A long time ago you had to write Orchard code by hand, like cavemen. Then the era of code-writing code came when Orchardizer was released. Now we add our own take on an Orchard developer's Visual Studio extension, introducing Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension with an enterprise-level long name! Lombiq Orchard Visual Studio Extension contains tools for some of the most common but mundane Orchard development tasks, like injecting a dependency, creating a new module or adding a new content part. Of course it's free and open source with a source repository on GitHub. So give it a try: you can install it from inside Visual Studio easily. And if you don't like something tell us on GitHub!

Our Liquid Markup Orchard module now got a lot smarter! The module enables you to create templates (from the admin or from code) in which you can use the Liquid Markup language. This is a bit more restrictive than e.g. Razor what you may usually work with when developing Orchard. However still it's quite powerful and now we have the following new features: Variables, not just fixed strings can be used when passing parameters to tags. So e.g. you can create a custom dynamic title for your pages. Accessing items of collections in the view model are now supported. E.g. from a template now you can selectively display the second and third image attached to a content item, not just the first one as before. The antiforgery token can now be displayed so you can write completely custom forms. Orchard-aware relative links can be easily constructed, so you can construct dynamic URLs that will work in any environment. Custom link and meta tags can be registered. This way e.g. you can add multiple shortcut icons for your site or add custom meta tags for Facebook sharing. Custom CSS classes can be added to shapes to improve how you can style those elements. Furthermore CSS classes can now also be added to the HTML document. For the whole list of features and examples covering every scenario take a look at the module's Readme. The modules is also available on all sites of DotNest, the Orchard SaaS. Did you get some inspiration to try Liquid? It's a safe templating language, you can even give it to non-developers. Check out the module on GitHub!

As you may have heard we were in London last week at ProgSCon, a diverse conference for programmers. And we turned software into hardware with Hastlayer! Do you want to see how we do this? Like this: This is the recording of the Hastlayer session of ProgSCon. It was a great conference by the way! Do you have an application that could be made faster? Hastlayer may be for you, drop us a line!

More than 10 Orchard developers, net 120000 lines of code and 17000km flown between Hungary and the UK - all this within 5 months. What are we talking about? Our latest Big Project! The Big Project (that shall not be named because of our NDA) was about migrating over an Umbraco app that used certain backend services to Orchard and to use a different set of backend services. Fair enough, but Big Project was really big: it's the app of the number one brand of its sector in the UK, is used by tens of thousands of people daily and the original Umbraco app was initially developed for 3,5 years! The parent company is also a Big Company by the way, traded on the London Stock Exchange as part of the FTSE 250 Index and made around GBP 700 million in revenue last year. It was quite a challenging ride: very tight schedule (3,5 years for the original app vs less than 5 months for the re-write), the biggest team of Lombiq's history working on it and an huge amount of code produced. Also lots and lots of Orchard bugs fixed. Some keywords on what the project consisted: Orchard, SASS, LESS, Bootstrap, all-nighters, web API integrations, Slack, JIRA, Octopus Deploy. Phew! While we can't disclose more details of the project or the names of the other companies involved references are available upon request, just get in touch with us! We can deliver the same power of Orchard development to you. Update: Rob King also talked about this and related projects at Orchard Harvest 2017 in New York:

Good news everyone! We're happy to announce that all our open source projects are now available not only in Mercurial, but in Git too on GitHub! We've moved 67 projects from CodePlex to Bitbucket, so you can clone, fork, raise issues and comment on them (along with all those that were already on Bitbucket) same as before and you'll get all the latest code from us instantly. You're not missing out on anything if you're using Git either: using our repository mirroring tool - Git-Hg Mirror - we've set up repositories on GitHub as well for all our open-source projects with two-way synchronization. This means that as a Git/GitHub user, you can also submit pull requests: when they are merged, the changes will be available for those who use the Mercurial repo (and vice versa), so everybody wins! Here are the links again for quick reference: Git-Hg Mirror Lombiq projects on BitBucket (Hg) Lombiq projects on GitHub Happy cloning!

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!

Microsoft is not a company that needs introduction - but one that needed Orchard training. More specifically the Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and Operations (MCIO) team (who supply the infrastructure for all Microsoft divisions, including Windows, Bing or even Azure) reached out to us: before starting a big Orchard project they wanted to have some expert help. After we became Microsoft suppliers we conducted a few days of what was an online intensive training for the MCIO team. They are now familiar with Orchard's built in features and everything a beginner Orchard developer needs to know. The only problem is that we won't see what they are building - because it will be an internal portal, just for Microsoft employee eyes.

As it happens Lombiq got to be part of the Microsoft Supplier Program - that means Microsoft is now Lombiq's customer! We actually already had our first project with one of the Microsoft teams, stay tuned for more info.

If you're using a distributed version control system in your software development team (and you really should!) then most possibly you go with Git or Mercurial. But what if you'd really like to use a repository in your project that is on the other system? Now you can use Git-hg Mirror: it's a super-simple service that automatically keeps a Git and Mercurial (or two Mercurial) repos in sync, even with two-way syncing! Commits pushed to one repo will just magically appear in the other repo. What a time to be alive! The website is (obviously) built on Orchard - you can see our demo on the last Orchard Steering Committee meeting.

Our Orchard CMS SaaS DotNest got a new look and feel! The old theme was a bit clunky, but now it looks as it should. Check out DotNest where you can create Orchard sites for free, without having to think about hosting!