Furthermore due to the vast amount of content items (more than 40000) certain performance problems in Orchard surfaced and CarolinaMLS® sponsored to fix a very important issue with Autoroute. This is how Mike Caesar, Director of Marketing and Communication of Carolina summarizes it: Lombiq took the time and effort to understand our unique business needs. The work performed was of good quality and delivered on time. Response time for questions and concerns was quick as well. In summary, it was a pleasant working partnership. Do you also need some Orchard development? Drop us a line!

The code behind our two-way Git-Mercurial sync service Git-hg Mirror is now open source! We're quite an open source company with dozens of projects on GitHub but up until now the code of Git-hg Mirror was private. Why? Simply because we didn't think it's worth open sourcing (being a very specific solution) and it was just easier not to do it. But suddenly several people nudged us in the last weeks so it's now all open source! Check out the Git-Hg Mirror Daemon and Git-Hg Mirror Common repos on GitHub!

A long time ago you had to write Orchard code by hand, like cavemen. Then the era of code-writing code came when Orchardizer was released. Now we add our own take on an Orchard developer's Visual Studio extension, introducing Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension with an enterprise-level long name! Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension contains tools for some of the most common but mundane Orchard development tasks, like injecting a dependency, creating a new module or adding a new content part. Of course it's free and open source with a source repository on GitHub. So give it a try: you can install it from inside Visual Studio easily. And if you don't like something tell us on GitHub!

Our Liquid Markup Orchard module now got a lot smarter! The module enables you to create templates (from the admin or from code) in which you can use the Liquid Markup language. This is a bit more restrictive than e.g. Razor what you may usually work with when developing Orchard. However still it's quite powerful and now we have the following new features: Variables, not just fixed strings can be used when passing parameters to tags. So e.g. you can create a custom dynamic title for your pages. Accessing items of collections in the view model are now supported. E.g. from a template now you can selectively display the second and third image attached to a content item, not just the first one as before. The antiforgery token can now be displayed so you can write completely custom forms. Orchard-aware relative links can be easily constructed, so you can construct dynamic URLs that will work in any environment. Custom link and meta tags can be registered. This way e.g. you can add multiple shortcut icons for your site or add custom meta tags for Facebook sharing. Custom CSS classes can be added to shapes to improve how you can style those elements. Furthermore CSS classes can now also be added to the HTML document. For the whole list of features and examples covering every scenario take a look at the module's Readme. The modules is also available on all sites of DotNest, the Orchard SaaS. Did you get some inspiration to try Liquid? It's a safe templating language, you can even give it to non-developers. Check out the module on GitHub!

As you may have heard we were in London last week at ProgSCon, a diverse conference for programmers. And we turned software into hardware with Hastlayer! Do you want to see how we do this? Like this: This is the recording of the Hastlayer session of ProgSCon. It was a great conference by the way! Do you have an application that could be made faster? Hastlayer may be for you, drop us a line!

More than 10 Orchard developers, net 120000 lines of code and 17000km flown between Hungary and the UK - all this within 5 months. What are we talking about? Our latest Big Project! The Big Project (that shall not be named because of our NDA) was about migrating over an Umbraco app that used certain backend services to Orchard and to use a different set of backend services. Fair enough, but Big Project was really big: it's the app of the number one brand of its sector in the UK, is used by tens of thousands of people daily and the original Umbraco app was initially developed for 3,5 years! The parent company is also a Big Company by the way, traded on the London Stock Exchange as part of the FTSE 250 Index and made around GBP 700 million in revenue last year. It was quite a challenging ride: very tight schedule (3,5 years for the original app vs less than 5 months for the re-write), the biggest team of Lombiq's history working on it and an huge amount of code produced. Also lots and lots of Orchard bugs fixed. Some keywords on what the project consisted: Orchard, SASS, LESS, Bootstrap, all-nighters, web API integrations, Slack, JIRA, Octopus Deploy. Phew! While we can't disclose more details of the project or the names of the other companies involved references are available upon request, just get in touch with us! We can deliver the same power of Orchard development to you. Update: Rob King also talked about this and related projects at Orchard Harvest 2017 in New York: