The third Orchard Harvest conference, held in Seattle, just began! Orcharders from all around the world gathered together at the Microsoft campus to share their experiences about their favourite CMS.

The keynote by Ylan and Bertrand got us up to speed with the current news about Orchard. Ylan gave us a warm welcome and introduced some of the well-known participants to the community. After that, Bertrand showed us historical and recent statistics (along with some funny pictures) about Orchard, the community and the contributors.

In the second session, aka "the Sébastien show", the benevolant dictator of Orchard is walking us through the process and details of migrating the ASP.NET blogs to Orchard. 750 blogs hosted by 4 Azure Web Sites that run on only one Large Virtual Machine. Sébastien also talked about interesting technical details, how the migration from the old system was executed and then the conclusion came: "Orchard is fast and easy to use". Besides, the tool that was written to serve as a bridge between the old system's content and the new one (working with BlogML format and Orchard recipes) will be publicly available soon.

The next session is by Jorge and Eric from Onestop: Jorge is walking us through the development and usage of the Onestop.Layout module that enables you to create custom, dynamically rearrangeable layouts, templates and slideshows. After that, Eric talked about master-child theming. The module is open-source and avaiable on BitBucket (along with other Onestop modules)!

The last session before the lunch break is by Piotr from Proligence: Piotr is talking about how they adopted Orchard and the fact that they (and their clients) are more than happy with this decision. Proligence shares some of their modules with community as open source projects on BitBucket, like a unit testing framework, the Astoria framework and the PowerShell CLI.

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After the break Samuel Goldenbaum from Hellocomputer (CTO) is talking about their digital agency based in Johannesburg and the some of the projects they delivered to big clients, like Toyota, the Jamaican Tourism Board and FCB South Africa. The latter project also involves the creation of an Orchard backend for serving content to mobile applications when attending conferences.

Next up is the representatives of MS Open Tech, Ross Gardler and Roopali Kaujalgi. Ross is talking about the company and its relation to Microsoft, how they are working with open-source technologies and spreading the word. In the second half of the presentation Roopali is showing us how to use the Microsoft Azure Media Services module, that was recently integrated into the Orchard codebase - this module's purpose is to serve media (mostly videos) to users visiting Orchard websites.

The last presentation today is Steve Taylor's session about the future of widgets in Orchard, Web Components and Polymer.js.

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