Sponsorship Spotlight: Mike Alhayek

Gábor: When did you first come across Orchard?

Mike: In late 2021, I was searching for a .NET framework that offered true modularity and multi-tenancy for a project I was leading. That's when I discovered Orchard Core. At first, I was drawn to the framework itself, but once I explored the CMS and saw how powerful and well-designed it was, I realized it stood out from the rest.

Gábor: Have you tried other CMSs too?

Mike: Before discovering Orchard Core, I used Umbraco. It's a solid CMS, but Orchard Core's architecture, modularity, and UI appealed to me more. I don't have a deep comparison, but Orchard Core simply aligned better with the type of projects I build and the flexibility I needed. Since then, I've been fully invested in Orchard Core and its ecosystem.

Gábor: Why do you like contributing to Orchard?

Mike: As I started using Orchard Core, I naturally ran into bugs or missing features that I needed for my projects. Instead of waiting for someone else to fix them, I jumped in and started contributing. Those early contributions were incredibly educational. Our late friend Jean‑Thierry Kéchichian often reviewed my PRs with deep, thoughtful explanations of Orchard Core's internals. His feedback accelerated my understanding of the framework, and I'll always be grateful for that.

I also learned a lot from Niraj Soni, who helped me understand shapes, templating, and CMS concepts more thoroughly. The community's willingness to help newcomers is one of the biggest reasons I kept contributing. And of course, financial support from companies like Lombiq helps sustain the ecosystem and encourages ongoing contributions. It's a community that invests in itself, and that makes contributing genuinely rewarding.

Gábor: I'm glad to hear that you receive useful feedback from the community.

Mike: Without the community's support, I wouldn't be one of Orchard Core's active contributors today. It's a welcoming, collaborative, and encouraging group of people. I always enjoy meeting new faces at Harvest; it's one of the highlights of being part of this ecosystem.

Gábor: What do you like most about Orchard?

Mike: Its flexibility. Orchard Core is designed with extensibility in mind, giving developers a modular architecture where every feature can be customized, replaced, or extended. It includes all the bells and whistles a SaaS owner needs: multi‑tenancy, feature toggles, modular components, deployment tools, and a CMS that can be shaped into virtually anything.

Another major advantage is that Orchard Core is built on top of the ASP.NET Core framework, which we all know, love, and are deeply familiar with. Having ASP.NET Core as the foundation means you're working with a modern, high‑performance, secure, and well‑supported platform. Developers can immediately leverage their existing .NET knowledge without needing to learn an entirely new ecosystem.

Orchard Core feels close to developers because it is built by engineers who understand how developers think. That combination - a powerful modular architecture on top of ASP.NET Core - makes it an exceptional foundation for building anything from small sites to large, multi‑tenant SaaS platforms.

Gábor: You have a repository on GitHub called Orchard Core Modules by CrestApps that contains a collection of modules and extensions that expand the capabilities of the Orchard Core framework. It contains an Artificial Intelligence Suite that brings CrestApps.Core AI capabilities into Orchard Core.

Mike: This repository goes far beyond artificial intelligence: it contains nearly 50 modules that meaningfully expand what Orchard Core can do. The idea behind the collection is simple: give developers practical tools that solve real problems and make Orchard Core even more powerful.

The AI Suite is the part that gets the most attention, and for good reason. It brings CrestApps.Core AI capabilities directly into Orchard Core and makes advanced AI integration incredibly easy. What makes it special is how naturally AI becomes part of the CMS experience. You can chat with your content items as if they were a knowledge base, automate workflows, manage site settings, analyze tabular data, and even perform complex operations through conversational commands. The AI can remember context, work with agents, execute tools, and help both administrators and end‑users interact with Orchard Core in smarter ways.

But the repository includes many other modules that people often overlook. There are modules that enhance the admin experience, improve notifications, simplify deployment, extend workflows, enrich content building, and provide utilities that make everyday development smoother. Some modules add new UI components, others improve security, and some simply fill gaps that developers frequently run into. The goal is to make Orchard Core feel like a complete, polished ecosystem where you have everything you need at your fingertips.

All of this is powered by CrestApps.Core, a general .NET AI framework that allows developers to bring AI into any .NET project, not just Orchard Core.

Gábor: And if someone wants to try out the AI Suite, they can easily do that in a minute by creating a site in DotNest, because now you have the option to manage your DotNest site with AI too! We announced the availability of the Orchard Core-integrated AI modules for DotNest a year ago, and you have added so many new features since then, so we will need to update those modules in DotNest soon.

Mike: And after nearly a year of development, I announced the release of CrestApps.OrchardCore v2 at the beginning of this month. This has been one of the largest and most ambitious updates we've ever built. It introduces a powerful collection of modules designed to significantly extend what you can do with Orchard Core CMS. It contains nearly 30 AI-focused modules that make integrating AI into your Orchard Core applications incredibly simple while remaining highly flexible and production-ready.

But it's not just about AI: it also contains a Content Transfer Module to import and export extremely large volumes of content using CSV and Excel files with high performance and reliability, and the Recipes Module, which provides JSON schemas for virtually everything in Orchard Core recipes, enabling rich IntelliSense while authoring recipes, schema validation, and precise AI-generated recipes for content items, workflows, site settings, and much more.

Gábor: Wow, that sounds really interesting, and it involved a lot of work! But what was the goal when you started the development of the CrestApps Orchard Core open-source modules?

Mike: The original idea was very simple: I wanted Orchard Core to be able to chat against its own content items. Instead of doing a traditional search, I wanted users to ask questions and get intelligent answers based on the site's content. That was the spark.

But once we started building, the project evolved quickly. It became clear that Orchard Core needed a full AI ecosystem, not just a chat tool. Today, the AI Suite is one of the most robust AI integrations in the Orchard community, covering everything from content management to workflows to data analysis.

Gábor: And you also created a repository called CrestApps.AgentSkills, which contains agent skills.

Mike: Yes, to support developers using tools like copilot‑cli or claude‑cli, we also created the CrestApps.AgentSkills repository. It teaches AI agents how to generate accurate Orchard Core code, extend features properly, and produce higher‑quality output. It essentially gives AI the “skills” needed to understand Orchard Core's architecture and conventions.

Gábor: Are you contributing to other open-source projects too?

Mike: Yes. I maintain all CrestApps repositories, contribute to YesSql, and occasionally contribute to other open-source projects whenever I encounter issues that directly affect my work or when I see an opportunity to improve something.

Gábor: You will be a speaker at this year's Harvest. We know that you will give two talks this time. Could you please give some insights into your talks for our readers?

Mike: One of my talks is titled "Unpacking AI Orchestrator". It's a deep dive into how AI orchestration actually works behind the scenes. Many people use AI tools daily but don't fully understand the orchestration layer that makes everything possible. This session will help attendees appreciate the complexity behind AI systems and understand why the CrestApps.OrchardCore AI modules are such a valuable addition to the Orchard ecosystem.

As for the second talk, I'm actively working on it. I know the topic I want to cover, but I'm still preparing the material. Once it's ready, I'll announce it.

Gábor: Thank you for the interview, and see you soon at Harvest!

Stay tuned for the upcoming parts of the Sponsorship Spotlight series! And if you missed the previous parts, check them out here:

• Sponsorship Spotlight: Antoine Griffard

• Sponsorship Spotlight: Hisham Bin Ateya

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