What’s the big news?
In another step towards making Apostrophe the most dynamic, feature-rich website ecosystem for building and maintaining your website, our team is pleased to announce the integration for the Astro web framework.
What is Astro?
Astro is a free, open-source software that enables users to build fast, content-driven websites with an emphasis on ease-of-use. It operates using a BYOF or “Bring Your Own Framework” model that makes it compatible with popular JS frameworks such as React, Svelt, or Vue. Some other key features of Astro’s technology include static site generation, component-based architecture, and built in automations. You can read more on Astro’s website.
What does the integration mean for Apostrophe users?
With the new integration comes the ability to let Apostrophe manage your content, handle routing of URLs and fetch content, and let Astro take the responsibility for the rendering of pages and any associated logic using your framework(s) of choice. Additionally, you can now bring the ApostropheCMS Admin UI into your Astro application, meaning can manage your site exactly as if you were in a "normal" Apostrophe instance.
Why is this such a big deal? Apostrophe has always been great for providing a rich live editing experience for marketing teams. When we originally introduced our native REST APIs in A3, we made it easier than ever to use Apostrophe as a headless CMS. However, it’s always been harder than it should be to deliver our standard fully WYSIWYG editing experience when running Apostrophe in headless mode. This new integration is an incredible solution to that puzzle, and we’re thrilled that we can now support such an elegant option for delivering a rich, in-context editing experience within a headless architecture.
How to get started…
There’s more information about these exciting new capabilities and instructions on how to use the integration at the Astro docs and on our Extensions page. Head over there now to get setup and install the module.
What’s next?
If you have questions about Astro or how to leverage some of the new features, feel free to reach out to us directly or, better yet, bring your feedback to Apostrophe’s Discord Community so others can benefit as well.
Lastly, we’d love to see you at our next live Show & Tell event on January 25th! We’ll be hosting an open discussion around some of the more commonly used JS frameworks, including some of the ones mentioned earlier in this announcement, and how to use them with Astro. It’s all going down in the Discord, see you there!