It has a certain ring to it when you can say your company, institute or school is 50 years, or 150 years old. How about 250 years? The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the oldest academic honor society in the US is almost that old, being founded in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. Having a history of even 17 US Presidents and countless other notable people being members, Phi Beta Kappa has an established presence to date - and a web presence also based on Orchard CMS. The Key Reporter, Phi Beta Kappa's news site, runs on Orchard. Since making modifications to an existing Orchard site can be challenging to start with, we got an inquiry: Jim Roberts, Phi Beta Kappa's Director of Information Technology and Planned Giving got in touch with us to help with a few things, change the site here and there. This is what he said about our brief joint work: From start to finish, Zoltán is the consummate professional. He is more than a skilled developer but a patient teacher and project manager as well. While the project was small in scope, I always felt as if my needs were a priority. I look forward to working with him again and would recommend Zoltán and his team without reservation. Let's see how we'll continue to work together! Do you have an Orchard site that would need some love? Just send us an e-mail!

Everybody knows the Smithsonian Institution, because as the "world's largest museum, education, and research complex" it's kind of hard to miss. What not everybody knew until this blog post is that the Smithsonian, specifically the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage also uses Orchard to run their websites! And as you may have guessed, we at Lombiq had some part in it. Folklife has three websites, all running on Orchard: http://www.folklife.si.edu/: The homepage of the Center. http://www.festival.si.edu/: Website for the annual Folklife Festival. In 2013 Hungary was the special guest, including some wild Hungarian dances. http://www.folkways.si.edu/: Website of the Folkways record label. Since March we've been helping them with new features for these websites. The first one was quite tricky: To get single sign-on working with their NetSuite app that handles ecommerce checkout for Folkways. After that we supplied, and continue to supply various smaller features (including a widget to display related content for blog posts) and consultancy sessions. But what does Toby Dodds, Technology Director of Folklife say about all this? As the Webmaster at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, I am responsible for the technical well-being of a handful of large web sites totaling close to 60,000 pages of content. Managing the sites is a complex challenge as we employ an array of different tools and technologies. Our web applications are based on Microsoft’s .NET Framework using the open-source CMS Orchard – which we love for its flexibility, good design and performance. One of the other strengths of Orchard is its stellar community of developers which we have been lucky to get to engage with. Partnering with an open-source community of developers is key to our IT strategy. Through that network we were lucky to meet Lombiq Technologies' amazing team. This spring we completed a redesign of all our three main web sites (festival.si.edu, folklife.si.edu, folkways.si.edu). It was an enormous task that pushed our organizational capacity to its outer limits. Rebuilding web sites while maintaining existing sites is grueling and absolutely requires additional highly skilled assistance. We were fortunate to be able to lean on Lombiq along the way to clear hurdles that were too high for us to clear ourselves alone. On multiple occasions Lombiq was available to us on short notice and even at odd hours. For this reason we are forever grateful for their skilled and prompt assistance and guidance. In addition to providing on-the-fly support services to our web development team, Lombiq also distinguished themselves this year by helping us break through on a challenging task related to our integration with our third-party e-commerce provider NetSuite. As a result our customers will be able to log in to our web site while simultaneously authenticating with our commerce platform. This unlocks a very exciting door for us moving forward and we would not be walking through it without Lombiq’s assistance. In short, I can’t say enough about the high-caliber of service provided by this firm of brilliant developers and kind individuals. I would whole heartedly recommend them to anyone looking to partner or enlist similar services as I’ve described above. And since the Smithsonian is a mostly government-funded institute that can pay with United States Treasure cheques we could even say that the US government uses Orchard - and is the client of Lombiq! Is your company also ready to make the Orchard leap? Let's have a call!

If you're a .NET developer, you must have heard of .NET Foundation: they basically take care of a lot of legal and administrative stuff for you if you're running an open source .NET project. They needed a new website, they wanted to use Orchard, they came to Lombiq! The old .NET Foundation website also used Orchard CMS (though an outdated version), but the project was a complete rewrite: new content structure, new theme, and new modules. Two of the modules are also open source, of course: Repository Markdown Content allows you to sync content in form of Markdown files to Orchard from a GitHub repository (much like the External Pages module does for Bitbucket repos). Feed Aggregator let's you sync content from RSS feeds. So you can hook up blog feeds for example and aggregate blog posts into an Orchard blog. The site is running on Azure in an App Service with staged publishing, using Azure SQL and Blob Storage. When due to the article about Google joining .NET Foundation the site experienced the "Slashdot effect" it was still no issue: configured with the out of the box Output Cache module the load was not even showing on the server's resource utilization. So what does Martin Woodward, Executive Director of .NET Foundation say? When looking for an Orchard expert to help us implement the new .NET Foundation site it was important that we worked with a team who had experience setting up Orchard to run at scale. We also needed some custom development done in the Orchard way, but it was important to us that the development work live on as open source modules so that all the work had some contribution back to the Orchard community. Lombiq were the perfect choice for this and I’m thrilled with the results. Martin Woodward also talks about the website in a Channel 9 video (and mentions Lombiq around 00:34:00). Are you also looking for a team to build an Orchard website for you? Get in touch with us!

The Charlotte Regional Realtor Association®, or more precisely Carolina Multiple Listing Services® got in touch with us to get some hands-on help with launching their new Orchard-based websites. The Association represents more than 9000 Realtors® (real estate professionals) in the Charlotte (North Carolina, USA) region. The new web presence, launched recently, consists of three websites: CarolinaHome.com (the Association's main website), MingleSchool.com (real estate school and training) and CarolinaRealtors.com (local Realtor® member site). Lombiq helped the small IT team of CarolinaMLS® with Orchard advisory and development: this consisted of, among others, a thorough code review, upgrading the websites' code from Orchard 1.7.0 to 1.8.1, then to 1.10.1, a data sync daemon that constantly synchronizes real estate listings from a legacy database to the Orchard site and various Orchard advisory. Furthermore due to the vast amount of content items (more than 40000) certain performance problems in Orchard surfaced and CarolinaMLS® sponsored to fix a very important issue with Autoroute. This is how Mike Caesar, Director of Marketing and Communication of Carolina summarizes it: Lombiq took the time and effort to understand our unique business needs. The work performed was of good quality and delivered on time. Response time for questions and concerns was quick as well. In summary, it was a pleasant working partnership. Do you also need some Orchard development? Drop us a line!

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.

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. Having a second pair of eyes look through your code or having a second opinion about some long-term software design decisions is always a good thing. Brent's coding buddy this time was Lombiq. This is what Brent has to say about his experiences: I’ve been a software developer and architect for over 15 years. I have found Orchard CMS to be extremely powerful and well built, but it also has a non-trivial learning curve. Lombiq are my “go to” team when I get stuck in Orchard. What better colleague to have looking over your shoulder than one who has worked on the actual Orchard team themselves? They know the ins and outs of the code, why you want to do one thing rather than the other, the future direction in which Orchard is heading, and are all around Orchard experts. I’ve also found them to be professional and fun to work with. If you’re looking for a developer to help you elevate your Orchard skills or want to hand off some work to someone else, you can’t go wrong with these guys. Are you also looking for some online mentoring (see all our Orchard training types on Orchard Dojo)? Just drop us a line!

"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. ...which we did on time. The Business Listings module's task is to store and display local businesses (e.g. hotels, restaurants) in a searchable manner on websites aimed for tourists. The second Orchard module, Packages & Deals builds on Business Listings, enabling business owners to compile their offerings and show them to visitors. Both modules utilize the latest features of Orchard 1.8.1, efficiently storing and querying data, and presenting them in a manner that can be overridden for every website in a flexibly. This is what Jennifer Peper, President of Aristlotle says: "When Aristotle needed additional Orchard advice and application assistance, we interviewed and partnered with Lombiq. Aristotle had a very tight turn-around for the production of key Orchard modules that involve complicated query structures and access legacy data. With a very rough draft of the specifications, Lombiq’s team started immediately and independently worked in a compressed timeframe to develop a key application for our company. They asked important questions, provided in-depth and long term solutions, and used the most advanced features of the latest version of Orchard. We look forward to our next project with their team. It is so rare to work with such professionals who commit to a deadline and meet it or beat it!" Update: since then we've delivered another orchard module for Aristotle: the Trip Planner module lets you select businesses from the Business Listings module to build a trip, visiting each one. Want to get an Orchard job done? You can count on us, just drop us a line.

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. Spanning across about a week we had several online mentoring sessions where we worked through the topics of multi-tenancy, shapes, navigation, localization, taxonomies and modelling the musical content in the Orchard way. To quote Erik Scofield from the Naxos developer team: "I would like to thank Lombiq for taking time to provide Naxos tailored Orchard training sessions. The training provided us with answers we needed to hit the ground running." Are you looking for Orchard expertise? Check here.

On Friday we completed a short but important emergency assignment: getting the GI Joe Search & Rescue team's website back online. The website was moved to a new hosting company but wasn't feeling all right (the standard IIS 404 page greeted the visitors). This was especially problematic given that the team needed the website for their communication on the weekend. That's when we got contacted on behalf of the team and started investigating. After checking the logs and verifying the integrity of the deployment we recognized the source of the error: although the site's database was seemingly restored all the tables were empty! Running the restore again fixed the database and thus solved the issue altogether. Naturally we didn't charge the team for this emergency fix: they don't charge you when you need their help either!