Sponsorship Spotlight: Hisham Bin Ateya

Gábor: When did you first come across Orchard?

Hisham: My journey with Orchard started before Orchard Core, when Orchard CMS was hosted on CodePlex and simply called Orchard. To be honest, I didn't use Orchard 1 for production, just exploring what was there. I have been following Orchard Core since the beginning, when it was called Orchard vNext. It was a prototype, if I recall, and I started my first contribution on May 25, 2017.

Gábor: Right, the very first commits to the Orchard Core repo were made by Nicholas Mayne in November of 2014. That was more than 10 years ago! And why do you like contributing to Orchard?

Hisham: For me, Orchard Core is not the first project I contributed to. Open-source software is close to my heart. I had already contributed to many projects before Orchard Core. After dedicating a lot of time to Orchard Core, I found it helped me understand many aspects of the ecosystem.

This has helped me use Orchard Core in my daily development and in production websites, as well as help the community as much as I can.

Gábor: What do you like most about Orchard?

Hisham: Flexibility, Extensibility, and Community.

Gábor: Have you tried other CMSs too?

Hisham: Sure, I tried many CMSs and frameworks, including DotNetNuke (DNN), Umbraco, Oqtane Framework, and Kentico CMS in the ASP.NET Core space. I also tried many PHP CMSs, including Drupal and Joomla.

For me, Orchard Core is one of the top 3 I have ever seen, but it has a steep learning curve; there are specialized terms, such as drivers and shapes.

Gábor: And what do you think is the difference between Orchard and the other CMSs?

Hisham: Orchard Core is not just a CMS; it's a web application framework with a CMS built on top of it, which is unique compared to other OSS projects.

It contains many modules, more than enough to start building your websites and web applications without worrying about the framework and cross-cutting concerns such as multitenancy, modularity, localization, logging, and much more.

I'd like to mention that Orchard Core is very flexible and extensible, and you can do many things even if you don't own the source code. It is the only product I have ever seen that provides such flexibility, in my opinion, but it also introduces some complexity.

Gábor: You mentioned that you are contributing to other open-source projects too. What are these projects? Are you contributing to the ones you mentioned?

Hisham: Yes, of course. I also contributed to many open-source software projects before Orchard Core, including the Oqtane Framework. I contributed to SimplCommerce, as well as to ASP.NET Core in its early days, when it was called DNX (Dot Net eXecution environment).

I'm running and maintaining a few libraries, such as JSON Localizer, which has over 700K downloads on NuGet.

I'm also helping with many projects, especially in localization. For more details, you can check out my GitHub profile.

Gábor: Congratulations on reaching more than 700K downloads! And you also have a repository on GitHub called Orchard Core Contrib Modules. Could you tell us more about it?

Hisham: Yes, I started a GitHub organization named "Orchard Core Contrib (OCC)", which is from the community to the community. It contains several repositories, including APIs, modules, and themes, that are not included by default in the official Orchard Core release. There were features that started there and were later moved to Orchard Core, which is impressive.

However, I faced many challenges maintaining these 59 packages, and the number is increasing over time, which requires significant time and support to keep these projects running.

But I will not forget the very useful feedback and contributions I received from the community. On that note, I invite any Orchard developer to contribute to this great project, which is community-to-community, as I mentioned before.

Gábor: I'm glad to hear that you receive useful feedback from the community. It's always a good feeling when others use and care about a project.

Hisham: I agree. The community is one of the most important things that made this project a success story. Many OSS projects have lost traction when there was no community around them.

Finally, I can't find the words to express my gratitude to Lombiq for their financial support for my contributions.

Gábor: It's our pleasure to support the developers who power open source. One last question: are you planning to join this year's Harvest?

Hisham: Unfortunately, no, due to the difficulties in reaching Canada and the US.

Gábor: I'm sad that you can't make it. Thank you for the interview, and I hope to see you at Harvest next year!

Stay tuned for the upcoming parts of the Sponsorship Spotlight series! And if you missed the previous part, you can check it out here, where we talked with Antoine Griffard, one of the main developers of Orchard Core. If you don't want to miss our upcoming Sponsorship Spotlight series, sign up for the Lombiq Technologies Newsletter and stay up to date with what's new, insightful, and happening at Lombiq.

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