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.

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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!

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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.

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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?

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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!

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When building a web-based service that will be used by people all around the world you also have to think about network latencies that are imposed by geographical distances. Your service itself may be very fast, but it won't matter if users on the other side of the globe will experience it with a delay of 1 second.

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This year's Orchard conference, Orchard Harvest will be held in Seattle between 9-11th June. A huge crowd of Orchard enthusiasts will be there, including renowed developers from Microsoft, that also provides the venue. And Lombiq will also attend: we'll share with you what we learned during creating DotNest in the last talk of the conference! See you there!

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We are happy to announce the second developer competition in Orchard's history, the Orchard Spring Harvest Challenge! Orchard 1.8 was released recently and we'd like to give the developer community some boost to support this awesome new version, that's why the 1.8-compatibility is in the center of this competition: you can apply with a completely new module that is compatible with 1.8 or update your old module for the new version. For more information please visit the event's website (hosted on DotNest, of course).

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Ever wanted to send some persistent notifications to the users of your Orchard site? This is now very easy with our new User Notifications module that we developed for RealtyShares: with User Notifications you can send notifications to individual users or groups of users, regardless the number of recipients. Tracy Gonzales, the Lead Engineer of RealtyShares said this about our work:

This module has been in production on www.realtyshares.com for several months, and it runs without a hitch. Not only is it easy to use, but it's also very efficient. RealtyShares is able to send batches of notifications on the order of tens of thousands without straining the web server or interrupting the user experience. Scaling isn't a concern either, as the module was designed to handle much higher volume.

The notification content is also token aware, so it's possible to send personalized messages addressing the user by name. This feature is very handy.

If you're looking for easy ways to engage users on your site, this simple yet powerful module is an indispensable tool.

Check out User Notifications so your users always can know what's up!

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Orchard CMS lacked a software as a service provider until now: precisely a week ago we opened our first software service, DotNest. DotNest gives users the ability to set up any number of Orchard websites after registration, without having to worry about development, hosting, deployment and maintenance. Hosted sites can customized in a variety of ways, including the usage of recipes and complete control over styling.

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Following the first Orchard university subject and the first open Orchard online course, Dojo Course, this year we continue with the first online university subject about Orchard. Óbuda University rolled out many online subjects this semester (to add to the list of "first"-s, this was also the first time the university started courses that were strictly just online courses, without any classroom attendance), one of them being ours: "ASP.NET MVC web application development using the Orchard content management framework" (which wins the award for the subject with the longest name too!). This is an exciting opportunity to test how well students can learn by just watching the tutorials, reading the supplied supporting materials and practising themselves. The project ideas we got submitted this far look very promising!

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Our second Orchard university course finished - but this time it was also a massive online course. With the free and open Dojo Course we reached more people than we ever could with an on-site course. You can read the full case study for the Orchard Dojo Course and the Orchard university course on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.

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Orchard, the beloved content management framework we built Lombiq on admittedly has a steep learning curve. Well, with great investment into learning Orchard comes great power or something, but still, how can we make some simple, everyday development tasks in Orchard easier? Can we also give beginner developers a tool to quickly flush out some simpler modules with only understanding the basics, leaving some more time to learn the whole system?

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