ere's a pattern anyone who has shipped a real website knows too well. You pick a CMS, then you go shopping. Search? Bolt on Algolia. Comments? Embed Disqus. SEO checks? Install a plugin that upsells a subscription. Star ratings? Paste in a review widget. Each one is another monthly bill, another account, and — the part that quietly bites you — another third-party script loading your visitors' data from someone else's server.
We think a complete CMS should ship the complete site. So over the last few weeks we shipped five plugins that cover the things people usually reach off-platform for. All five run inside your Neleto instance, on your EU server, with no external scripts on your pages. Here's what they do — and, honestly, where the edges are.
1. Site Search — instead of Algolia
Site Search adds a real search box to your site, backed by PostgreSQL full-text search running in the plugin's own database. It's German-aware (so Häuser matches Haus), forgiving of typos, and it shows an autocomplete dropdown as visitors type. Drop the search-bar component on any page; results render on a /search page that uses whichever layout you choose, so it looks like the rest of your site.
The part we like most is the free insight: a dashboard card shows your most common searches, and — more useful — the searches that returned nothing. That's a ready-made content to-do list of things your visitors expect but you don't have yet. No external service, no per-search fees, no data leaving your box.
2. Blog Comments — instead of Disqus
Blog Comments gives your posts a comment section that lives in your database, not in an ad-funded third party's. Drop {{ comments(post.id) }} into your blog-post template and you get a threaded thread with replies and likes. Every comment waits for approval by default, so spam never reaches the page — and on top of that there's a honeypot, a submit time-trap, optional hCaptcha/reCAPTCHA, and optional Akismet scoring.
Because it's yours, the privacy story is clean: no tracking scripts on your pages, email is optional and never shown, and there's a one-click erase or anonymize by email for GDPR requests. It even works without JavaScript — the form posts, replies, and likes all degrade gracefully.
3. Google Reviews — instead of an embed widget
Google Reviews pulls your Google rating and latest reviews and renders them in your site's own style — not in a generic Google iframe. The reviews are fetched server-side and cached on your server, so no Google tracking script runs in your visitors' browsers. You can hide any individual review, and the block adds AggregateRating structured data so your star rating can show up in search results too.
One honest limit worth stating up front: Google's API returns at most 5 reviews per location. That's Google's cap, not ours — so this is your best reviews on show, refreshed automatically, rather than an exhaustive archive.
4. Site Health — instead of an SEO plugin
Site Health is two audits in one: on-page SEO and accessibility. It scans every page and gives it a 0–100 score, flags the things search engines penalize (missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, weak social tags, missing H1s) and the barriers that block screen-reader and keyboard users (images without alt text, vague link text, missing page language). Two dashboard cards summarize the whole site; a full admin panel lets you fix page by page.
It also generates structured data (JSON-LD) for your organization, articles, events, breadcrumbs and FAQs — the markup that earns rich results in Google — from content you already have. Accessibility auditing is especially timely for the German market since the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz took effect in 2025.
5. Media Gallery — instead of a gallery/slider plugin
Media Gallery is a pack of ready-to-use blocks built entirely from the images already in your media library: a responsive grid or masonry with an accessible lightbox, a swipeable slider, a draggable before/after comparison, and a logo strip. Pick your images with the normal file picker and publish.
Two details that matter: images are delivered at the right size for each device through Neleto's built-in image scaling (srcset out of the box), and everything is accessible and dependency-free — a few KB of vanilla JS per block, no jQuery, no carousel library, and the blocks work even before the JavaScript loads.
Why "built in" actually matters
It's not just tidiness. Keeping these inside the CMS changes three things you can measure:
- Privacy, by default. Your search index, your comments, your cached reviews all live in your own EU-hosted database. There are no third-party scripts loading visitor data from a US cloud — which is a much shorter conversation with your DPO, and squarely on the right side of the DSGVO.
- Speed. No blocking calls out to Algolia or Disqus or a reviews CDN on every page load. The plugins are small Rust services next to a Rust CMS; the review data and search index are already local.
- One admin, one bill. Editors manage everything from the same dashboard, with the same roles. There's no separate SaaS console to log into, and no stack of monthly subscriptions that quietly grows with your traffic.
This is the whole idea behind an all-in-one CMS: the features a real site needs shouldn't each be a separate vendor. They should just be there.
The build-in-public bit
All five are built on the same plugin system that ships with Neleto — each is a small service that the CMS runs alongside your site, exposing components, template helpers, visitor-facing pages and dashboard cards. That's the same surface any developer can build against, and it's a big part of why a small team could ship five of these in a short stretch: the hard parts (rendering, image scaling, auth, roles, hosting) are already handled by the CMS, so a plugin gets to be just the feature.
We'll go deeper on writing your own plugin in a future post. For now: if you run a Neleto site, these are in the plugin store today. Install the ones you need, skip the subscriptions you don't.
Running your site somewhere that charges you per search and per seat for the basics? That's the gap Neleto is built to close — see how the complete CMS compares, or spin up a free project and install the plugins you need.
Fast websites. Easy content. AI native.
Originally published on neleto.io.
Top comments (0)