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 The problem: Homepage widgets showing outdated content The news, press releases, and blog post widgets on the homepage weren’t consistently showing the latest items.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 Over time, the index became inconsistent with the database, resulting in outdated content appearing on the homepage.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.