Community focus: Helping Orchard Core look as good as it actually is
As developers, we spend our days building with other people's tools, and some of those tools quietly make our work better year after year. Orchard Core is one of them. It's an open-source Content Management System (CMS) and application framework, totally free and developed on .NET, which we've built on for years; a tool we use to help shape the custom software we develop and deliver for clients.
And we use it because it’s a genuinely excellent framework. With a security-focused ecosystem, it ticks everything we need to support clients managing sensitive data (and complies with our ISO 27001 certification, too).
So, when we looked at its main website and felt it didn't quite do the project justice, two of our developers, Nick Jackson and Alcwyn Parker, offered to help put that right, and to give the work back to the community for free.
With the new site set to go live later this year (don’t worry, you can still see live concept), this is the story of why we did it, how we approached it as a development team, and why helping the project grow matters to us.
FIRST, WHAT IS ORCHARD CORE?
If you're not a developer, Orchard Core might not mean much to you… so, a little context. This framework is used by developers and agencies around the world to build websites and applications, originally built by several creators from Microsoft and today managed by the .NET Foundation. It's powerful, flexible and seriously well-engineered to be very fast, with the core team taking a no compromise approach to performance.
That said, the quality of the product wasn't coming across on its own website, and that’s a really common problem in open source software development. The engineering is brilliant, the community is active, and yet the shop window doesn't tell that story. And for a project competing for attention against bigger, better-funded names (think Wordpress or Umbraco), that shop window matters more than you'd think. It's often the first thing a developer sees before they decide whether to give the project a chance at all.
So, we figured it was time to do the software justice, and we knew exactly where to start - with ourselves.
WE ARE THE AUDIENCE
As developers, we realised we are exactly the people this website is trying to reach, making us well-placed to understand what others like us would want to know, too.
While most projects have to go and research who their website is for, we’re .NET developers who pick frameworks, weigh up trade-offs, and have to justify those choices to the people we work with.
That made the priorities obvious. A developer landing on the site for the first time needs quick evidence that the project is active, well-maintained, easy to get started with, and a credible choice next to the alternatives. And the people around that developer, the agency owners, CTOs, product leads and clients, need confidence that the technology is safe and built to last.
That’s two very different audiences, with two very different questions. We've been on both sides of that conversation many times, so we built around answering both as directly as possible.
WHAT WE FOCUSED ON
And because we know what developers actually want to see, we leaned towards substance over decoration. In reality, that meant:
- Showing the real thing. Including genuine product screenshots and real contributors from the project, not stock imagery. When you're trying to prove something is real and active, showing the real thing does the heavy lifting.
- An honest comparison. Developers compare tools whether you help them or not, so we gave them a clear, factual comparison against the main alternatives: what each one is, what it's best at, how it's licensed and how it's governed. No spin, just the information people need to make a good decision.
- Clean and easy to scan. Modular sections that are quick to read and straightforward for the community to extend later, so the site can grow with the project rather than needing another overhaul in two years.
The result? A site that feels as considered and trustworthy as the codebase behind it.
BUILDING IT IN THE OPEN
Keeping the community informed and involved really was a key part of this project. Rather than disappear for a few months and unveil a finished article, we shared the concept early, as an open discovery, with the explicit aim of getting community feedback before anything went into production.
We presented it to the Orchard Core community during their regular online session, and the response was genuinely brilliant. The feedback was warm and constructive, including from the project's core maintainers, who got behind the direction and helped sharpen the details (one even spotted a licensing label we'd got wrong, which is exactly the kind of thing an open process is meant to catch).
And that's the whole spirit of the community, to ensure one company isn’t deciding what's best for everyone. It's an idea shared with the people who know the project best, tested in the open, and made better by them. A stronger website is really a means to an end: helping more developers discover Orchard Core, give it a try, and stick around to build the community and the project itself.
Check out the live concept for yourself and why not join the community discussion on GitHub? If you already build on Orchard Core (or are trying it now for the first time), we'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts.
GIVING BACK TO THE TOOLS WE BUILD ON
It would be easy to ask what a development company gets out of redoing an open-source project's website for free. The honest answer is that we've taken a huge amount from this community over the years, and contributing our time and skills back is simply how we think a healthy ecosystem should work. As a certified B Corp, that sits right at the heart of how we like to operate.
We've been building secure, robust software for twenty years, as a B Corp and an ISO 27001-accredited team, and projects like this are a reminder of why we love the craft of it.
If you're building something serious on .NET and want a development partner who contributes to the tools as well as builds with them, get in touch. And if you're part of the Orchard Core community, come and tell us what you think.
