3… 2… 1… Ignition. We have liftoff.
Another week, another static site generator out of beta support on CloudCannon. But it’s not just any SSG — it’s Astro, the top-performing all-in-one web framework designed for speed. With Astro and CloudCannon you can manage your content in your own Git repository and deploy everywhere, while using your favorite UI components and libraries. And the final touch? With CloudCannon, your highly performant sites are available for non-technical editors to draft, review, and publish their content.
Astro is a lightweight and powerful static site generator that allows developers to mix and match popular frameworks like as React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, SolidJS, AlpineJS, and Lit. Astro keeps your static sites fast by default, automatically converting components to HTML at build time, and removing superfluous JavaScript. And with Astro's partial hydration, you can hydrate specific interactive components on the page.
With CloudCannon as your Astro CMS, your whole team can collaborate to create incredibly fast static sites with a wide range of components. Astro is in fine company on CloudCannon — we’ve recently brought our support for Gatsby, SvelteKit, and Next.js out of beta, joining the likes of Hugo, Jekyll, and Eleventy. (And we’re not stopping there!)
What’s new for Astro users on CloudCannon?
We have imported, built, and stress-tested a variety of static Astro sites using CloudCannon, from local development using GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket connections to spinning up new Astro sites straight on CloudCannon from one of our existing themes. We've improved the Astro experience for all users along the way.
Astro-specific documentation and guides
Experienced devs choose Astro because they love both the tool’s DX and its performance. We’re big fans too, but we also want to support developers who are new to either Astro or CloudCannon. With that in mind, we've updated our documentation to address Astro specifically, to ensure that all of your questions are answered and readily searchable. (If you work across multiple SSGs, you’ll find a handy SSG-switcher in the top right of our new documentation, so you can compare how CloudCannon adapts to different tools.)
We’ve also written up a Getting Started with Astro guide, to help you configure your Astro site for visual editing with CloudCannon, share your Astro site with others, and set up content publishing workflows for large teams.
Sendit — a stellar free page-building theme for Astro
We've extended our new theme Sendit for Astro as well, demonstrating the benefits of CloudCannon's page-building processes and adaptable Visual Editor for Astro users. Sendit provides a sleek, contemporary, and ready-to-use site that is now available for everyone to adapt, edit, and customize. It’s also an excellent working example of how to configure your existing Astro sites for editing on CloudCannon: make use of that cloudcannon.config.yml file and see how it’s all set up!
With Sendit, all users can quickly build their pages from a pre-made set of 20 pre-styled and reusable page components, as well as create their own components to extend the project. Sendit has an easily configurable navigation and footer, multiple hero options, and subtle animations, all optimized for editing in CloudCannon.
Check out the Sendit demo site to see its potential. You can also deploy a new Sendit site with Astro and CloudCannon in one click, and experience the best of our Visual Editor for intuitive page building.
Thanks to the Astro core team!
We worked closely with members of the Astro core team to reach this milestone release, and it was a really productive process. CloudCannon developer Tate Kennington led the charge on our side, and Astro's concerted #leanweb approach to building sites with islands architecture and partial hydration for interactivity really won him over.
Here's Tate on Astro — why the tool is such a natural fit for CloudCannon, the steps we took to bring our Astro support out of beta, and his excitement for the future of Astro and CloudCannon features growing alongside each other:
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