Hi, I want to discuss about Orion CMS. This project passed 165 stars on github and 400 downloads.
Orion is a simple and powerful CMS for meteor that allows you to build simple or complex websites with powerful admin panels in minutes. It’s very easy to learn and saves a lot of time when building administrable websites.
It has drop in solutions to things like uploading files, relationships between collections and more.
More Information:
Demo:
http://orion-example.meteor.com/
If you have any question or ideas we can discuss it here or in Github.
I will be happy to hear your opinion.
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I evaluated it (very lazily) a couple of days ago and the documentation seemed to lack anything related to the front-end in regards to visual design and templating.
I think what the project needs is a proper step-by-step guide to building a simple site/blog
The demo just does not make any sense from a web designer’s point of view 
EDIT:
Sorry that may have come out strong/negative. What and how you did with the backend seems impressive. But I just did not feel motivated enough to do a proper evaluation due to lack of front-end related material and after all, it is kind of important when one is shopping for a cms to build a web site.
1 Like
Hi,
Do you have any suggestion to implement? Maybe we can add it to the framework
any basic site that
- does not look like stock bootstrap
- a few content pages (about/team/contact)
- one or two “list” type examples like news and products (category pages, product page)
- a blog with tags/categories
- a contact form somewhere
a guide that demoes this and a walk through of how it would be created from scratch
and if your primary target are web designers you must be as little technical as possible
2 Likes
I would love to see some thumbnail in your file manager. Also maybe a status if the media is in use in an entity. And also maybe a local filesystem provider ^^
What I found difficult is the terminology you are using : dictionary, entities, attributes… maybe it’s because I’m french and I did not give enough try reading the doc 
It looks great anyhow and I’m going to try it very soon as I was wanting to do something like that for another project of mine.
Keep up the good work and thank you
@serkandurusoy Those are great ideas, someone can create a orion site with that features and make it open source. I can’t add that things to the core because it will not be in all sites. One of the principles of orion is to not be intrusive.
If someone create something like a “theme” with that features it could be completely customizable for everyone
@guidouil That are great ideas, you can open a pull request on github. To use filesystem with any store you want is very easy. Check here the discussion https://github.com/orionjs/core/issues/8.
I hope someone release soon a community package that let you upload to a local storage, maybe you can do it.
Yes definitely. That’s also what I meant. Not a core feature, but a
demo of the core features accompanied with a tutorial that shows how
that demo has been built.
Good idea, when I have more time I will do it
I sort of disagree with the feedback so far, the point of your CMS has absolutely met all of my needs because it never got in the way but allowed for me to build the frontend completely bare without crap I need to remove.
Maybe a simple starter theme that only has frontend templating files and zero styles would benefit beginners and make it easier for non-devs to adapt.
I have a basic starter theme with contact/blog/portfolio stuff here: https://github.com/iamkevingreen/Orion-Starter and the live version is here: http://districtdomain.com I haven’t had a chance to update to the latest builds (it’s about a month or two outdated from the current Orion build) I might find time to do that this weekend because it could use a little refresh anyway.
I might extend my version to include some categories/taxonomy for the blog and then you guys could have something more like a normal wordpressy feel.
Again awesome job with this CMS, i’ve used it for another personal project and my buddy is really happy about it.
@iamkevingreen that looks just fine. Also, what I said was
Not a core feature, but a demo of the core features accompanied with a tutorial
So not even a starter theme. Just a way for people to learn it. Think of it like “discover meteor for orion”.
Therefore perhaps would you like to throw in a few other “types” of pages to your example and write a blog post about how you put it together?
It may be a good start to a community documentation.
Thanks @iamkevingreen!
@serkandurusoy, its always great to have more resources for the community. If someone makes a tutorial I can put it in the readme, so everyone can read it.
great job @nicolaslopezj, the latest updates with relationships are just amazing! this project is very promising!!
2 Likes
I built the website for my brewery in meteor.
twbrewing.com
I’d be interested in A) seeing how difficult it would be to convert it to use Orion, B) collaborating on that conversion and C) releasing the source code so that it could be pointed to as an example.
It’s a real site so it would be quite a bit more complex than a basic example would be. Having said that though I do think it covers a lot of the basic functionality most sites would want (blog, contact form, location information with embedded map, menu/dynamic lists, etc…) and so having a non-trivial example and covering those items could really be useful.
4 Likes
@funkyeah I think it would be really easy to convert that site with orion, and things like maps are really easy to add a custom field or two that lets you get lat/long or something to serve to the frontend.
I am going to spend some time extending my example (maybe rebuild it from scratch with the newer orion stuff and document it in the next week or so)
Hi @funkyeah,
It would be very easy to use orion on your site. You just have to change your texts, images and map to definitions in the dictionary, make a entity for your blog, etc.
You can ask on github and everyone can help you. And it would be great if you make your project open source!
The hard part in my mind is not so much the actual integration of orion, but rather the migration of my existing data. The website has a basic back-end that uses meteor roles and and somewhat of a pre-existing data model (created from the need for inserting blog posts with authors and what not). So I would need to migrate to the new user system (not too hard cause I can manually re-create new users the few users there currently are), and the blog data (much harder because the blogs have author fields related to the user system and actual content to migrate.
Any recommendations on executing on those particular items? I’m a bit of a noob, but I think I grasp basic migrations when updating your data from one known data-model to another, but am totally lost on how to migrate it from one known to to some other unknown data model (orion’s).
You can create your complete data model within orion, populate with some test data and examine the underlying collections to see how it is structured. Only then, you can write scripts for your migrations.
@funkyeah If your previews data model was in meteor it wouldn’t be difficult, you can use the same