Further reading
This is our blog. It contains the latest news and announcements about our open-source projects, services, and products; not least, there are gripping case studies, customer projects, and much more.
Clear Specs Go a Long Way: Inside Our Three-Year Orchard Core Collaboration with Fieldman
What happens when your application needs both stability improvements and new features at the same time?
That was the situation when Lombiq joined the Fieldman project. Their Orchard Core-based web application already had established business logic, but it required bug fixes, upgrades, and further development.
Fieldman is an American software company that helps local governments and utility vendors manage all types of assets, jobs, and field projects.
Your analytics isn’t broken. It’s incomplete.
Web analytics is the foundation of modern marketing decisions. But today, a growing portion of user behavior simply doesn’t show up in your reports.
Ad blockers, browser extensions, and privacy tools can strip tracking parameters or block analytics scripts entirely. The result is incomplete campaign data, misleading attribution, and decisions based on partial visibility.
For marketing and product teams, this is not just a technical inconvenience. It is a business risk. Campaign performance becomes harder to evaluate, budgets are harder to justify, and growth decisions rely on guesswork instead of evidence.
Bringing Orchard Core into the classroom at Óbuda University
Since 2013, we’ve been working with Óbuda University on a hands-on way to teach web development. What began as a course built around Orchard CMS later evolved into an Orchard Core-based subject, giving students a chance to learn by building something that could actually work in the real world, not just completing classroom exercises.We asked our colleague Gábor Domonkos, who has led the collaboration for years, to walk us through how the course started, how it works today, and what students usually take away from it.– How did this collaboration start?At first, the university had a Hungarian, non-developer course focused on Orchard CMS and DotNest, Lombiq’s hosted Orchard platform. Students built sites through the admin UI, which was a good introduction to content management. But once Orchard Core arrived, we saw a chance to create something more ambitious: a developer-focused subject where students could also write code and go beyond the basics.– What changed with Orchard Core?Orchard Core made the course much more flexible. Students can now learn not just how to use a CMS, but how to extend it, customize it, and build on top of it. That meant more room for customization and coding. It also gives them a much more realistic picture of what it means to develop with a modern CMS on ASP.NET Core.– How is the course structured?The semester is built around a few milestones. Early on, students choose their project topic and define the basic idea. Midway through the semester, they should already have a working site with real content. By the end, the project should be close to final, both in structure and content.The later stages are mostly about making sure students stay on track. If they need help, they can share a short update so we can spot problems early and steer them in the right direction. Some students also choose to demo their project before the official deadline.– What do students usually build? Any favorites?That depends on which version of the course they take. In the non-developer version, students often build sites with forms, search, taxonomies, and content workflows. In the developer-focused version, they go further and build custom modules, themes, and more advanced functionality.One project that stands out was a volunteer platform. Organizations could publish volunteer opportunities, and users could browse, apply, and track their enrollments. It was a nice example of how Orchard Core can support a real, practical use case without adding unnecessary complexity.– Has this led to anything beyond the course?Yes, some students later became our colleagues at Lombiq. By the time they finish the course, they already know the basics of Orchard Core and have built something real with it. More importantly, they have seen what it’s like to work with a real open-source ecosystem, not just with a classroom demo.– Where should someone start if they want to learn Orchard Core today?If someone wants to learn Orchard Core today, Lombiq has a few good starting points. Dojo Course 3 is a full video course on YouTube that walks through Orchard Core for both users and developers. We also maintain the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core on GitHub, which is a functional module with heavily commented code to help developers understand how Orchard Core works in practice. And beyond that, Orchard Dojo regularly publishes tutorials, tips, and other learning resources for the Orchard community. For us, that is the best proof that the collaboration works. Students gain practical experience, the university gets a more hands-on subject, and the industry gets people who are better prepared for real projects. We believe more universities could benefit from this kind of collaboration, whether with Orchard Core or other open-source technologies. And if you are exploring something similar, we are always happy to share what has worked for us so far.
Event management backend for one of the largest retailers
Avastec, a UK company, approached us to continue the development of their existing Orchard Core-based headless backend utilized by the event management site of one of the world's largest retailers. It was already in use with a publicly accessible Node.js-based frontend. The end client urgently wanted some new features, with follow-up tasks to optimize the system's performance, and keep the app up-to-date while maintaining the integrity of the user interface. Our initial task involved the transformation of data migrations from the simpler recipe-based paradigm to a more structured code-based approach. This transition aimed to enhance the traceability of modifications the development team applied. Simultaneously, a suite of UI tests was integrated into the workflow to uphold continuous code quality assurance. Leveraging the flexibility of Orchard Core's migration API, we executed this pivotal migration process without it negatively affecting users. Since then, we've delivered a lot to meet various user requirements, including event ticketing, integrating with a GDPR compliance API, and launching the site for another brand of the end client. One particularly interesting task was the implementation of QR code-based entry management, which we also supplemented with UI tests using the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox. We've also implemented a feature to let the app use a fake video feed during tests, what we also demoed during the weekly Orchard Core podcast. From our other open-source projects, we also utilized Lombiq Helpful Extensions, as well as Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights, since the app is hosted in Azure. This is what Steve Taylor, CTO and Founder of Avastec says about our joint work: Working with this team has been a genuinely positive experience from day one. They quickly understood the complexities of our existing Orchard Core setup and delivered improvements without disrupting a live, high-traffic platform. Their ability to balance rapid feature delivery with long-term maintainability and performance has been particularly valuable. The introduction of structured migrations, robust UI testing, and innovative solutions like QR-based entry management significantly elevated the quality of the system. They’ve consistently demonstrated technical expertise, reliability, and a proactive mindset, making them a trusted partner in the ongoing evolution of our platform. Thanks to Orchard Core, UI testing, and innovative feature implementations, we effectively addressed Avastec’s challenges and delivered a significantly improved event management backend. It continues to serve the end client, with us working on improvements to this day. Do you want to launch and event management platform on Orchard Core? We have actually built several more too, get in touch with us!
Helping out the builders of Ontario - RESCON case study
The Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON) represents professionals in Ontario’s residential building industry and leads initiatives to foster innovation across the sector. Their public website runs on Orchard Core: it's a headless Orchard Core backend powering a separate Vue-based frontend application. But an issue had started to undermine one of the site’s most important functions: publishing up-to-date content. The problem: Homepage widgets showing outdated content The news, press releases, and blog post widgets on the homepage weren’t consistently showing the latest items. Immediately after publishing, everything looked fine. But over time, older items would start appearing again. For an organization communicating important industry updates, this was more than a minor inconvenience. It affected publishing reliability and trust. Understanding the architecture Since a different developer built the system originally, our first task was to understand and reproduce the environment. The application consists of: Orchard Core running as a headless backend. A separate Vue-based frontend. Lucene search indexing powering the homepage content widgets. Getting the frontend running locally required recreating an older Node.js environment. Node Version Manager for Windows made this possible by allowing us to install and switch between Node versions easily. The root cause The homepage widgets relied on data fetched from a Lucene index. Over time, the index became inconsistent with the database, resulting in outdated content appearing on the homepage. While fixing the indexing would have been possible, we stepped back and asked a simpler question: does this feature even require Lucene? It turned out it didn’t. The fix: Simplify, don’t patch Instead of investing in a lengthy Lucene investigation, we removed the unnecessary dependency and modified the widgets to fetch content directly via SQL queries. This: Eliminated a moving part, Reduced architectural complexity, and Resolved the inconsistency issue at its root. Sometimes the best fix is not making a system more robust, but making it simpler. Leaving the system healthier While working on the issue, we also enabled Orchard Core’s Audit Trail feature, allowing precise tracking of content changes. This improves governance and operational safety, particularly important for organizations publishing public information. We also performed smaller cleanups to ensure the application was in a better state than when we first examined it. That’s a principle we follow in every project. Collaboration We worked closely with Chris Ohan, IT Lead, and Grant Cameron, Senior Director of Public Affairs at RESCON. Since Grant manages much of the website’s content, his rapid feedback helped validate improvements quickly and ensure the publishing experience was restored. This is what Grant told about working with us: Lombiq stepped in to fix a problem with several widgets on our homepage. We met virtually, explained the problem and their experts went to work quickly and identified the issue. They explained the problem to us and corrected the issue. The team at Lombiq was efficient and professional. They got our site up and running and tweaked the Orchard Core setup to improve functionality. We were more than pleased with the result. Need help with an Orchard Core issue? If your Orchard Core application behaves unpredictably, whether it’s publishing inconsistencies, performance issues, or architectural drift over time, we can help diagnose and stabilize it. Get in touch and let’s take a look.
From CMS to Collection Manager: An Interview with Toby Dodds on Orchard Core at Smithsonian Folkways
“Our CMS is not just a web-publishing platform — it’s evolved to become our collection manager.” Smithsonian Folkways runs a 75,000-track archive on Orchard Core. Director of Technology Toby Dodds shares how they moved from Orchard 1.x to Core, and turned their CMS into a mission-critical platform.
Rebuilding Flamingo Marine’s Website with Orchard Core CMS
For Flamingo Marine's new site, we built a lightweight but design-driven Orchard Core solution with flexible content editing and custom widgets. From an animated hero section to a synced dual-slider carousel, the project showcased how Orchard Core can drive clean, modern websites that are easy to update and extend.
The European Accessibility Act came into effect today. Should you care?
With the European Accessibility Act coming effect into today (June 28th, 2025), we've reached an important milestone in (web) accessibility. As the official announcement states:
"The Act mandates that a range of products and services such as consumer electronics (TVs, smartphones, computers, gaming consoles, etc.), ticketing and vending machines, websites and mobile acts, among others, comply with accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities."
An important clarification here is that the EEA "applies to businesses operating in key sectors such as banking, transport, telecommunications, e-commerce, and consumer electronics [...] for new products and services introduced after 2025."
Now, you might think that "OK, but my service has been running for years and I know my customers, do I really need to worry about this?". Of course, you should! New products/services launching under the effect of the EEA have a competitive advantage of catering to a wider audience, including those not directly affected, but caring about (or taking care of) those who are.
Since Lombiq is a web software/services agency, we'll focus on one particular aspect of accessibility: web content accessibility. We started rewriting all our websites 2 years ago and web content accessibility has been a guiding principle of our UI/UX design from the very beginning (you can also check our case studies). We can't really put any metrics behind its usefulness and we didn't care about the ROI; our open-source DNA compelled us to do so to make sure that the knowledge we share is as widely available as possible.
But: Making your website accessible is not a one-off effort - you also need to make sure that your website remains compliant. Fortunately, neither did we or you have to start from scratch with all this: Compliance with EEA is covered by compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA (at the time of writing this article) and there are a multitudes of tools to help you in this effort.
That's why we developed a component of our UI Testing Toolbox library to easily integrate automated UI tests into any ASP.NET Core application that allows you to verify WCAG-compliance. Check out our sample UI test - it really is this simple! We continuously run such tests in our own CI workflows, as well as in our clients' projects.
Let us help you help us all!
Happy complying and compiling!
Migrating the homepage of the Orchard Core SaaS DotNest to Orchard Core
Following the migration of lombiq.com, Git-hg Mirror, Hastlayer, and Orchard Dojo from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core (and also the redesign of lombiq.com and Orchard Dojo), we had only one site remaining that was still running on Orchard 1: DotNest.com. While you could create Orchard Core sites on DotNest for years, until now, the DotNest website itself still ran on Orchard 1.This marks the end of an era. Now all of our sites are running on Orchard Core, which offers better performance, modularity, and development experience than Orchard 1.Furthermore, we fixed some web accessibility problems on the site and added UI tests to make sure nothing breaks and affects you as a user.We utilized many of our open-source modules, including Lombiq Privacy, Lombiq Helpful Extensions, and utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions. For the themes, we built upon the Lombiq Base Theme. Lombiq Helpful Extensions played a crucial role in this project (and in the other ones too), as there was a significant amount of content to migrate. Leveraging the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature, we transferred Orchard 1 content items—such as blog posts, pages, and even users—to Orchard Core. Additionally, we retained the search functionality on the Knowledge Base page, now powered by Elasticsearch and the commenting on blog posts with Giscus. Of course, while working with these modules we always make sure that any enhancement that comes to mind is added to them and any bug that we find is patched. So, the wider Orchard Core community benefits from each of these projects too.This is a migration, where if you notice nothing it’s great because we migrated a lot of backend code and the goal was to keep the functionalities of DotNest, without breaking or changing anything.Migrating to Orchard Core not only brought performance increases but also added quality of life and security features, like two-factor authentication. The new foundation of the site opened new possibilities for us to bring you a better version of DotNest.With DotNest now running on Orchard Core, we’ve completed our journey of modernizing all our sites. This migration wasn’t just about keeping up with technology—it was about ensuring a smoother, more secure, and future-proof experience for our users. Although most of the changes were behind the scenes, the result is a faster, more reliable DotNest that preserves all the features you rely on while setting the stage for future enhancements.Are you still running Orchard 1 apps? Contact us to see how we can help you migrate it to Orchard Core too.
Migrating Orchard Dojo to Orchard Core
We migrated yet another Lombiq site from Orchard 1 to Orchard Core: Our Orchard learning website Orchard Dojo now runs on the latest version of Orchard. For a case study on how we completed this migration project, check out the case study on Orchard Dojo.