nur-blog

nur-blog is a public, responsive blog frontend for nur-cms. It is a WebAssembly plugin written in Rust and renders all public HTML with Maud. Published CMS Pages and Articles are read through the plugin content API; drafts are never available to the frontend.

The plugin provides a restrained, blog design with a header, footer and with a persistent left-side navigation on large screens, an optional CMS-driven hero, article previews and pagination. Its settings are maintained in the nur-cms admin interface, so a rebuild is not needed when the localized site name, site description, navigation, content-type slugs or favicon changes.

Features

• Six article previews per overview page by default, with configurable pagination.
• CMS Pages at /{page_slug} and Articles at /{article_type}/{article_slug}.
• A dynamic /sitemap.xml containing the localized home pages and every published Page and Article in the blog's available locales. Absolute URLs use nur-cms's server.public_url, with forwarded request headers as fallback.
• A dynamic /robots.txt that references the sitemap and excludes the internal nur-cms API, authentication, administration, SSE, and private-file routes.
• An optional Page before the article overview, intended for the home-page hero.
• Full-text search across published Articles and Pages in a keyboard-accessible modal, with a non-JavaScript search page as fallback.
• Independently configurable website locales with localized site identity, index Page and navigation. Fixed English and German interface translations are powered by rust-i18n.
• Category navigation with article counts in the desktop sidebar and as a dropdown in the mobile menu. Category filters are retained during pagination and language changes.
• Optional media, authors, category, tags and publication date.
• Safe CMS HTML output, including the shared Comrak/Syntect code highlighting supplied by nur-cms.
• CSS custom properties for visual themes and a separate override stylesheet.
• A protected admin Web Component for site settings and ordered navigation.

Requirements

• nur-cms 0.20.x with plugin root routes, admin components, and the published-entry-facets and published-entry-references plugin host calls enabled.
• A 5,000,000-instruction override for the blog on pages containing multiple rendered article previews: fuel_overrides = { blog = 5_000_000 } in [plugins.runtime].
• Rust with the wasm32-wasip2 target.
• The accompanying nur-cms Syntect change from this project, which adds syntax highlighting to safe Markdown HTML output.

Configure nur-cms

Enable the plugin and its public and admin capabilities in nur-cms.toml:

[plugins]
enabled = ["blog"]
additional_directories = ["../nur-blog"]
allow_root_routes = true
allow_admin_components = true

[plugins.runtime]
fuel_overrides = { blog = 5_000_000 }

additional_directories points to this repository, which acts as the plugin collection root. nur-cms then discovers the package in blog/. Only one enabled plugin can own the public root route /.

Build

rustup target add wasm32-wasip2
cargo build --target wasm32-wasip2 --release

The repository root is a Cargo workspace and a nur-cms plugin collection. The complete plugin crate lives in blog/, matching the plugin ID. nur-cms ignores the Rust and web source files and loads the manifest, generated assets, migrations, and Wasm component from the same directory. The resulting component is at:

blog/target/wasm32-wasip2/release/nur_blog.wasm

Install

Deploy the following files while keeping their relative paths:

blog/
├── LICENSE
├── plugin.toml
├── nur_blog.wasm
├── assets/                     # generated assets and theme-overrides.css
└── migrations/

Place the directory in a configured nur-cms plugin location. At first load, the plugin migration creates settings, site_localization, and navigation in its isolated plugin schema and inserts English and German defaults. Global settings have typed columns; localized website fields and ordered navigation entries remain relational rows.

Create a release archive

The bundle script creates a ready-to-install archive with the manifest, migrations, generated minified assets, editable theme override, and Wasm component. For development, blog/plugin.toml references the Cargo target path. In the archive, the component is copied to blog/nur_blog.wasm and the packaged manifest is rewritten to reference that file directly:

scripts/bundle.sh

The resulting archive is written to dist/nur-blog-[version].tar.gz.

Admin settings

Open Blog in the nur-cms admin menu to configure:

• Default website locale as a BCP 47 code, for example en, de, or de-DE
• Optional multilingual routes and language selection. The selector is shown only when this option is enabled and at least two website locales exist.
• Up to 20 website locales, each with its own site name, description, optional index-Page slug, and ordered navigation
• Optional favicon URL, for example /uploads/favicon.svg; without one, the bundled default icon is used. Images can be selected from the existing nur-cms media browser.
• Article and Page content-type slugs
• Articles per overview page, from 1 to 24

Navigation destinations may be root-relative paths such as /about, or https:// and http:// URLs. The favicon accepts the same URL forms. Settings and navigation are validated before they are stored.

Public routes

Route	Content
/	Hero and newest article previews
/page/2	Further preview pages
/search?q=term	Search published Articles and Pages
/favicon.ico	Bundled default favicon
/robots.txt	Crawler rules and sitemap reference
/sitemap.xml	Dynamic sitemap for published content
/{article_type}/{slug}	Full CMS Article
/{slug}	Full CMS Page
/de/	Localized home page
/de/page/2	Localized preview page
/de/search?q=term	Localized search
/de/{article_type}/{slug}	Localized CMS Article
/de/{slug}	Localized CMS Page

For example, configuring article_type as artikel renders an article at /artikel/mein-beitrag.

The search opens from the sidebar or mobile header and with Command+K on macOS or Ctrl+K on other systems. Results use nur-cms full-text search and remain limited to published content.

Internationalization

The configured website locales control localized site names and descriptions, the hero's index Page, navigation, and the locale filter applied to nur-cms content queries. When multilingual support is enabled, they also control the public language selector and localized routes. The default locale has no URL prefix. Each additional locale uses a leading path segment.

Fixed interface text such as search labels, pagination, and accessibility text is compiled with rust-i18n. English and German are included. Regional variants such as de-DE fall back to their base language and then to English for these fixed labels. A website locale without a matching compiled translation remains fully usable and receives the English fixed labels.

Visitors can switch between all configured website locales from the sidebar or mobile navigation. Internal navigation, articles, pagination, search, and the sitemap use the same canonical URL form. A language switch keeps the current overview or search route and its other query parameters. On a Page or Article, the switch follows nur-cms's content translation group and uses the translated entry's slug. If that group has no published entry for the selected locale, the link leads to that locale's home page.

Fixed interface text lives in blog/locales and is compiled into the Wasm component with rust-i18n. The build script generates the admin component's translation dictionary from the same files, so public and admin translations share one source. Adding a locale file translates fixed UI text; adding a website localization in the admin enables its public route and language-selector entry. Article and Page translations remain managed by nur-cms.

While multilingual support is enabled, locale codes are reserved as the first URL segment. A Page slug or article content-type slug such as de would then conflict with the localized German routes and should not be used.

Themes

blog/web/blog.css contains the complete responsive base design with a spacious two-column composition and content-focused type hierarchy. Override its --blog-* custom properties, or component classes, in blog/assets/theme-overrides.css. That file is loaded after the base stylesheet, remains readable, and is never overwritten by the build. Syntax-highlight colors are exposed through the --blog-code-* custom properties as well.

The build script minifies CSS with Lightning CSS and JavaScript with Oxc, then writes deployable files to blog/assets/*.min.css and blog/assets/*.min.js. Generated files are ignored by Git. Public stylesheets use the package version as a query parameter, for example ?v=0.1.0.

Development checks

cargo fmt --check
cargo clippy --target wasm32-wasip2 -- -D warnings
cargo test
cargo build --target wasm32-wasip2 --release
scripts/bundle.sh
node --check blog/web/admin.js

License

nur-blog is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3. See LICENSE for the complete license text.