Has anyone used Meteor to build a blog? I currently have a static blog built with Middleman and another blog running WordPress. I LOVE Meteor and have built a number of apps with it. However, I’m concerned that it may not be a good option for building a blog for two reasons: (1) it is a heavy javascript framework that would cause the page load times to be slow; and (2) it isn’t rendered on the server so search bots may have trouble scraping the page (even with spiderable).
I think it would be awesome to build a blog with Meteor! I’d love the control it would offer. I just don’t know enough about SEO and the current state of search bots to know if switching from Middleman or WordPress would hurt me in the SEO department.
I was hacking one together a while ago (as a learning exercise, it’s messy!), with server side rendering for the public-facing side. But I landed some work and abandoned it in favour of Ghost 
I think it’s a good exercise, but Ghost is already a good, maintained blog platform and you can spend your time on bigger and better things!
Meteor can be used as a blog. But, that’s not the best tool for that. Try to use a tool best for blog just like your current solutions.
We could use Meteor as a blog in the future, but not now. Here are the reasons.
- Loading all the JS/Templates.
Meteor loads all the JS and template for all the pages. Blogs needs to be fast and this will become a problem.
- Confusing SEO support
You can use spiderable for SEO and it’ll work. But something you need to face mysterious issues and Memory problems.
There are plans to fix above issues. Once after that, Meteor will be a best solution for blogs as well.
Ghost is pretty cool. I used it for a little bit before switching to Middleman (at that point I knew Ruby a lot better than JavaScript!) It looks like it’s grown up a lot since I last touched it too! I’ll have to play around with it.
That is what I was afraid of 
I think I’ll stick with Middleman for now, but I’d love to make a blog with Meteor at some point!! Hopefully it becomes useable for making blogs at some point.
I’ve always found it a bit of a turn-off when the makers of some web framework don’t use it for their own site.
“Dog-fooding” one’s own tech is a powerful form of validation. I totally understand that working through the issues mentioned in this thread may not seem to be the best use of MDG developer time, but I’m sure the community would gladly contribute if they saw the project being used for meteor.com instead of hubspot.
Then we’d end up with a best-of-breed blog engine built in Meteor. Same goes for using discourse to power this forum. Why not start with the telescope code base and make whatever improvements are necessary to be the best forum option available using any framework?
Think about the message this sends: “We think you should use meteor for your stuff, but it’s not good enough for our own site.” Hmm.
These real-world examples that people can clone and deploy to have a battle-tested solution with all the edge cases already figured out in 10 minutes would drive adoption better than anything else.
I’m not complaining, just voicing my perspective. I think it’s important.
Wow, you’ve resurrected an old one here. It caught my attention though because I just read this article a couple of weeks ago. I am writing an app that will need some blog functionality as well as a lot of other functions that can be implemented more easily perhaps in WordPress than Meteor. However, I’ve chosen Meteor.
IMO (as everything below is), I think you’re suffering from a couple of misconceptions I’ve also had to work through.
First, Meteor is more of an app framework than a web framework. Is there a framework out there that can create both a web blog and an app from the same code? I don’t think any of the blog leaders can do that. So, apples and oranges.
Second, I think Meteor is perhaps not all the way to being a framework. It is closer to an app stack. i.e. LAMP is to WordPress as Meteor is to ???. I don’t think that anyone has yet come up with the right solution for ??? in that equation. Orionjs and Telescope are a couple that I have spotted as contenders, but they just fall short.
Some on here have basically indicated that the LAMP stack is better than Meteor’s stack for the “blog” problem. I think that is true if you implement your grandmother’s blog. The right blog type of application for Meteor might be some exciting cross between a traditional blog and Trello. Its components would be excitingly dynamic with live, collaborative, in-place content creation.
For Meteor to take off in this space,
- Apollo has to hit in full so that we can balance our database usage better
- I think we badly need automatic code splitting for this space because I like my sites to do many things,
- A blog / album / event, forum, etc. framework built on the Meteor stack with a well-defined component interface exposing Meteor’s gifts to the components needs to hit so that people can write dynamic themes that work with all plugins and dynamic plugins that work with all themes. That will allow people to monetize their creativity.
That last is the real key, component developers need to be able to monetize their creativity without creating sites themselves in order for a framework to really take off. To do that, we need a framework above the Meteor stack.
I don’t think I’m suffering from misconceptions. I’m talking specifically about apps that run on top of Meteor, not Meteor itself. I know what Meteor’s strengths and weaknesses are.
It’s really Telescope is to Meteor as Discourse is to Rails. Or ______ is to Linux/Node/Mongo/Meteor as WordPress is to LAMP.
It’s ok by me if there are several Meteor apps mounted at various URL paths to handle all of the needs of a site. Just like Discourse and Hubspot blog are now on meteor.com.
It would be great for MDG to spearhead taking Telescope and some Meteor based blog all the way to production quality, and use them on meteor.com. Yes, there are areas where Meteor isn’t perfectly suited for a marketing conscious website out of the box, but there are workarounds like SSR for apps that need such functionality.
Having a few examples of those types of apps to showcase what they look like with those rough edges sanded off and optimized deployment config properly documented would be a boon for the community.
Then you wouldn’t have to second guess your choice regarding WordPress. You could confidently choose it’s Meteor based alternative.
Sorry, I keyed off of the words “web framework” and made assumptions.
I agree, I’d very much like to see a quality Meteor-based blog…
Actually, maybe I don’t precisely agree. WordPress has grown far beyond a blog. Most sites written with it are not blogs.
I prototyped an app in WordPress that had blogging, event scheduling, albums, forums, and a few other niceties in about 3 days. I then realized that I would never be able to get that to work in a polished, cohesive way - largely because the components were all flaky in some fashion. I looked into the causes and decided that the platform has just gone through too much evolution without revolution. Also, the components weren’t very exciting, the client loads were always north of a megabyte, and I couldn’t find a way to twist their multisite mode to support my site’s requirements to have a single site with groups that each have their own page with the above features and have relationships to other groups.
So, I would very much like to see WordPress’s replacement implemented on Meteor. I see this as being in reach with Meteor 1.5 + Apollo. I think Meteor is going to start stabilizing after that point and a framework trying to garner a community of theme/plugin developers needs some stability.
Hopefully, it will be possible at that point to develop an application framework that
- allows theme and plugin developers to choose the view layer of their preference, be it React, Blaze, or whatever,
- cleanly mix their products with other plugins using other preferences,
- choose the degree of reactivity that their components need independently of each other,
- meet their database needs with SQL, NoSQL or any mix the problem being solved requires,
- allows for core components such as accounts management and permissions management to be plugins instead of hard-wired into the framework to create better competition and ease growth there,
- never thinks of itself as just a blog tool but instead a site building tool that anyone can use to build and deploy an exciting site with state-of-the-art components whether they be blogs, chat rooms, messaging centers, forums, store fronts, business fronts, event managers, or whatever else you can think of in hours,
- provides a tool for novice users to pick themes and plugins, lay them out, and configure them,
- provides a portal for those to be picked from (npm could perhaps store them but they’d need to be findable in a system that lets you see what they look like, has novices in mind, and supports both free and paid components),
- builds all of that using automatic code splitting to keep sizes down,
- and builds and deploys apps with all of that for the phone, the web, or the PC that simply work without being debugged by someone knowledgeable of JS.
I think all of that and more is possible on top of Meteor. It just needs clear and hard standards for the interfaces that the different component types are written too and a framework (as thin as possible) that glues components written to those standards together with a few tools. The basic pieces are probably already out there but need to be pulled together and made uniform.
So, my answer to the article’s question is that I believe that Meteor is now a good option for building a blogging platform for 2017 and beyond and that that platform, if done right, could become a great option for building lots of sites, not just blogs. But, Meteor itself is not a good option for the typical blog builder (my mother who is an ex-English teacher blogging in retirement) or or an efficient option for experienced developers to build a blog nor do I believe it ever will be or was ever intended to be.
I wrote a [blog post]((https://buttercms.com/blog/meteor-cms-blog-tutorial) on how to build a CMS-powered blog with Meteor and ButterCMS. This gives you a production-ready blog with a CMS for authors, similar to WordPress. In your Meteor app you can use whatever view layer you like (React, Blaze, etc).
ButterCMS is a paid service but it’s free for personal websites/blogs. For full disclosure: I’m a developer at ButterCMS.