Astro with Wagtail CMS

This initiative is wonderfully self-referential: it is the site you are reading right now. froodx.net is an Astro build wired to a Wagtail CMS and hosted on Cloudflare, with the public front end and the editing system now living as separate but cooperative parts.

Eddie, the Heart of Gold’s shipboard computer, was endlessly enthusiastic and occasionally unbearable about it. A good CMS is the calmer cousin of Eddie: always available, genuinely helpful, and content to let you get on with the actual writing rather than narrating it back at you.

How it fits together

• Astro renders fast, content-driven pages with almost no client-side weight.
• Wagtail stores the editable content and exposes it through the CMS API.
• Astro pulls that content in at build time and renders the public site.
• Cloudflare Pages hosts the public front end, while Wagtail runs separately as the admin and publishing system.
• Editing happens in Wagtail; going live still means rebuilding Astro from the newly published CMS content.

The lesson, dearly bought

When a thing breaks with no error and a blank page, reproduce the running system and look at the actual configuration. Do not theorise endlessly from the source code. This site learned that lesson the hard way; the Wagtail rebuild kept the useful parts of the workflow and dropped the parts that kept turning editorial work into infrastructure archaeology.