If your website is at least just a bit popular you'll get a lot of spam in form of comment spam for example but also as registration spam: spambots will try to sign up on your site and fill your database with garbage. The Orchard registration page is no different: but now you can use Orchard's spam countermeasures there as well with the Lombiq Antispam module. We added a new feature to this module that lets you add anti-spam content parts from the built-in Orchard.AntiSpam module to the registration page as an additional layer of validation: when anti-spam validation fails, registration will fail. You can read about the details in the documentation of the module (accessible from its project page) and you can also see it action on the Orchard Community Meeting.

Recently we were invited by Microsoft to join the Azure Websites Customer Advisory Board, a group of selected IT professionals working daily with Azure, helping shape the platform. Representatives from the widely used .NET web systems Sitecore, DNN and Umbraco are also part of Azure CABs. This way we'll be able to contribute to enhance the Azure experience that many Orchard developers face daily too. The CAB membership will allow us to make DotNest, the Orchard SaaS better utilize Azure and thus continue to improve as an Orchard-based CMS as a Service platform. Orchard now has the strongest presence among all content management frameworks in the Azure Websites CAB: the two founders of Lombiq, Zoltán and Benedek became members and Sebastien Ros from Microsoft, the lead developer of Orchard takes part on the CAB meetings too. Update as of May, 2015: Microsoft Customer Advisory Boards were converted into what is now Azure Advisors. Lombiq's membership was transferred, so we're now part of Azure Advisors.

You may already know that Zoltán and Benedek were among the presenters at this year's Orchard Harvest conference in Seattle too. At the beginning of the session we announced the results of the Spring Harvest Challenge and then we continued with our talk about how we built and maintain DotNest, the Orchard CMS SaaS: 0:00:00 - 0:18:30 : Spring Harvest Challenge announcement 0:18:30 - 0:37:15 : Capabilities and features of DotNest by Zoltán 0:37:15 - 1:05:26 : Deployment and maintenance of DotNest by Benedek

Orchard is not just a CMS but also a great framework too; and it would be awesome to use the capabilities of the Orchard framework not just in Orchard web apps, but... Any application? This is exactly what the Orchard Application Host enables! The Orchard Application Host, or Orchard App Host is a framework that enables you to run your code inside the scope of an Orchard shell, but from any application: thus you can write a console app, a cloud worker, a desktop app, a Windows service, etc. and use the awesome features of Orchard like automatic dependency injection, caching, data access, shapes, logging... After you developed with Orchard everything else feels so low-level, right? Now you can supercharge any app with Orchard App Host! See it in action in the below recording of the Orchard Community Meeting (from 22:55)! Do you have a lot of ideas for using Orchard App Host now? Here's a deal! Create some cool implementation that uses Orchard through Orchard App Host and we'll personally help you if you have any issues. If you find something missing from Orchard App Host we'll implement it. And when you're done we'll post about your project here, we'll tweet about it and also feature in on the Orchard App Host project page. Just get in touch with us when you're ready!

In the beginning of this year, we were contacted by Kurt Mang, a long-time Orchard user and developer to give him assistance in his current project to migrate the website of Atlantis Programs & Pedalheads from Wordpress to Orchard. Pedalheads is a company that organizes trips and events for kids for the last 25 years with various sport activities - like cycling and swimming - to keep them healthy and happy. A truly great initiative! While Kurt was leading the development of this project, our team was tasked to migrate all the data (pages, blogs, galleries, etc.) from the old website to the shiny new Orchard one. We delivered the new database on time and the site was up and running for the deadline. Here's what Kurt said about our co-operative work: "My team turned to Lombiq to take over a Wordpress-to-Orchard migration that threatened to undue our timelines and jeopardize our project. Lombiq was our first choice, but I was concerned that we hadn't provided them enough time... Fortunately for my team and my client, Zoltán and Benedek's team came through with a top notch migration that we were able to get into production with minimal effort. It was a tough assignment with far too aggressive timelines, but the Lombiq team delivered and kept the project on track. I am happy to recommend their services and will be working with them again soon." Happy camping!

Musqle.com is a multi-language website built by Softival with the aim to provide trustworthy information and useful tools for bodybuilding and fitness enthusiasts since 2012. Last year, not long after Lombiq was founded we were contacted by Norbert Korny, the owner and lead developer of Softival to develop a fairly complex Orchard module for them: a complete set of functionalities where administrator users can create and manage training plans, users can see, copy and manage these training plans for themselves (or create plans from scratch). They can apply these training plans to their personalized "Workout Calendar", which enables users to log their actual trainings and see how they perform over time using the "Training Statistics" feature, which is capable of displaying various graphs representing the progress they are making in training specific exercises and muscles. The module is also full of other convenient features that help you manage your training and also make this experience quite friendly and customized as possible. The Trainings module was recently demoed by Benedek on the weekly Orchard community meeting, so go ahead and take a look! Happy training with Musqle.com!

We proudly announce that Lombiq is now officially "out of the garage" since last Saturday, when we moved into our first office. So from now on during the next few months the whole team is working in one place in a flat in the centre of Budapest! And here are some pictures about the process of moving in and the view from our windows!

Recently Naxos of America, the #1 independent classical music distributor in the U.S. and Canada contacted us to receive some Orchard training and advisory. Naxos is building a new music information platform on Orchard so their developers wanted to get some hands-on mentoring about Orchard. Spanning across about a week we had several online mentoring sessions where we worked through the topics of multi-tenancy, shapes, navigation, localization, taxonomies and modelling the musical content in the Orchard way. To quote Erik Scofield from the Naxos developer team: "I would like to thank Lombiq for taking time to provide Naxos tailored Orchard training sessions. The training provided us with answers we needed to hit the ground running." Are you looking for Orchard expertise? Check here.

We haven't told you here yet but recently we released two new Orchard modules! Orchard Liquid Markup is a module that extends the built-in Orchard.Templates module and allows you to write shape templates right from the admin by using the Liquid Markup language. The module is also included on DotNest sites! Associativy Taxonomies Adapter is the other new module: extending the Associtiaty knowledge graph engine it provides an automatic way of building cool graphs by using existing taxonomies (coming from the built-in Orchard.Taxonomies module). Which one got you interested?

We are proud to announce that Lombiq Technologies Ltd. celebrates its first "birthday" today! It all started on the 27th of May in 2013, with Benedek and Zoltán signing the foundation documents of Lombiq and embarking on a successful journey. We've been striving to provide high-value services, useful advices and high-quality code to our customers and we'll continue to do so for many more years to come! We'd like say thanks to our supportive families and our awesome colleagues in the Lombiq team!