Mailer is an editorial Astro 7 theme built for newsletters, serialised publications, independent writers, paid and free subscription lists, and small editorial teams that publish in numbered issues.
The theme is designed for static-first publishing with structured issue content, fast page loads, minimal dependencies, and reusable Astro components. Issues are managed through Astro content collections with validated frontmatter for issue numbers, titles, excerpts, topics, dates, writers, covers with alt text and photo credit, featured flags, and drafts. The front page is dealt from the archive with no repeats between blocks, and every block hides itself when it has nothing to show, so a site with three issues and a site with three hundred both look deliberate.
Key Features
- Built with Astro 7, Tailwind CSS 4, and TypeScript
- Editorial newsletter and archive design built around numbered issues
- Home, archive, issue, topic, topic index, writer, writer index, search, about, privacy, styleguide, RSS, robots, sitemap, and 404 pages
- Astro content collections for structured issue publishing in Markdown or MDX
- Validated issue schema with numbers, excerpts, topics, writers, covers, alt text, photo credits, featured and draft flags
- Front page assembled from the archive: lead issue, recent cards, numbered back-issue index, topic grid, and writer row
- Numbered archive index grouped by year, with pagination shared across archive, topic, and writer pages
- Issue pages with a fixed reading column, reading-progress bar, writer note, and previous/next navigation
- Six MDX content blocks with no imports needed â callouts, toggles, self-filling bookmark cards, audio, file downloads, and captioned figures with wide break-out
- Lightbox on every issue with arrow keys, swipe, a counter, and preloaded neighbours, applied to plain Markdown images too
- Client-side search over a statically generated JSON index, shared by a Ctrl/Cmd K dialog and a results page
- Provider-neutral signup form that posts to any endpoint â Buttondown, Kit, Mailchimp, Listmonk, or your own handler
- Share card with eleven targets, a copy-link field, and native share-sheet handoff
- Auto-hiding header with a full-width mobile drawer, trapped focus, and Escape
- Full-content RSS feed with summary-only and item-cap settings, plus build-time read time and draft exclusion
- Config-driven site identity, SEO defaults, navigation, socials, topics, and writer portraits across three config files
- Canonical URLs, sitemap, RSS, robots.txt, Open Graph, Twitter/X cards, and BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, and WebSite JSON-LD
- Build-time social share cards cropped from each issue cover
- Accessible skip link, landmarks, labelled controls, visible focus states, and full reduced-motion support
- Responsive Astro images with Sharp and one self-hosted variable typeface with no external font requests
- System-aware light and dark modes with a saved reader preference
- Static output with no framework islands, deployable to Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, or any static host
Best For
- Newsletters
- Independent writers
- Serialised publications
- Editorial teams
- Paid and free subscription lists
- Essay and long-form archives
- Studio and agency dispatches
- Community bulletins
- Research digests
- Static issue archives
