We have more than 160 open-source repositories under our GitHub organization, out of which more than 140 are somehow related to Orchard (including Orchard Core and 1.x). Up until now, if you wanted to utilize our projects in your own ones, you could only reference them as Git submodules or copy over the source files. Now, however, all the Orchard Core-related projects of ours, as well as several others, are available as NuGet packages! For those projects that are available on NuGet, now you'll see a NuGet shield in the Readme, like it's visible under Helpful Libraries (and for that, there is even more than one package!). Installation instructions and user guides were also updated to reflect that now you can use these projects both from NuGet and as the full source as Git submodules. Do you want to easily publish your projects to NuGet as well? You can build on what we've created for that: Take a look at our new GitHub Actions project that we developed with the help of Orchard community member Dean Marcussen. Here, among others, you can also find a GitHub workflow that fully takes care of publishing your project to NuGet for you. You just have to push version tags to your repository, and in a few minutes, the new package will appear on NuGet. This was a huge piece of work, but we're not fully done yet. Some of our projects aren't published on NuGet due to some specialties which cause projects depending on them to have a sub-optimal publishing story as well. You can track this effort here. We hope that this way, more people can make use of our open-source work, strengthening the Orchard ecosystem. Go check out our projects under the Lombiq NuGet profile!

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.

If you're a user of Atlassian's chat service, HipChat, just like us, then you've surely heard that it'll be retired in February 2019. While Atlassian recommends and officially supports migrating to Slack what if you wanted to try Microsoft Teams instead? While there is no official support from Microsoft to migrate to Teams you can try our free and open source tool that we're releasing just now! Our HipChat to Microsoft Teams Migration Utility can be used to import the contents of a HipChat export file into Teams: HipChat rooms will be re-created as channels and messages will be imported. The app is not too easy to use and this being a preliminary release it has a lot of features missing. However, if you're interested in moving from HipChat to Teams (or just want to evaluate Teams as one of the alternatives) you can try it out to get at least some of your existing content into Teams. Let us know how it works for you and if you can contribute with bug reports, feature requests or code that would be awesome! Grab the app from GitHub!

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!

Fields in Orchard are simply to use ways of building your own content: you can enrich content items to store a variety of data in the available fields. With our Lombiq Fields module we now add two new ones: Media Library Upload Field and the Money Field. So what are these two fields doing exactly? Media Library Upload Field: with it Media items can be uploaded attached to content items, all this in a very customizable way. Money Field: with this field you can store amounts of money, including the currency in a semantic way. You can also see the module in action in the Orchard Communtiy Meeting's podcast. Check out Lombiq Fields on GitHub or see it in action on DotNest!

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? We created the Orchard Abstractions module as a proof of concept. The module enables you to write content parts extremely easily. You remember (or if you're beginning with Orchard: you'll soon learn) that to write a custom content part you have to think about not just the part itself, but also about data storage (either with records or through the InfosetPart), migrations, drivers, handlers, you have to understand shapes (with intricate but awesome details like shape factories) and placement. With Abstractions we made this easier: as the bare minimum you only have to write a content part class (basically a simple POCO with virtual properties) and a display and/or editor template for it. That's it. If you want to be more advanced and display something through the part that should be calculated somehow you can attach such logic by implementing a simple interface. All this is what we called Quick Parts. On top of that Abstractions also contains Quick Widgets: by deriving your content part from a specific class you'll get your part set up as a widget for free. How about that? :-) Also everything you write using Quick Parts or Quick Widgets uses standard mechanisms in the background. So if you decide to go hardcore and customize everything you can do that by gradually enhancing what you've written to the point where you have the whole module done in the standard way. Your parts' data won't get lost, there is no data migration needed. Most of your code will remain intact and the remainder should just be copy-pasted elsewhere. If you feel adventurous take a look at the separate samples project and begin to write your parts - quickly.

Our new Download as... Orchard module brings the ability to download content items as files: currently HTML or PDF. This means you can give automatic download links for your contents on your Orchard sites (something that's our profession to develop). The module even cares about flattening hierarchies of content that are defined with container-contained connections. We already use the module so you can download the vast knowledge collection of Orchard Dojo Library. You can see a demo of the module on the Orchard podcast.

A bit more than a week ago we demoed a new Orchard module of us on the Community Meeting, Antispam. The module contains only one small but useful feature, a content part (JavaScript AntiSpam Part): this part prevents clients not running JavaScript from posting content item editor forms. What this means is that content item forms (like comment forms or contact forms) employing this part can't be posted by spambots, since spambots commonly don't support JavaScript fortunately. Following the decision on the meeting we also quickly added this feature to the built-in Orchard.AntiSpam module, so if you're running the latest Orchard source (like the Lombiq sites do) you can already use JavaScript AntiSpam Part! We use it and it really works!

At Lombiq we believe in open source and empower it how we can: for example we routinely release open source Orchard modules that are freely usable by anyone on their Orchard-driver websites. Recently we created two modules: Watcher and Route Permissions. Watcher enables users to "watch" content items, i.e. subscribe to notifications if the item changes. The module integrates with the new Orchard 1.7 module Workflows and is thus very generic: you can e.g. send e-mails to subscribed users when a message is posted to their watched forum or if a comment appears under their watched blog post; but not just e-mails, you could set this up to send private messages, sticky notifications, anything that is usable from a workflow. You can get an idea of how Watcher works from its readme. The Route Permissions module enables you to configure access control for URL patterns defined by regular expressions. This is convenient if you have sections on your website defined by a directory structure (e.g. blog/private vs blog/public) as you can use such URL patterns to quickly restrict access to a bigger part of the site. If you have any questions about our modules or need help about something don't hesitate to drop us a mail. You can view all of our open source modules under our company profile on GitHub.

We recently released a new module of ours, Associativy Internal Link Graph Builder. This module lets you automatically build Associativy graphs by parsing internal links between content items. Associativy graphs are networks of connected content items that can be visualized, explored and searched in many ways, creating a unique form of content display. The Orchard Dojo Graph runs on Associativy too and uses our new module.