Pellandry Fluid Controls: a self-hosted CMS for manufacturers — an open-source .NET manufacturing company website

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 manufacturing company website — the site an engineer opens to check a pressure rating, the place a buyer looks up a lead time, and the portal a distributor signs into for this year's price sheet. The same build works for a manufacturer's own marketing or IT team, or for an agency that builds sites for industrial companies.

If you are looking for a self-hosted CMS for manufacturers, or an open-source .NET CMS for industrial companies, this is the kind of site that fits: product series, specifications, plants, literature and distributors as structured content, server-rendered pages, and members-only distributor and service portals built on Raytha's own user accounts and groups. Built on a fresh Raytha instance, with no client-side app in the layout.

Pellandry Fluid Controls is fictional. The company, its plants and the towns they are in, its products, part numbers, people, distributors and figures are invented and labeled as such, and phone numbers use the 555 range. There are no quote, order, payment or registration forms; partner accounts exist only for the demo.

A product line drawn like an engineering sheet

Most manufacturer sites open with a stock photo of a factory and a "request a quote" button. This one opens the way engineers and buyers actually work: with the drawing, the rating and the lead time.

• Product series as records. Twelve series in six families (ball, butterfly, check and control valves, actuators and pumps). Each has sizes, pressure rating, materials, temperature range, end connections, certifications and a spec table, all as fields, so the product page, the cards and the search results come from the same data.
• A part-number decoder. Every series stores its part-number segments, and the page lays them out as a strip: B140, -S, -20, -SW, -P, each with what it means. Distributors, buyers and maintenance planners read the same thing.
• A weekly lead-time board. A dark, departure-board table of every series with its plant and standard lead time, with anything over eight weeks flagged in orange, next to each plant's cells and how loaded they are this week. A planner changes one number and the board, the product page and the portal all update.
• Plants, industries and distributors. Plant pages show cell load, certifications and the series made there. Industry pages (water, chemical, food, oil and gas, power, HVAC, pharma) list what those buyers ask for and which series fit. The distributor directory is grouped by region, and each product page lists distributors that carry that family.
• An open literature library. Datasheets, installation manuals, certificates and guides are public pages with document numbers and revisions. Price sheets, CAD packages and service bulletins appear in the same list with a lock, so the public can see they exist.
• Site search across products, literature, industries, plants, distributors and news.

Design: the drawing sheet

The look borrows from a general-arrangement drawing: blueprint navy with a fine grid, white line work, safety orange for callouts and anything that needs attention, and a title block under each drawing with the series, sizes, plant and lead time. Text is set in IBM Plex Sans with IBM Plex Mono for part numbers, ratings and lead times. There are no wide display fonts. Product, industry and news images are generated line drawings, so no real product, plant or person is pictured.

Why a manufacturer looks at a self-hosted CMS

• Dealer and distributor portals without a second system. Raytha has public user accounts and user groups. The distributor portal, the service desk and partner-only documents check CurrentUser.UserGroups in the template on the server, so a price sheet or a service bulletin is never sent to a browser that should not see it.
• No per-seat pricing. Every product manager, applications engineer and plant scheduler who updates the site can have an editor account, and every distributor branch and service technician can have a sign-in. Raytha has no seat licensing, so you do not ration logins across plants, regions and partners.
• You own the code and the content model. Raytha is open source. Products, specs, part-number rules, plants and literature are content types you define; the templates and content are files you can keep in your own repository, hand to the next agency, or rebuild on a new server without asking anyone.
• On premises and .NET, if your IT policy needs it. Many manufacturers run Windows and .NET for ERP, MES and quality systems, keep pricing and engineering data on their own network, or answer to customer and export-control rules about where technical data lives. Raytha is ASP.NET Core with PostgreSQL, so it can run on premises or in a private cloud next to those systems. Single sign-on, role-based admin permissions and audit logs are built in. You can also deploy it on Railway.
• Structured product data instead of PDF folders. Specs, lead times and part-number segments are fields, so they can be filtered, searched and reused across pages, and an integration can update them from an ERP through the API instead of someone re-typing a datasheet.
• One build, many product lines. For an agency that builds industrial sites, the kit is the product: the same content model and theme can be rebuilt for the next manufacturer with its own families, plants and colors.

Raytha fits manufacturers that want to own their stack: the code is open source, the content model is yours, and the site can run on servers your IT team controls, next to the rest of your plant systems. If you would rather not run it yourself, Raytha can be fully hosted and managed for you under contract. Where another platform may suit you better is if you need a large plugin marketplace, or an all-in-one marketing suite with CRM and marketing automation built in. For fair comparisons with platforms industrial and .NET teams often evaluate, see Raytha vs Kentico, Raytha vs DNN, Raytha vs Umbraco and Raytha vs WordPress.

How the members-only areas work

• Two user groups: distributors and service partners. An account can be in either or both; admins see everything.
• Each literature item has an audience field (everyone, distributors, service partners). The detail template reads it and the signed-in user's groups and renders either the body or a lock panel with a sign-in link. The library lists every document with its audience.
• The distributor portal at /portal is a site page with its own template: signed out, it explains what is behind sign-in; signed in as a distributor, it shows the order cut-off notice, a table of every series with its price band, lead time and plant, the multipliers by band, the regional manager, and the price sheets, CAD packages and stocking terms. Product pages also show a distributor's price band in the sidebar.
• The service desk at /service-desk shows service bulletins, field repair procedures, test checklists and the status of each plant and the repair center, only for service partner accounts.
• Sign-in uses Raytha's built-in login page, restyled to match. There is no registration form: in the story, the regional sales manager creates partner accounts. For more on the pattern, see creating a members-only website.

What is in the kit

Six content types (products, industries, plants, literature, news, distributors), two user groups, site pages for Company, Quality, Search, the distributor portal and the service desk, menus, and generated product drawings and art — all rebuildable with one command from the kit in the examples repository. Route check: 72 routes checked, 0 failed.