With a strong background in migrating websites to Orchard Core, we embarked on a journey to revamp hastlayer.com, the home of our cutting-edge .NET hardware acceleration project Hastlayer. This transformation was not merely a migration from the older Orchard 1 CMS; it was an opportunity to embrace Orchard Core's superior performance, modularity, and development experience. However, this migration was more than just a technical upgrade. It was a chance to refresh our website's appearance and align it with contemporary design trends. Hastlayer’s website was due for a facelift, its design needed a modern touch to resonate with current web aesthetics. Leveraging our expertise and experience, we utilized several of our own open-source projects developed over the years. Key Orchard Core modules such as Lombiq Privacy and Lombiq Helpful Extensions, along with utilities like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, played a pivotal role. The Lombiq Base Theme as well as the theme of our company website served as the foundation for our theme, providing a robust starting point for customization. A distinctive aspect of this project was the creative process of reimagining hastlayer.com. Unlike client projects where we respond to external requirements and feedback, this was an internal endeavor. Collaborative brainstorming sessions shaped the vision and identity we wanted to communicate to our audience. We aimed to maintain a visual coherence with lombiq.com’s design, simultaneously, we aspired to inject a sense of uniqueness and distinction into hastlayer.com. To maintain simplicity, we reused numerous design elements and built upon them. Aligning the team's diverse perspectives required several iterations, but it ultimately led to a cohesive design that represented Hastlayer's ethos. The result is a revamped site that we are immensely proud of. It reflects our identity and the services we provide. We invite you to explore the new hastlayer.com and experience the innovation that defines us. As we revel in the success of this project, we look forward to future opportunities to renew and refine our digital footprint. Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Hastlayer, and more Orchard Core migration projects!

Git-hg Mirror is a site of our own, that was previously built on Orchard 1 and was migrated to Orchard Core. The site is a simple-to-use (at least this is the intention) web application to automatically keep a Git and a Mercurial repository or two Mercurial or two Git repositories in sync. This allows you to create mirrors of repositories in the other version control system. The site’s FAQ page provides more information about the site’s purpose and functionality. This case study delves into the intricate journey of transforming Git-hg Mirror from its original Orchard 1 roots to the contemporary Orchard Core, highlighting the technical challenges and solutions that made this transition possible. Migrating a site from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core is beneficial because it allows you to take advantage of the latest features, improved performance and a more modern architecture, ensuring your website remains up-to-date and competitive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. As usual, we leveraged many of our own open-source modules that we've built and refined over time, such as Lombiq Helpful Extensions, utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, Lombiq Base Theme as a base for the themes, Lombiq Hosting Tenants for tenant management, and Lombiq Helpful Libraries, as the name suggests, for generally useful libraries. The migration needed some work with User accounts (mainly a converter from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core and depersonalization maintenance, which is responsible for replacing the registered user's sensitive data like email address, the repository URLs or access tokens with randomly generated data for privacy reasons) thus this resulted in new additions to our open-source modules. Feel free to check these out, the User converter is now part of the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature and the depersonalization maintenance is included in the Lombiq Hosting Tenants project. Because of the user account migrations, the previously registered users will just have to reset their password the first time they try to log in, but they will get a notification about it and once they have done it, they will be good to go, nothing else has changed. We are happy with the results and the additions to our open-source modules and stay tuned, as we keep the migrations rolling.

We have a fair amount of experience with migrating different sites from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core. For example, we migrated Folkways. Now we had a chance and time to use our knowledge on our main site, lombiq.com. There was a good reason to migrate: Orchard Core offers better performance, modularity, and development experience than Orchard 1. But wait there is more!Besides migrating, we also modernized our site’s look. Let’s be honest, a renewal was overdue for our site. The site was created back in 2013! It was simple, clean, and functional, but it didn’t age well with upcoming trends and looks of modern websites. But now we can showcase our expertise and services in a more modern and user-friendly way. For this project, we used a lot of our own open-source modules that we developed over the years. These include Lombiq Privacy and Lombiq Helpful Extensions, utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, and Lombiq Base Theme as a base for the themes. These modules add various features and functionalities to Orchard Core that make it more powerful and versatile. As we were using these modules, we also encountered and fixed some bugs and issues in them. We learned that some modules can behave differently or unexpectedly depending on the context or situation they are used in. This can be challenging to detect and resolve, but it also helps us improve the quality and reliability of our modules.One of the most rewarding and innovative aspects of this project was brainstorming about the site and thinking about how we wanted to communicate our vision and identity as a company to our audience. It was a new and different experience, compared to working on client projects where we had to follow their feedback, vision, and goals. In our own project, we had to provide these ourselves and ensure they were aligned with our work and Lombiq. It was exciting, but also demanding. We all had slightly different views and thoughts about what our work and Lombiq stand for. But after several sessions of collaboration and feedback, we reached a consensus on the designs and key features that would best fit our new site.Our new site turned out great and we are very happy with it. It represents who we are and what we do as a company. We hope you like it too! And who knows which of our own sites we will renew next…

If you like music – and, truthfully, who doesn't? –, we have some good news for you: you can now browse and license music on an Orchard Core-based platform! This is brought to you by the long-standing collaboration between Lombiq and the Smithsonian Institution, which has been engaged in a working relationship with us for several years now. The sites of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage were made using Orchard 1, which we had a hand in creating all the way back in 2017. These Orchard-powered sites also include the home of the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which is now running on Orchard Core instead! Folkways, with music and Orchard at its core With Orchard Core offering an ever-growing number of benefits over its predecessor, including various performance improvements and a more user-friendly UI, the time to upgrade from Orchard 1 drew near by the end of 2021. Due to our long history with the Institution, we had the opportunity to participate in this project too. Lombiq took a major part in the migration process that was ongoing earlier this year. This included updating the existing codebase to modern standards using the latest C# language features, re-implementing our Content Editors module to make it Orchard Core compatible, as well as adding UI testing to easily spot regressions. The application also makes use of several of our open-source projects such as Helpful Libraries, Helpful Extensions, Gulp Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets. The new Folkways site launched in July and can be found on our showcase website Show Orchard as well. This is what Toby Dodds, Technology Director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, had to say regarding our collaboration: During the past year we’ve had the pleasure of working collaboratively with Lombiq to upgrade our backend CMS from Orchard’s 1.x to its more modern 2.x version Orchard Core – based on Microsoft’s Dot.Net Core. This was a complex and difficult project, but essential as well, and once again we feel lucky to have been able to work through it with Lombiq. Anyone who works around Web or IT systems knows that they are not static and always grow and expand in complexity. Collections of data grow as do the number of fields. Our collection database, which is now 20 years old is at the core of our whole enterprise and represents millions of pieces of information. Years ago, we determined that we could leverage Microsoft technologies and Orchard’s CMS to manage that data while simultaneously supporting our website. This strategy has paid off and we have been able to thrive as a business, generating revenue through sales on our website, licensing opportunities, in-kind donations, and through the distribution of our catalog to outside digital music services. All this business is data-centric and working with Orchard has given us total control of our data landscape. A big challenge, and a breakthrough, of Orchard Core is that data is accessed in a code-based way which results in better performance but required us to complete a complex migration of our data from our 1.x database held in MS SQL Server. Thankfully Lombiq was ready to take this on, helping us build a data migration process that worked like a charm and was a bridge between the old and the new. We were also able to retain access to our data in SQL, allowing us to keep our existing integrations, and the ability to query our data directly when necessary. Because data is managed within the application layer now, we have also leaned on Lombiq to develop a set of tools to Import, Export, and Update our collection using Excel spreadsheets. Our data life has gotten easier as a result and we are now better prepared to acquire, process, and distribute recordings and collections moving forward. Orchard Core represents not only a step forward for our website but also for our collection management work as well. Specifically on the website we have also been able to take advantage of Orchard Core’s improved speed to produce new tools for browsing the collection. Being able to browse and filter thousands of releases in a nanosecond is cool, no matter how you slice it. Additionally, this new speed on our website is opening a door for us to introduce a streaming audio player that depends on AJAX to maintain a persistent audio listening experience while browsing the site. This only works well if pages load quickly and do they ever! Getting to streaming is a key priority for us and now we expect to make that available to the public next year. In summary, this has been an innovative and productive period for Folkways and now that we are in Orchard Core, we are looking forward to all the benefits that will come from this hard-fought upgrade. Our success here is thanks to Lombiq who’ve had the skill, vision, and patience to work with us to overcome big challenges and get the job done. You can also check out a demo video of the app and our experiences developing it here. As Orchard Core grows in popularity, so does our experience with it. If you too would like to enjoy the various improvements the platform offers, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

Did you visit Santa Monica before, either in real life or by checking out Del Perro Pier in the video game GTA V? If you did, then you know that the city is famous for its sandy beaches, palm trees, sunshine all year round, and... A new Orchard Core website! The website of the City of Santa Monica is under santamonica.gov. Before migrating it to Orchard Core it was running on Orchard 1, actually. That's when the City's government contacted us to request some Orchard consulting. The occasion was mainly that their new website was already in the works, though initially planned to be built on Orchard 1 too. We discussed the option to use Orchard Core instead, and the City, showing quite some courage to jump into a CMS new to them, opted with it. Orchard Core it is, then! During the better half of 2021, we've worked with the City as consultants. We gave recommendations, helped with blockers, did smaller development work (including a module to integrate the digital asset management platform Bynder, something we hope can be open-sourced), while the Santa Monica development team rolled out the new website. It launched not long ago, as we also published it on our Orchard showcase website Show Orchard. Just on the side, this was part of a move from on-premise to cloud hosting with Azure too, something we helped with as well, including setting up Azure Active Directory authentication. A wealth of telemetry collected with the help of our Azure Applications Orchard Core module assures that no error goes undetected, and the overall performance of the app can be closely monitored. The site also uses our Helpful Libraries, Helpful Extensions, Gulp Extensions, and NPM MSBuild Targets projects. We really enjoy working with the team at the City! This is what Prasanna Joshi, the City's Enterprise Architect and Digital Development Manager says about our collaboration: Lombiq is very helpful to get us where we are today. Lombiq not only provided development consulting but also answered our developers’ questions on time. They were instrumental in helping us set up an Azure environment for the Website. Lombiq also assisted in creating short-term and long-term solutions for our approach. We continue to rely on Lombiq's expertise as we move to the next phase of the project. Do you also run an older Orchard 1 site that could benefit from the move to the latest Orchard Core? Drop us a line and we can help you make it happen!

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!

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!