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Philosophy and architecture
Why the CMS is a dependency and the website is the app, and what Aurora is built on.
Aurora started from one question: what if a client site's CMS were simply part of the Laravel application, rather than a platform the application lives inside? Four principles follow from that.
- The CMS is a dependency, the website is the app. Everything the CMS is comes in through Composer: models, admin, migrations, AI tools, admin styles. The application in
app/andresources/is the website: its layouts, its components, its own blocks. Upgrading the CMS iscomposer update; it never touches the site, and the site never needs to fork the CMS. - Edit the real thing. Editors shouldn't fill in forms and imagine the result. The canvas renders the same Blade components the website renders, with the site's own CSS.
- Content stays structured. Each block declares its fields in a Filament schema, so content is typed, validated, translatable, searchable and machine-readable. That is what makes the APIs and AI assistants dependable.
- Permissions are the boundary, everywhere. The admin, the visual editor, bulk actions, the MCP server and the built-in assistant all go through the same policies. Publishing is checked at the model level, so no surface can skip it.
The project
Plain text
your-site/ ← your website: a Laravel app, started from the template
├── app/Providers/ ← the site's set-up: its own settings tabs, block order
├── app/Blocks/ ← the site's own blocks (found automatically)
├── resources/views/
│ ├── components/blocks/ ← views for the site's own blocks
│ ├── components/layouts/ ← the site's page shell (header, footer, menus)
│ └── vendor/aurora/layouts/ ← page layouts, published from Aurora and made the site's own
├── resources/css/
│ ├── app.css ← the website's CSS, also shown on the editor's canvas
│ └── site/tokens.css ← the website's design tokens
└── vendor/aurora/ ← the CMS, through Composer
├── cms/ ← models, Filament admin, MCP, APIs, migrations, views, lang
├── borealis/ ← the default admin theme ("Borealis")
└── minimal/ ← a second admin theme ("Minimal")Built on
| Concern | Built on |
|---|---|
| Admin | Filament 5 (SPA mode), Livewire, Blade, Phosphor icons |
| Visual editor | carljanzell/filament-page-builder, extended by Aurora |
| Media | spatie/laravel-medialibrary |
| Roles and permissions | spatie/laravel-permission |
| Translations | spatie/laravel-translatable, spatie/laravel-translation-loader |
| Menus | datlechin/filament-menu-builder |
| Search | Laravel Scout (a database engine with MySQL full-text, or any Scout driver) |
| AI | laravel/mcp, laravel/passport (OAuth), laravel/ai |
| GraphQL | webonyx/graphql-php |
| Sign-in | Passkeys (spatie/laravel-passkeys), authenticator apps, impersonation |