You probably heard about Try Orchard!: it's a free service where you can test drive Orchard on demo sites, without having to register, download or set up anything. Now Try Orchard! just got smarter with an Orchard walkthrough. When you visit a Try Orchard! demo site you'll be greeted by a tooltip that offers you a guided, interactive walkthrough showing you how to use the basic features of Orchard: publishing pages and blog posts, commenting, user management... This way newcomers will get a glimpse of using Orchard, without reading any documentation or getting any help or training. By the way Try Orchard! is also featured in the official Orchard documentation and on Orchard Beginner. Enjoy your walkthrough!

We're pleased to announce a brand new DotNest site that will be a massive help for Orchard newcomers: Orchard Beginner! Orchard Beginner really aims to help those who're just starting with Orchard. The site's content is still being expanded rapidly but it already gives Orchard rookies some very essential guidelines. Orchard Beginner is maintained by the well-known Orchard Dojo trainer Abhishek Luv!

So what if you're a total newcomer to Orchard but want to see it in action, without having to download, install, set up anything or signing up anywhere (not even DotNest)? You can Try Orchard! Try Orchard is just a quick prototype right now, but you can see that it's a set of periodically re-installed DotNest tenants that you can play with. There is also a possibility to have an interactive walk-through for users to get an overview of Orchard, as you can see from the three inline popups that greet you. You can also see a demo of the demo site (yes :-)) on the recording of the weekly Orchard Community Meeting, although screen sharing didn't work for the first half. So Try Orchard! is just in its infancy but it works! Now if you want to convince your buddy to take a look at this awesome CMS just tell them to Try Orchard!

BindTuning, a well-known company of theme designers and web developers from Portugal contributed some of their themes so that they are available to DotNest users for free! Metro: a theme with clean and elegant design, following the principles of the Modern UI. Terra: clean and flexible design with a pastel color palette. The Bootstrap Theme: this is the theme for you if you're looking for a basic Bootstrap theme. You can customize TheBootstrapTheme for free at http://bindtuning.com, creating a personalized theme that adjusts to your branding. Since it's a free theme, you can create unlimited customizations of this theme at no cost. Go ahead and customize your DotNest site even further! Happy Orcharding,the DotNest Guys

We have released two Bootstrap-based themes that are available for every DotNest site for free: Philip Senechal, the well-known Orchard theme development professional and freelancer known for his cool Boostrap-based themes provided us with updated, Orchard 1.8-compatible versions for two of his themes: ReTouch: a multi-purpose theme with modern and clean design. FlatJack: a nicely customizable theme with options for selecting dark or light environment and different accent colors. Go ahead and customize your DotNest site! Happy Orcharding,the DotNest Guys

As you may know, all DotNest sites have the Combinator module enabled (and configured) by default. This module automatically bundles and minifies static resources (like stylesheets and script files) to enhance client-side performance. Now Combinator got a lot faster with a feature called resource sharing. Resource sharing enables tenants in a multi-tenant Orchard application (like DotNest) to share processed resources with each other through the Default tenant. This means that if a resource was already processed for any of the tenants all other tenants will just use that without having to re-process it. In practice this means that e.g. admin pages will load much faster for tenants the first time: you don't have to wait for Combinator to process the resources (unless you're the first one to look at that page) since they will just be fetched from the shared location. So how much time did we manage to save you?

The Preview phase of DotNest ends today. We're very excited to take DotNest to the next level, because we really strive to provide an awesome Orchard SaaS for you! The end of the Preview also means that custom domain usage is not free anymore. But we value that you were among the early adopters of DotNest: so as we promised everybody who is already registered on DotNest as of today still gets custom usage free for three months! Please send us an e-mail to guys at dotnest dot com and we'll set up your custom domain usage. Let's keep your DotNest sites going!

Until now you could only theme your DotNest site by using stylesheets. But now these dark days are over! We present you the power of Liquid Markup templates! What is Liquid? Liquid Markup is a templating language specifically developed for being able to write safe templates. It's "safe" because you can't just write arbitrary C# code, thus potentially endangering other tenants. But you wouldn't want to do that anyway, right? By making the Orchard Liquid Markup module available for all DotNest sites as of today you get an option to write templates from the admin site using Liquid, through the built-in Templates modules. These templates are then used just as normal shape templates. And not only this but you can add templates to your Media Theme (just files with the .liquid file format) and when the theme is deployed the templates will be deployed as well! There are constraints on what you can achieve from Liquid templates of course but it should be more than sufficient for theming your site. Also you have the power of Orchard shape composition at your hand too: go and read the readme on what power you can unlock! Also since the module was demoed on the weekly Orchard meeting you can watch iT in action in the recorded video (from 41:47). Oh, and by the way we also updated Orchard to the latest 1.8.x version so your site is now living on the bleeding edge! (Don't worry, we tested everything thoroughly.) Let's go and theme the heck out of that site of yours!

Client-side performance matters - of course. That's why we optimized DotNest to be fast out of the box not just when work is done on the server but also on the client-side. For example the Combinator module is enabled and configured on all sites by default to give CSS and JS bundling and minifications. All static resources are served from a cookie-less (practically a CDN) endpoint (dotneststatic.com). And some more tricks... YSlow is a very easy to use tool to get some metrics about the client-side performance of a site. The tool measures performance on a 1-100 scale, 100 being the best. Out of the box a freshly created DotNest tenant has a YSlow score of 98! This hardly gets any better. See the screenshot below! Don't take our word for it, check it out yourself!

As you all surely know, the third Orchard Harvest conference will be between 9-11 June in Seattle. If you attend (or watch the recordings later) you'll be able to also hear about what's under the hood of DotNest in our "Building an Orchard SaaS - DotNest" talk. We'll share the experiences of building and operating DotNest so you can make your own Orchard web apps better. See you at Harvest!