Orchard Core 3.0, Admin Theme in Orchard Core: The Developer cheat sheet - This week in Orchard (19/06/2026)
We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core 3.0 is out! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core. In the coming weeks, we will explore the latest features and additions in Orchard Core 3.0!
New documentation by contributor Quoc Bao An Nguyen covers how to work with the Admin Theme in Orchard Core for building consistent, maintainable custom admin interfaces.
Thanks to contributor ghazi1567, ReCaptcha settings can now be configured via ConfigureReCaptchaSettings(), allowing keys to be pulled from appsettings.json rather than only from the admin dashboard.
A new demo by Mike Alhayek showcases how the AI Suite can route chat sessions to live human agents (e.g., via Genesys), enabling hybrid AI-and-human support workflows.
We attended Digitalk's BeerUP Tech Fest, where we networked and gave a talk on .NET web architecture in regulated environments!
Orchard Core updates
Admin Theme in Orchard Core: The Developer cheat sheet
When building modules or custom admin pages in Orchard Core, knowing how to work with the Admin Theme is essential for creating a consistent and maintainable user experience. Whether you're styling forms or building custom editors, Orchard Core gives you a clean, framework-agnostic toolkit to do it right.
Ready to build better admin experiences in Orchard Core? Dive into the Admin Theme Conventions documentation added by our new contributor, Quoc Bao An Nguyen, and start crafting custom admin interfaces that are flexible, maintainable, and visually consistent, no matter which theme your users choose.
Skip the Admin Dashboard: Configure ReCaptcha programatically
You currently need to configure ReCaptcha settings from settings. This is a good and necessary way to do it, but for environment-based settings (like different ones for staging and prod), it'd be better to make them configurable via configuration providers as well. ReCaptchaSettings is almost ready for this. We can solve this in a similar way to what we have in a lot of other modules:
- Provide an extension method to do environment configuration, similar to ConfigureAzureADSettings().
- Check that everywhere where ReCaptchaSettings is used, it's used as an IOptions<ReCaptchaSettings> and not directly as site settings (except when the site settings are edited). E.g., ReCaptchaLoginFilter goes directly to the site settings instead of going the options way.
With the latest updates by ghazi1567, you can now streamline this process using the ConfigureReCaptchaSettings() extension method. This allows you to map your settings directly from appsettings.json, ensuring the SiteKey and SecretKey are applied automatically during application initialization. Check out the documentation of the ReCaptcha module for the details, and thanks again, ghazi1567, for your first contribution!
Demos
Route Smarter: Chat Response Handlers
There is a feature in the AI Suite that is extremely helpful if you are exposing a chat widget to the public. It can change the chat's response using a chat response handler. This allows you to handle cases, like handing over a connection or a chat happening with AI. It means, like, you start a conversation with AI, and then the AI can decide to route you to a real person. So, using Chat Response Handlers lets you register custom handlers that route prompts to external systems, such as live agent platforms (e.g., Genesys, Twilio, Flex, LivePerson), rather than to AI.
This enables scenarios like:
- Live agent handoff: An AI function detects the user needs human support and transfers the session to a live agent queue.
- Hybrid AI + human: AI handles initial triage, then a human agent takes over mid-conversation.
- Non-AI chat profiles: Configure a profile to skip AI entirely and route all prompts to an external system from the start.
Check out this recording on YouTube to see how Orchard can transfer you to a human agent via the AI Chat Admin Widget and Frontend Widget. In this demo by Mike Alhayek, you can see that the AI Suite sends over the session with the context to Genesys, where the user can continue the conversation with a human.
News from the community
Orchard Core 3.0
The community yesterday released the third major version of Orchard Core with several new features and additions! This release is packed with performance improvements, bug fixes, and a variety of enhancements, making it our best version yet. Whether you're building a new project or maintaining an existing one, Orchard Core 3.0 brings stability and power to your fingertips. Why Upgrade to Orchard Core 3.0?
- Enhanced Performance: Your sites and applications will run faster, smoother, and more efficiently.
- Rock-Solid Stability: We've squashed numerous bugs, ensuring a more reliable and enjoyable development experience.
- Seamless Development: By sticking to version control best practices, we've ensured no breaking changes in any patch or minor release, allowing developers to confidently create modules and libraries that will work across the entire 3.x series.
Prior to initiating this upgrade, thoroughly review the documented list of breaking changes (such as Orchard Core 3.0 requiring .NET 10) to ensure a smooth, hassle-free transition.
Orchard Core is available as a NuGet package that you can easily add to your ASP.NET Core solution. Here's how you can get started with Orchard Core.
As you can see from the release notes, Orchard Core 3.0 contains many new additions compared to the previous version. From week to week, we try to summarize the latest features of the new release to make sure you will get the most out of your new version! If you are curious about what you can achieve, you will find all the information you need in this blog post series over the coming weeks!
Lombiq at BeerUP Tech Fest
We had a blast at Digitalk-tech's BeerUP Tech Fest! It was indeed more like a festival, with two tracks of talks running late into the night and a festival atmosphere in the garden. Met many people from Budapest's wider tech community and made many valuable connections.
Márk Bartha, Zoltán István Lehóczky, Milán Keszthelyi, and Gábor Domonkos, as pictured, manned our table at the ViVeTech Nyrt, booth and engaged with attendees. Zoltán also gave the ".NET web architecture in regulated environments: CMS or custom development" talk, sharing our experiences working with clients in the healthcare, finance, insurance, construction, and government sectors.
Orchard Harvest 2026 Early Bird tickets!
We're excited to open registration for Orchard Harvest 2026!
This year, we've also created a short "convince your boss" one-pager to help you make the case for attending. It highlights the practical takeaways, business value, and networking opportunities waiting at the event.
If you want to learn from real-world Orchard Core use cases, get a better sense of where the platform is heading, and connect with experts and active community members, this is for you. We'll be sharing this year's speakers and topics over time, so stay tuned!
Secure your spot today for the early bird pricing and get ready to level up your skills at Orchard Harvest!
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