Orchard Hungary: Recent Posts
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Orchard Hungary is now driven by Lombiq Technologies Ltd.
We're very excited to announce that we decided to bring our Orchard-related activities to a new level and we founded our company: Lombiq Technologies Ltd. Lombiq will focus on Orchard development, consulting and training in the beginning. To aid learning Orchard we also opened Orchard Dojo.
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Orchard University course in the 2013. spring semester ended today
As you may have heard, the Orchard Hungary Team hosted a university course at the Óbuda University's John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics this semester. The course started in the middle of February and ended today with the "final" 9 participants (forming 5 teams) presenting their projects. Let's see them in the order of presentation:
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Content part development checklist
Make sure you don't forget anything if you develop a content part. Here's a high-level checklist you can run through so you don't forget anything:
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Orchard PHP scripting demo at Óbuda University
Orchard? PHP? Wat? Orchard and PHP indeed: we developed our Orchard Scripting Extensions module a while ago that gives you a generic scripting runtime for creating specific scripting engines for Orchard. With these engines it is then possible to greatly extend the functionality of Orchard, just by using scripts. We developed multiple engines for this framework, first a PHP one (then soon a C#/VB and JavaScript one).
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Moving Tenants across Orchard instances
A few days ago I was facing the task of "merging" two Orchard instances (both of them containing two tenants) into one. As a matter of fact I thought I was looking forward to a raging storm of errors but it turned out to be quite simple. There are two basic rules you must keep in mind:
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It will be an early Harvest this year!
Last September we could be part of the awesome Orchard Harvest, the first Orchard conference. The next Harvest is not so far: it's nearing us as it will take place in June and now in Europe, in Amsterdam! Sign up for more information or vote for the schedule on the new Orchard Harvest website!
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How to start with Orchard development?
This is maybe the first question everybody starting with Orchard development asks. I.e. what should I do to have a Visual Studio solution that I can run and play with and use to start writing an Orchard module or theme? Here are the first steps.
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Ways of source controlling an Orchard solution
When working in a team you naturally need source control but it's strongly advised even if you develop individually. So how to do this when working with Orchard? There are a few good options.
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Orchard Hungary now running on Azure
After a briefer test we decided to permanently migrate Orchard Hungary to Azure Virtual Machines.
We were on Gearhost before but we continuously experienced slowdowns and outages. On the contrary Azure VMs are very fast and reliable, the whole service being remarkably professional. Not to mention at this scale it's suspiciously cheap (for the price of a Snickers bar all of our data is stored in a geo-reduntant way; you'll have to fire at least two nukes to take down Orchard HUN).
At the moment we use an extra small VM because it simply is enough. If we happen to run out of power in the future we'll just turn up the instance size.
Our pages' response time now is around 100ms for anonymous users. And that's not that bad!
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Our first training assignment in Manchester
The Orchard Hungary Team completed its first training-related assignment at the end of January. We were contacted by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which is a governmental organisation in the United Kingdom, that they would like to migrate both their intranet and internet applications to Orchard - a process they already started to execute. They have an experienced team of software developers at the Manchester HQ for whom they sought training solutions in Orchard: that's where we came into picture.