Catch Slow SQL Before Production, How to use Orchard Core Agent Skills? - This week in Orchard (07/08/2026)
Want tighter control over your login screen's security policy? A new setting lets you turn the Remember Me option off site-wide, not just hide it.
Wondering how a team actually keeps its AI-assisted development consistent? New documentation and two updated agent skills cover exactly that.
And curious how you catch a performance regression before it reaches production, not after? Lombiq's new SQL query monitoring feature, built on the same open-source toolkit Lombiq uses on client projects, does precisely that.
This week's changes come from Mike Alhayek, plus agent skills work from Antoine Griffard and Sébastien Ros, and a new tool from Lombiq.
Orchard Core updates
New Allow Remember Me Login Setting
This feature by Mike Alhayek adds a new AllowRememberMe setting in LoginSettings, so administrators can control whether the Remember Me option is available on the login form at all. When it's off, the checkbox is neither shown nor respected, so the option is a real security policy control, not just a UI toggle.
To try it out, head to Settings -> Security -> User Login, where you will find the new Allow user to be remembered during login checkbox, defaulting to true. Turn it off, and the Remember me checkbox disappears from the login screen entirely.
How to use Orchard Core Agent Skills?
Orchard Core has had several agent skills for a while, but no documentation on how to use or contribute to them, until now. Thanks to Antoine Griffard, there is a new documentation page that covers where the skills live, which ones are available, and how to use them. For teams onboarding new developers (or new AI agents) onto Orchard Core, that's one less thing to figure out by trial and error.
Antoine also added a new skill, Orchard Core Setup Recipe Creator, which creates Orchard Core setup recipes (.recipe.json) that provision a tenant on setup: enabling features, setting themes, defining content types, importing content, roles, and settings. Use it when you need a setup recipe, a starter recipe, or automated tenant configuration.
Sébastien Ros improved the orchardcore-tester skill, so an agent can reliably stand up an Orchard Core site for browser-based functional testing. Find the updated skill, which tests Orchard Core features through browser automation: admin features, content management, media library, and module testing.
Demos
Catch Slow SQL Before Production - Lombiq's Query Monitoring Explained
This week, you can see a new feature in the Lombiq UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core: automated SQL query monitoring for UI tests. It flags three common performance problems as tests run:
- duplicate SQL queries (the classic SELECT N+1 signal)
- duplicate queries with identical parameters (usually a missing cache)
- and oversized result sets (usually a missing filter or paging).
It's disabled by default since it adds overhead, so you enable it for the tests where it matters, either as manual assertions after specific page changes or automatically on every page load, with configurable thresholds and execution filters. When a check fails, you get the URL, failure category, threshold, and full SQL call stack, so you can tell right away whether it's a real regression or just needs tuning.
The easiest way to try it out is to clone Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions solution. This Orchard Core Visual Studio solution contains most of Lombiq's open-source Orchard modules and themes, as well as related utilities and libraries, including our UI Testing Toolbox for Orchard Core with several samples and documentation.
You will find a class called SqlQueryMonitoringTests in the Lombiq.Tests.UI.Samples project that contains several well-documented tests. We will run the first one, called SqlQueryMonitoringExplicitAssertions. But before doing that, we added a for loop to our code that will query all of our published content items a hundred times, so we have something for the monitor to catch.
If we run our test and check the Test Detail Summary, we will see two failure categories:
- DuplicateCommandText
- DuplicateCommandWithParameters
Below the categories, you can see guides, threshold configuration values, and call stacks to help you identify and fix the errors raised by our feature.
For teams maintaining a codebase long-term, this is the kind of check that catches performance regressions in code review instead of in production, backed by the same open-source toolkit (Selenium, Atata, xUnit, cross-browser, CI-ready) Lombiq uses on its own client projects. Watch the demo on YouTube for more, or check the docs for setup details.
News from the community
Orchard Harvest 2026 Program
The Orchard Harvest 2026 conference will be held in Vancouver, and we look forward to seeing you all this autumn in Canada. Our confirmed dates for this year are September 10th and 11th.
Don't miss this limited-time offer: just $280 for two days of all-access learning and networking. Secure your early-bird tickets to the conference now!
The full Orchard Harvest 2026 program is live! Be sure to check out the conference's updated official website for the program!
As we move forward, we will keep community members informed of the details, and you will find every detail in this newsletter, too!
Don't miss the biggest Orchard Core event of the year!
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