Aurora on Nick: Should We All Jump?
In June the guitarist and composer Salomon Jakobsson asked for a website that would be his only home on the web — no platforms, his own catalog, his own streams, eight languages. We built it on Nick with Aurora as the public frontend, and it has been in production at salomonjakobsson.ljusa-tider.se since mid-August: real content, real visitors, and a site owner who edits through Aurora daily with an AI assistant of his own. Thirteen patches, a dozen upstream findings, and one shipped fleet later, this talk is the honest account of that build: what was strictly Aurora, what reached down into Nick and PostgreSQL, what Aurora already does better than Volto — and a straight answer to the question everyone in the hallway is asking: should we all jump to Aurora now?
Details
This is a field report, not a demo.
The site is Salomon Jakobsson's production home — eight languages, self-hosted audio and video, album catalog, working contact forms — running Aurora as its public frontend on a Nick backend since mid-August 2026. Salomon edits it himself; his edits and his own AI assistant's bug reports drove much of what this talk covers. You will also hear the site before you hear this talk: the Aurora Theme, which Salomon composed and performed for the platform, opens the plenary lightning talks — published on his site, streamed from it.
What was strictly Aurora.
A thirteen-patch series tells you precisely where an alpha frontend meets reality: a Video edit form and a new Audio block, the first view for the schemaForm contact block, responsive columns, a contents-view date bug where nick's JSON null met classic Plone's 'None' convention, a language switcher that went from a broken row to a dropdown to — as of this week — keeping the reader's place across languages, and a footer that says the artist's name instead of the framework's. Also the honest gap list: the publish UI is a stub, the control panel is unstyled, and Aurora's editor saves into a document model that quietly forks from classic blocks.
What reached into Nick and PostgreSQL.
Streaming forced HTTP range support into the download route — and uncovered a permission hole on the way. Forms ride Nick's schemaform endpoint with submissions in Postgres. Translation groups, the roles model, and a wonield gains one JSON wrapper per browser save — a defect that lives somewhere in the seam between frontend and backend, which is exactly why running the full stack yourself matters. Underneath all of it: documents as jsonb rows in PostgreSQL, one databtenant, everything reconstructible.
Is Aurora better than Volto?
In some ways, measurably: twelve-second producteact Router stack, react-aria accessibility for free, and an editing feelVolto cannot match. In other ways, not yet: workflow, control panels, and form editing are still Volto's territory. The answer to the title's question is a conditional worth twenty-five minutes: jump deliberately, not immediately — I'll show which kiewards, which operations you must be prepared to route around, and how fast the gaps are closing when real sites feed fixes upstream.