Masthead is a newspaper-style news theme for EmDash, the open-source CMS built on Astro. It is for local papers, magazines, student newspapers, and newsletters with many writers: editors publish from an admin screen, not from Markdown files in a repository.
How it looks
- 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
What editors get
- The EmDash admin: write posts and pages in a rich-text editor and upload media
- Sections, tags, authors, menus, and site settings (title, tagline, logo) are edited in the admin, not in code
- The front page's lead, top stories, and section columns are chosen in the admin
- Sample content (24 articles, 7 bylines, 6 sections) is applied on first setup, so the site is complete from the first run
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-free.ondelva.com. The admin demo at https://masthead-free.ondelva.com/demo signs you in as a contributor, with no sign-up.
Masthead Pro
Pro adds a podcast (episode pages, player, transcripts, and an Apple Podcasts / Spotify-ready feed), email-link membership with members-only articles and episodes, newsletter and corrections forms, Cover and Sign-up page layouts, and generated social images. Pro demo: https://masthead.ondelva.com
