In the last few days, I’ve tried to cover as much ground for Meteor related resources as possible, and as I continue to work my way through, more and more interesting topics and article ideas come to mind, today we’re going to look at reusable apps/modules that we can incorporate within our pre-existing Meteor applications, but also use all of these together to build a separate template of an application if we so desire.
Take a look at my previous roundups of the best Meteor books for starters, a list of highly-resourceful Meteor courses to jumpstart your progress, as well as a roundup of the best learning communities for Meteor developers, everything’s been gathered up according to what the majority of community uses, but if you find something’s missing — be sure to let us know about it in the comments.
I’m sure that there are more of these types of apps and modules available, but I really wanted to focus on quality and ease of use for this particular post, so 90% of the reusable apps that we’re going to see in this post today are going to come from a developer team that goes by the name of Differential. You could say that they’re quite famous in the Meteor community for their efforts and resources.
1. Blog
First up we have a blog module that offers a very simple blogging system for your application that you’re building, it easily integrates with the accounts package that you should already have installed. The editing options perhaps aren’t the best, but I’ve heard good things about this Blog package being used on live client sites.
2. Accounts-Entry
accounts-entry is a meteorite package that relies on Iron Router and provides an alternative interface to accounts-ui, with whole pages for sign up and sign in. The real advantage for this package is most likely the design, and the ability to easily integrate all the social networks if you desire. Seen it on many live websites now.
3. Billing
If you’re into the market to build eCommerce apps, or any other applications that might utilize the Stripe billing system, then this is the package to get — at least for getting a feel of how things work in Meteor, and how third-party systems can be implemented. It keeps track of Stripe related ids on a billing object embedded in the user’s document.
4. Simple Form
Before this package, you would’ve used the Profile package, but since that has been deprecated, we’ve got a new one in place. Simple Form does exactly what you’d expect it to do, it allows you to add forms to your applications without the extra hassle. It contains boilerplate code for various form elements, and will take care of wiring up the form controls to the data for you.
5. Voltage
Great for experimenting with how single-page applications work within the Meteor ecosystem, the Voltage package allows you to create separate static pages that are easy to edit and work with. You can preview the package in live action at the Voltage Example website. It’s simple enough to give you an idea and preview of how things work in that field.
6. Comments
What could a package with the name of Comments possibly do? Of course, it allows you to add comments to any part of your website. It can also help you to understand how the live reactivity works for things such as comments, you can then use that knowledge to implement your own systems across your app, at least in the early learning stages.
7. Azimuth
You can of course just avoid all these separate modules and packages all together, and opt for something much more easy — such as a full-blown CMS. Azimuth is exactly that, a Meteor CMS that’s both fast and easy to use. The documentation is easy to understand, and the whole project by itself is a piece of cake to work with.
8. Orion
Orion is also a Meteor CMS, but dubs itself as a fully working Meteor framework. I guess both terms can apply in this case. You can preview Orion on this website, it’s definitely not a bad management system to use for your first Meteor project. Photos, custom colors, embeds, styling options.. all these things are supported, which should make development slightly less troublesome.
Reusable Apps for Your Meteor Projects
We’ve got a good variety of modules and packages in this post, the first six that come from Differential are basically ways of learning more about how each individual module works, while the last two CMS’s are great for seeing how it all comes together and work with each other. I do hope this post will be of some value to you and your Meteor development journey, would love to hear about your favorite reusable apps in the comment box if you so desire to share.
