Sounds like clickbait, right? Fair enough, here's the TL;DR: We moved our Azure Web App from the Windows S1 plan to the new Linux P0v4 plan. Read on for the details!How we used to run our Orchard Core apps in AzureThose Orchard Core web apps of ours that aren't too resource-hungry (like the app running Orchard Dojo) we've been running on the Windows S1 plan of App Services. This now legacy plan provides 1 vCPU, 1,75 GB of RAM, and HDD local storage for a cost of USD 73/month. Not a lot of processing power, but it was enough if your requirements weren't high either. And it, as you may have guessed it, runs on a Windows server.We've done measurements before, and the Linux pair of this App Service plan performed worse. The newer Premium tiers, with newer hardware and SSD storage performed better, but were too expensive for our use-cases and the added performance wasn't necessary. However, two things happened since then: The S1 tier of App Services became deprecated, and a new, v4 Premium tier was rolled out. What's more, the lowest plan of Premium v4, P0v4, is actually cheaper at USD 53,3/month! This is a 28% cost reduction right off the bat, and it promised better performance, too, so we had to try it out. And this was a great success!Windows S1 App Services — the baselineThe test subject was our Lombiq Tenants Core app. This runs most of our own websites, including Orchard Dojo, dotnest.com (but not the sites created on DotNest), and our company website. This is how its performance looked under the Windows S1 plan: Not great, but not terr... No, at face value, it's actually quite terrible, with the 99th percentile being at 18 seconds for generating a server-side response. However, digging into the details revealed that the vast majority of requests that users cared about (e.g. excluding error pages that spambots hit) performed on an acceptable level, within 1-200 ms. Now, this is indeed not great, but not terrible either. Still, the average response time for all requests, even if this includes ones that no real person was seeing and one-off outliers, was 3,7 s. Can we fix this?The charts in this post are from Azure Application Insights, BTW, Azure's app monitoring service. We use it enhanced by our open-source Lombiq Hosting - Azure Application Insights for Orchard Core module, check it out!Linux wasn't always betterAn ASP.NET Core web app, especially in its source form but even when compiled to binaries, consists of a lot of small files, and it constantly works with a lot of small files too (like stylesheets, images). You'd expect that this is a clear case where Linux (with its usually used ext4 file system) has an advantage over Windows (with NTFS). Linux also generally has a lower resource footprint in itself, leaving more for the web app. So, it should just be faster, right? Nope!At least, it wasn't faster at the time when we compared the Windows and Linux S1 tiers. The average server-side latency was about 68% worse under Linux, although for a lower price. The tiny savings weren't worth the worse UX.But then the P0v4 App Service plan came.Migrating to Linux P0v4 App Services and reducing latency by 98%The new P0v4 App Service plan, which came out of preview and entered general availability in September 2025, offers still 1 vCPU but 4 GB RAM, and SSD storage. It also contains the latest hardware all around. So, we checked out how it performs in real life.Moving from a Windows to Linux App Service Plan is a manual process: You have to create a new App Service, configure every service connection and automation to use it instead of the old one, and deploy your app to it anew. It's a chore, but you have to do it only once. And this is your reward: As you can see, 50th percentile was reduced to only 39 ms from 226, and the 99th percentile from 17,8 s to 738 ms. The average response time on the Windows S1 App Service was 3,7 s, while on the Linux P0v4 one 77,5 ms. Let me write it out in a more obvious way: 3700 ms vs 77,5. That's a 98% reduction in latency! Which is absolutely awesome. There must be multiple generations between the CPUs and RAM of the S1 and P0v4 tiers, and I guess having an SSD and newer everything else helps too. More RAM surely does as well, although that was always enough before too.ConclusionMy recommendation would be to keep an eye on the offering that Azure, or your hosting provider, has, because the cost of compute is constantly coming down while performance is going up. With clever and not always ethical tricks, providers try to keep you paying ever increasingly more. However, the reality of hardware advances should eventually be reflected in your monthly bill and your app's performance metrics — you might need to work for it, though.Do you also want better performance for your Orchard Core or any ASP.NET Core app? Contact us and we can take a look!

This time, you can see a demo about centralizing the Indexing process and having a unified UI for managing Indexes and the Search Settings! But first, let's look at our other topics, like removing Media files for a removed tenant when using Azure Blob Storage, and adding RouteEndpoint cache. Don't forget that you can still fill out our Orchard Core Admin UI experience renewal survey to help shape the future of Orchard Core!

This time, you can see a demo of the AI feature updates! But first, let's check out our other topics, like a new blog post about automating Orchard Core Deployment on AWS ECS with CloudFormation or using the history plugin for Trumbowyg editors by default!

Cache top-unread notifications in the navbar for better performance, and add AddSiteDisplayDriver, and AddPermissionProvider extensions are the topics for this week. Check out our post for an Orchard Harvest 2024 montage video and for a case study about how we migrated Orchard Dojo to Orchard Core!

Today we had the second day of the Orchard Harvest 2024 conference. In this post, we would like to summarize what happened on the second day of the conference.

Convert Themes views to shapes, improving notification filter performance, and announcing the 2.0 release of the Orchard Core Commerce project are the topics for this week! Without further ado, let's get started! Orchard Core updates Convert Themes views to shapes Before this change, there was no flexible way to contribute to the output of the Themes views. For example, there was no way to inject a "Customize" button next to the Enable/Disable button to allow customizing the appearance. The goal of this change is to convert the concrete view of the Themes view to shapes so we can inject shapes into the output. As you can see, the outcome is the same. The only difference is that people can inject shapes into variance zones now. Improve notification filter performance After the move to System.Text.Json some metrics went up. This fixed the lock contentions and large object heaps. Plus, some other GC stats are also better. The creation of JsonSerializerOptions uses a weak reference and locks internally so they shouldn't be created too often. The NotifyFilter was created then eagerly while not necessary. Now it's only on demand with some extra caching. The NotifyFilter class is a filter, meaning it will be invoked in every request. Orchard Core will invoke its OnHandlerExecuting method. And on every request, it was creating a new filter instance and it was then creating a new JsonSerializerOptions. It's creating a new one because it needs to set a dynamic converter, a converter that needs something that the DI resolves. And creating a JsonSerializerOptions object is expensive. Now you can just resolve the IOptions<NotifyJsonSerializerOptions> which class contains the JsonSerializerOptions to improve the performance. News from the community Orchard Core Commerce 2.0 Orchard Core Commerce is an Orchard Core port and partial rewrite of the open-source Nwazet Commerce module that was built for Orchard CMS 1.x. Nwazet Commerce was initially built in 2012 by Bertrand Le Roy, loosely based on a commerce sample by Sipke Shoorstra. The initial goal of Nwazet Commerce was to power the website of the hardware startup Nwazet. While Nwazet is no longer operating, the Nwazet Commerce project went on and was further developed by a group of passionate contributors who are using the platform for their own, and their customer's websites. Like Orchard, Nwazet Commerce was built with extensibility in mind, and as such, it has its own extensions (typical examples include local tax and shipping modules). It's also a pure, idiomatic Orchard. Orchard Core represents a major evolution of the Orchard design principles and is sufficiently different that running Nwazet Commerce on it will necessitate significant work. As such, the community decided that starting from a blank slate was the best way to go, so they will port Nwazet Commerce piece by piece, being careful to accurately apply Orchard Core's new design principles. The community also decided to adopt a new name that gets rid of the now obsolete origins and establishes our ambition for the module to become the go-to commerce module for Orchard Core. Back in 2022, we published a demo where you could see the current state of the module. A few months later, we reached another milestone when we finished with the basic implementation of Stripe Payment integration (without taxation, shipping, etc.). Stripe is a payment service provider that business owners can use to accept dozens of payment methods, from credit cards to buy now, pay later services. Stripe Payments handles the steps between a customer providing their card information and learning that their payment has been accepted. As you may know, Lombiq provides stewardship for the Orchard Core Commerce module. That means that we do code reviews and work on features and fixes. At the beginning of 2023, we released the 1.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! You can read some of the key features of the release in this post. You can easily try it out by cloning this repo and building and running the OrchardCore.Commerce.Web project. Thanks to Auto Setup, the site will be set up with the OrchardCore Commerce - Development recipe. After you can go to the dashboard, using the credentials admin and Password1!, and go to Content -> Content Items to create your first Product. And one month ago, we released the 2.0 version of the Orchard Core Commerce module! This is a major version increment because there are some breaking changes, so watch out! We have upgraded to the latest Orchard Core 1.8 packages too. One of the breaking changes is that the built-in Stripe payment provider support has been separated into a standalone package. For now, it's still the only payment processor we support out-of-the-box but we plan to expand that in the near future. You can also implement your custom payment providers. We've also added product listing with filter, search and paging support, the ability to resume payment from the order page, more documentation including a guide, and many other improvements, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements. Check out the full list of changes here. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 470 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

The MiniProfiler visibility is now based on permissions, tenant APIs improvements, and using ListContent permission instead of ViewContent to see the content items list. Interested in the details? Well, then check out our post for the details! Orchard Core updates MiniProfiler visibility based on permissions MiniProfiler is a library and UI for profiling your application. By letting you see where your time is spent, which queries are run, and any other custom timings you want to add, MiniProfiler helps you debug issues and optimize performance. And MiniProfiler is a built-in feature in Orchard Core that has some updates. Let's say an admin needs to profile a production instance. Enabling MiniProfiler for everyone to see is not acceptable in most cases. Also, a user may want to profile an ajax request to analyze a query or other info. The solution here is to provide new permissions when you enable the Mini Profiler feature. If you navigate to Security -> Roles and hit Edit near any role, you can see the new permissions which enable you to view the Mini Profiler widget on the back end and the front-end pages. Tenant APIs improvements Orchard Core tenant APIs got several updates lately. First of all, there was no way to update some tenant settings from API calls. Meaning, the tenant's category was missing in the ApiController. We should be able to set a tenant's description via an API call, so this property is now included in the sent model. Another improvement is the new Edit endpoint because there was no way to update tenant settings from API calls. The new Edit endpoint in the Tenant's ApiController takes care of this and enables us to modify the tenant settings either if the tenant is uninitialized or running. The updateable properties are the same as what is displayed on the tenant editor on the Admin UI. Use ListContent permission instead of ViewContent Currently, we use View Content as a minimal permission to list the contents in the content items UI. We use the same permission to also show the Content -> Content Items admin menu. Here the List Content permission should be used, not View Content. What if someone wants to allow a user to view content using a direct link but does not want them to list the contents in the UI? Currently, this isn't possible. Additionally, ViewContent is granted to all Anonymous and Authenticated roles, which is fine. But, access to list contents should be granted by the ListContent permission to avoid allowing listing content without explicit permission grant. If you check out the change logs in the docs of the upcoming release, you can read about the updated permissions. News from the community Hastlayer is now fully open-source Hastlayer is being developed by Lombiq Technologies, a software, training, and services company focusing on web development with open Microsoft technologies. Hastlayer transforms .NET software into FPGA-implemented logic circuits. (FPGAs are chips that can mimic other chips.) The result is code that runs faster and uses less power than a code-only solution without sacrificing the ability of further developing your software. Using Hastlayer will optimize your performance and lower the power consumption of hardware, which will bring you more satisfied customers who want your solution and a boost in your company’s revenue. And we have just recently fully open-sourced Hastlayer! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 410 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!

Fluid provides optional support for functions, optimizing SlugServie and MediaTokenService, and hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core are the topics of this week. Check out this post for the details! Orchard Core updates Optimize SlugService The goal here was to increase the performance of the SlugService as much as we can. Marko Lahma went through the thing, and the problem was that the ZString haven't been used, it was leaking all the time thus bad perf. BenchmarkDotNet=v0.13.1, OS=Windows 10.0.22000AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 1 CPU, 32 logical and 16 physical cores.NET SDK=6.0.101 [Host] : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT DefaultJob : .NET 6.0.1 (6.0.121.56705), X64 RyuJIT General easy rule (when implicit usings aren't being used): If there's using System.Linq; at the top of the performance-critical code, try to find a way to get rid of it. Reduce allocations in MediaTokenService and improve performance Since Orchard Core can use all .NET 6 goodness, Marko Lahma improved the performance of the MediaTokenService too. And what did he change? Don't ToString StringValues, keep them as-is as in dictionary once built. Parse commands and other commands with one pass using constructs that QueryHelpers uses. Allocate static command arrays to return from processors, some of them were always returning new ones. Change GetHash not to allocation anonymous closure each time by using Try/Set construct, using the same logic that extension method GetOrCreate uses. Change hash calculation to use stackalloc and spans for workloads < 1024 bytes (common case). Use the custom AddQueryString method that understands spans and concrete a dictionary type. Here you can see the numbers: Before: After: Fluid functions Now there is a new optional feature in Fluid called Functions. It's optional because the goal of Fluid is to be able to as close as possible to Liquid, but Liquid doesn't have Functions. If you open up the readme file of Fluid, you can see a new section there called Functions. There is a new option in the FluidParser that you can say AllowFunctions. By setting the AllowFunctions to true, you can call functions like this: {{ field('user') }}. The format of this one is {{ identifier('arguments')}} just like in JavaScript or in C#. Or you can say {{ field('pass', type='password') }} which is like {{ identifier('values', type='named value') }}. How it works is a field is an object, a FluidValue of type FunctionValue. In Fluid, anytime we access something like {% assign name = "Bill" %}, the name is a FluidValue, and in this case, the type is StringValue. When we find a field, the field is a value of type FunctionValue, and the FunctionValue implements the method name InvokeAsync. There is InvokeAsync, there is GetPropertyAsync, etc., everything that an object can do, and when this FunctionValue's Invoke is invoked it will execute something. And to invoke a FluidValue you use parenthesis. If we do parenthesis on something like name, which is a string, we can do name(), it will invoke the string, but it just returns NIL value. So you can invoke name if you want, it will not do anything. If it's a function, it will do something. To learn more about Functions, check out the documentation of Fluid! News from the community Hiding a shape sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core The Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core is a demo Orchard Core CMS module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. And the module has a new sample, which is a shape table provider that hides shapes. Check out the code of the new ShapeHidigingShapeTableProvider here! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 240 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

The development of Orchard Core of course has been continued after the release of 1.0. Are you curious about the newest improvements of Orchard Core? Well, let's check them out! Orchard Core updates Optimize AddTokenToPath The community tries to make Orchard Core as optimized and as fast as it could be. C# and ASP.NET Core with other third-party libraries offer several tricks and techniques to achieve this goal. For example, you can use ZString instead of StringBuilder. ZString is a library that provides StringBuilder and StringWriter with zero allocation, meaning it's allocating an array on the stack for small buffers, instead of creating new StringBuilders and StringWriters every time. All ZString methods only allocate the final string. Also, ZString has enabled to access the inner buffer, so if the output target has stringless API, you can achieve completely zero allocation. Or another improvement could be to not use string.Split that causing array allocation, use sub-strings instead. Add extension method for site setting deployments Whenever you would like to add a deployment step that allows exporting your custom site settings, you need to register three services with the transient, scoped, and singleton lifetimes. It's not a huge issue though because you can easily open a Startup.cs file of a module that contains these kinds of registrations and see how you can do it in your module but having an extension method for site setting deployments could reduce the lines that you need to copy every time. The new AddSiteSettingsPropertyDeploymentStep allows you to register your custom site settings deployments just in one line! Check out the Startup.cs files of any module to see the new way of registering your site setting deployments. Not use a current culture when checking invalid Autoroute path If you enable the Localization module and set a default culture to a non en-US culture, e.g. th-TH, you will get a validation error when trying to save a content item with an Autoroute part. Here is the screenshot when trying to save a content item and a default culture is th-TH. This issue is from AutoroutePartExtensions.ValidatePathFieldValue method. Inside the method, there is a call of autoroute.Path?.IndexOf("//") which returns 0 instead of -1 when a current culture is th-TH. According to the MS document, IndexOf(String) searches a word by using culture and case sensitivity. Refer to Recommendations for string usage, we should use StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase for the non-linguistic string search. There is no case in a space and //, so the fix here was to pick StringComparison.Ordinal and to match IndexOf which is case-sensitive. Cypress 8.2.0 and Trumbowyg 2.25.1 If you are a huge Orchard Core enthusiast and like to check out the recent changes of the CMS from time to time, you may notice that the community upgrades the different .NET/Client-side/Test libraries from time to time. The Orchard Core documentation has a Libraries page under the Resources one where you can see the versions of these libraries that are used across the main branch of Orchard Core. Antoine Griffard recently updated Cypress to 8.2.0 and Trumbowyg to 2.25.1! With these updates, you can make sure that if you would like to use the built-in libraries of Orchard Core you will always have the latest versions! News from the community Lombiq Technologies: new developer colleagues and new group photo We had a great company trip last week where almost all of the colleagues of Lombiq gathered together to spend the whole day together offline. This was a great opportunity to update our group photo on our official website, so head to the About us page where you can see the most, but not all of our team as of the summer of 2021. And we also have two new colleagues to introduce: Ádám Jakab and Szabolcs Deme. Don't forget to check out their bio too! DotNest Core DotNest Core is a complete redevelopment of the DotNest platform, all on the latest version of Orchard Core. We've been running it with a couple of select few customers for a while now, and it's time to open it up a bit more. While you can't yet just simply create an Orchard Core-based DotNest site, you can sign up for our limited beta here. You'll soon be able to get a fully functional, reliably hosted Orchard Core site on DotNest where you can build your personal website or something to showcase your Orchard skills with. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 215 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

A new demo about Admin Layers, several performance improvements, and a new AdminBranding shape is waiting for you in our upcoming post! Oh, and have we mentioned that Lombiq is now more than 8 years old? :) Orchard Core updates Move admin branding to a distinct shape Now you will find a brand new AdminBranding shape in the default admin theme of Orchard Core that is about containing the favicon, and the default, clickable Orchard Core logo that redirects the user to the home page of the admin UI (the admin dashboard). And now, because this whole stuff is a new shape, you can easily customize this one too! Check out the updated documentation to read some words about it! Fix drop widget to empty zone Someone reported an issue that it's not possible to drag and drop widgets to an empty zone. Now, this has been fixed. Remove some async-await It's not a recommendation anymore to remove async/await when it can be removed. In this case here the Task from _session.Query can be returned directly, it doesn't have to be awaited. There is a benefit in terms of allocations but at the same time if there is an exception you lose where it's coming from. And the impact in terms of perf is minimal. So, it's not a recommendation to do it every time. Adding spatial features to content (Lucene indexed) You could see a demo a few weeks ago about adding spatial features to content. This module provides a GeoPointField, which can be used to give a geographic position to content. And this has been merged to the dev branch of Orchard Core with nice detailed documentation also! Don't forget to check out the docs to read about Terms specifications, Geo Bounding Box, Geo Distance, and many more! Reduce string allocations in MediaTokenService and use pooled StringBuilder instances with StringWriter Now the code is using StringBuilder from the StringBuilderPool instead of using String.Concat(), which is about allocating one buffer. There are other improvements with the queryStringTokenKey, which is not recreating a new string every time, just using the existing one. StringWriter will create a StringBuilder by using the StringBuilderPool and passing that to the StringWriter. It's not creating a new one, it's just reusing the existing one. Demos Admin Layers People want to change shapes or styles for various things on the admin UI without having a custom admin theme. For example, currently, it is not possible to change the admin panel's logo and icon without a custom theme (set the base theme to Admin). The new Admin Layers feature is very similar to the Admin Templates one. This new one is about working with the layers of the admin theme, which means you can put different kinds of widgets to the zones of the admin theme using different kinds of layers rules. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that's the goal of this one! Let's say you set up your site using the Blog recipe. After go to the Configuration -> Settings -> Features and find the Admin Layers one which enables admin users to render widgets across pages of the admin based on conditions. Now, the first thing to do is to set up the available zones for widgets as you would do that in the case of the front-end widgets as well. You can do that under Design -> Settings -> Admin Zones. Let's say we would like to work with the HeadMeta, Footer, Header, and NavbarTop zones for now. And let's add some layers too! If you navigate to Design -> Admin Widgets, you could see a very-very familiar UI to manage zones and layers. Here we have just added a simple layer called Always that has one boolean condition rule, which is True. Meaning the widgets on this layer will always be rendered. Now, let's do some testing! Let's say we add a simple Raw Html widget to the NavbarTop zone that is just about containing some bold text. After we will create a new Liquid Widget and render it in the HeadMeta zone. The Liquid Widget is just about containing some styling for the theme: {% styleblock at:"Head"%} body { background-color: gray !important; }{% endstyleblock %} Now we have created two widgets that we have displayed on the Always layer of the admin theme. Let's see how our theme looks like! First, notice the Some text in the NavbarTop zone near the moon icon. This is the Raw HTML widget in the NavbarTop zone. And the new background color is coming from our Liquid Widget. If you would like to know more about this feature, don't forget to check out the following recording on YouTube! News from the community Lombiq is 8 years old! May 21, 2021, is the 8th anniversary of founding Lombiq! On this special occasion, we have gathered 8 important factors of our company's life. We are glad that we took these steps at that time otherwise we might not be able to celebrate with our strong community here today. Check out our post to see which important factors we gathered together! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 202 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!