Larkmoor College: a self-hosted CMS for colleges and universities, on open-source .NET

For each Raytha use case we take a realistic brief, hand it to an AI agent with the raytha CLI, and publish what comes out: the site, the files behind it, and a kit you can use to rebuild it yourself. This one is a college website: a program finder across six schools, a faculty directory, admissions with deadlines and visits, an illustrated campus map, news, events, athletics schedules and a members-only portal for students, faculty and staff.

If you are looking for a self-hosted CMS for colleges or an open-source .NET CMS for higher education, this is what a small college's public website looks like on Raytha. The agent built it on a fresh Raytha 2.0.1 instance. Nobody opened the admin. Every template, content type, item, page, menu and group went in through the CLI, from files in a directory.

Larkmoor College is fictional. The students, faculty, buildings, teams and documents are invented, and the site says so on every page. There are no application, registration or payment forms.

Why college and university web teams look for a self-hosted CMS

A college website serves prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni and the local community at once. Admissions, marketing, the registrar, athletics and central IT all need a say in it, and the same questions come up:

• Keep the site in your own environment. Many campus IT teams prefer to run public websites on infrastructure they already patch, back up and monitor, whether that is an on-premises data center or a university cloud account. Raytha is a .NET 10 application with PostgreSQL, shipped as a Docker image, so it can run on your own servers, in your own cloud or with a hosting partner you already use.
• You own the code. Raytha is MIT-licensed. The templates, content types and content in this example are plain files you can keep in your own repository, so the site outlives any one vendor contract, web agency or budget cycle.
• It fits a .NET and Microsoft campus. Many institutions already run Active Directory or Entra ID, SQL Server and .NET applications for student services. Raytha is ASP.NET Core, so the team that maintains those systems can host, review and extend the website with tools they already know.
• Members-only areas without a second CMS. Raytha has public user accounts, user groups and per-group permissions, so a portal with advising checklists for students and policy materials for faculty can sit behind a website sign-in. That sign-in is for the website only. It does not replace the student information system, the learning management system or campus email.
• No per-seat pricing. There is no license fee per editor, department or page view, so every school, office and athletics coach who updates a page can have an account.
• Campus sign-in for editors. Raytha supports SAML and JWT single sign-on, so the people who edit the site can use the identity provider the campus already runs.

Raytha is a small open-source project, and it is not the right answer for every institution. If you need a large module ecosystem, a vendor that hosts and supports the platform under contract, or a full digital experience suite with CRM and marketing automation built in, a commercial CMS or a larger open-source platform may fit better. For fair comparisons with platforms .NET teams often evaluate, see Raytha vs Kentico, Raytha vs DNN (DotNetNuke), Raytha vs Umbraco and Raytha vs WordPress.

What was built

Larkmoor College is the website of a fictional residential college of liberal arts and sciences with about 3,400 students on the Calder River, founded in 1891. The site has:

• A home page with a program finder, quick links, the six schools, featured programs, upcoming events, news, a campus map and athletics.
• Sixteen academic programs (majors, a minor and a master's) with filters for school, degree and keyword, and pages listing courses, outcomes, faculty and the building each program calls home.
• A faculty directory with fourteen profiles, searchable by name, school and teaching interest, with office hours and contact details.
• Admissions: how to apply, a deadlines table, cost and financial aid, how to plan a visit and an FAQ. It links to a portal rather than taking applications.
• Campus life with an illustrated campus map and ten buildings, from residence halls to the library, each with hours, features and the events held there.
• News, events (lectures, performances, visit days, games) and athletics with eight teams and their schedules and results.
• A student and faculty portal behind a Raytha sign-in. Students see advising, tutoring, technology and wellbeing resources; faculty and staff also see the handbook digest, grade deadlines and teaching workshops.
• An about page with a short history, a contact directory, an accessibility statement and search across programs, faculty, buildings, news, events and resources.

The design is collegiate without being stuffy: a deep oxblood hero over an illustrated campus skyline, warm cream paper backgrounds, white cards, gold accents and an evergreen secondary color for the sciences. Headings are set in Newsreader and everything else in Public Sans. No wide display fonts. The crest, building illustrations, portraits and PDFs are generated by a script, so every image and document is license-free. On a 390px phone the navigation becomes a menu button and the program and building grids stack cleanly.

How programs, the faculty directory and the portal work

1. Each program is a content item with school and degree dropdowns, courses and outcomes, and a relationship field to the building it is based in. The programs page filters those fields with query parameters, and the same items power search and the home page program finder.
2. Each faculty profile relates to a program, so a program page lists its faculty and a profile links back to its program without duplicating anything. Events and programs relate to buildings, so a building page shows what happens there.
3. The portal uses two Raytha user groups, students and faculty. The portal and resource templates check CurrentUser.UserGroups on the server: signed out, members-only resources show a lock and a sign-in prompt; signed in as a student, faculty materials stay hidden.

Try it yourself

The rebuild kit is in the public RaythaHQ/raytha-examples repository. Point the Raytha CLI at a fresh instance, run the example's build.sh, and you get the same content types, templates, pages and seed content. You can also deploy Raytha on Railway from the template to try a blank site quickly.