It's not just companies, often we help Orchard freelancers as well: this time Brent Carter, a fellow Orchard developer needed some thoughts on his running Orchard projects, like one web app helping children in the US learning Chinese.

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"No time to explain: get into development!" Roughly this is how we started to work with Aristotle, the award-winning creative agency from Arkansas. In a sprint of two weeks we had to deliver two Orchard modules for listing local businesses and managing their deals.

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We all know that with software stuff tends to break or doesn't work as expected - at least for some users. Then it would be great to see exactly what those "some" users experience. So why not authenticate as them? This is now possible with our new Orchard module, Login as Anybody.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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!

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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!

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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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