When you visit a concert, you visit Orchard: Troubleshooting Live Nation's Orchard platform

Did you ever go to a concert? Well, then most possibly you've been a guest of Live Nation Clubs and Theaters: A subsidiary of the Fortune 500 entertainment company Live Nation, Live Nation Clubs and Theaters manages a wide array of venues within the United States. But this is not what they're famous for, they also use Orchard :). Specifically all of Live Nation Clubs and Theater venues and brands, including e.g. House of BluesThe Aztec Theatre, and the Coca Cola Roxy are part of a 50-site multi tenant Orchard application. And we helped to iron out a few issues.

Running 50 sites in a multi tenant Orchard app is not an extreme number (we have 3600 sites on DotNest) but if you have such high-profile websites it's still a challenge, especially operations-wise, to keep it all working smoothly. Live Nation Club and Theaters's development team got in touch with us to help troubleshoot some evasive bugs that hogged the whole application randomly when modules were enabled or disabled. We drilled into the issue and came up with a solution for the application's hosting environment, so the whole platform is much more stable now. We also helped the Live Nation Clubs and Theaters team with a few other issues and questions, and still continue to work together so Orchard serves them well.

This is what Bryan Pritchard, Sr. Director Digital Development & Content Production told about us working together:

There was this pesky problem that surfaced randomly when we enabled a feature on one of our sites and caused recurring (though short) downtimes. Since there was enough work on our plate already we reached out to the Lombiq team to help us fix the issue, which they soon did! We'll continue to be in touch with Lombiq as our Orchard experts.

Do you also have a big multi tenant Orchard app that needs some maintenance? You found just the right team, get in touch with us!

Other recent posts

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!