Masthead Pro is a newspaper-style news and podcast theme for EmDash, the open-source CMS built on Astro. It is for newsrooms that publish articles and a podcast, and want readers to sign in for some of it: editors work in an admin screen, readers get a fast site on Cloudflare Workers.
Everything in the free edition
- A front page with a full-width nameplate, a lead story with a drop cap, and a dense column grid split by thin vertical rules
- Articles in one readable column, with bylines, reading time, and photo credits
- Section, tag, and author pages; full-text search; dark mode; works down to 360px wide
- The EmDash admin for posts, pages, media, sections, authors, menus, and site settings
Pro features
- Podcast: seasons, episode pages with a player and transcript, a podcast strip on the front page, and an RSS feed ready for Apple Podcasts and Spotify
- Membership: readers sign up and sign in with an email link, no password. Articles and episodes marked members-only stop at a paywall for everyone else, and lists label them "Members only"
- Forms built in the admin, with submissions kept there: newsletter sign-up and a corrections report
- Page layouts chosen per page: Standard, Cover, and Sign-up
- Social share images generated for every article
- Sign-in emails sent through Cloudflare Email Sending, with rate limiting
Under the hood
- Astro 7 and EmDash, server-rendered on Cloudflare Workers with D1 (database) and R2 (media)
- Pages cached at the edge and refreshed when content changes
- RSS, sitemap, SEO metadata and JSON-LD; no client-side framework on public pages
- AGENTS.md and EmDash agent skills for Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI coding tools
- Needs a Cloudflare Workers Paid plan (the bundle is over the free plan's 3 MiB limit)
Try it
Live demo: https://masthead.ondelva.com. The admin demo at https://masthead.ondelva.com/demo signs you in as a contributor, with no sign-up; the same account opens members-only stories.
License and support
Personal ($59, one person) and Team ($149, up to 10 people) licenses, both for unlimited sites for yourself or clients. You get the source through GitHub and a zip download, every 1.x update, and email support. 14-day refund. A free MIT edition is also available: https://github.com/ondelva/astro-theme-masthead
