Another Lombiq site was improved: Orchard Dojo
After renewing and migrating lombiq.com to Orchard Core, our next bigger target was Orchard Dojo. Orchard Dojo was actually created before lombiq.com, so it was even older, but not by much. With our new experiences from migrating lombiq.com, we started working on Dojo.
The same way as with lombiq.com, we wanted to modernize the site, while improving the looks. So, Dojo was redesigned while keeping the core functionalities, and message of the website. We wanted the design to look similar to the lombiq.com website, but at the same time stand apart from it. This was achieved with a new color palette, that uses a darker less contrasted version of the original Lombiq colors (red, blue, and green). We also focused on improving the site's usability and aesthetics, ensuring it is both visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Besides the looks, we migrated the Dojo to Orchard Core from Orchard 1.x. The site became part of the multi-tenant application that lombiq.com runs on. As usual, we used a lot of our open-source modules. These include Lombiq Privacy and Lombiq Helpful Extensions, utility modules like Lombiq NodeJs Extensions, and Lombiq Base Theme as a base for the themes. Using Lombiq Helpful Extensions was especially important here because there was a lot of content to migrate. With the help of the Orchard 1 Recipe Migration feature, we migrated Orchard 1 content items to Orchard Core, like blog posts pages and taxonomies, it was way faster than doing it manually. We also kept the searching functionality, this time we used Elasticsearch.
In the meantime, one thing was missing from not just the new Orchard Dojo site, but from the new lombiq.com site too: the commenting functionality for the blog posts. We thought about a lot of solutions, but in the end, we chose Giscus. Giscus is a comment system powered by GitHub Discussions. It allows users to add a commenting feature to their websites or blogs using GitHub's discussion threads. We integrated it and migrated the comments from the old websites.
Brainstorming about Orchard Dojo was made easier by the experiences we gained while renewing lombiq.com. Though Dojo has more pages (for example the training topics and modules), so it was challenging to create a new structure of the sites, that is easier to navigate, but at the same time, it stays true to the original site. While implementing the design we had an easier job, since we made sure to write reusable code, while working on lombiq.com.
The new site turned out great and we are very happy with it. We hope you like it too!