Relay is designed for photo-led editorial publishing. Its monochrome system lets cover photography carry the colour, holding a single signal accent back for links and active state, so a publication looks composed with nothing more than good imagery and clean typography. It combines static Astro performance, structured Markdown content, responsive image optimization, automatic read time, strong SEO defaults, accessible navigation, RSS, sitemap support, static search, and a fully configurable section system for technology magazines, review sites, product and engineering teams, agencies, and independent writers.
Features
- Photo-led homepage with an autoplaying featured slideshow, trending and category rails, topic tiles, a publication panel, and a latest-posts grid with an editorial sidebar
- Markdown articles powered by Astro content collections
- Validated frontmatter for titles, excerpts, categories, dates, updated dates, authors, tags, covers, image credits, trending state, and drafts
- Read time calculated automatically from the article body at build time, at a configurable reading speed
- Article pages with a title-first header, an 820px reading column, reading progress, share and copy-link actions, an author box, and a related-story rail
- Posts can opt out of the cover image and run as a text-only document
- Dynamic category pages with configurable featured, grid, and editorial list layouts
- Paginated archive plus category, tag, author index, and individual author archive pages
- Built-in static search with a keyboard-friendly command palette, ranked metadata matches, a lazy-loaded index, and a dedicated results page
- Scroll-snap rails that page horizontally on small screens and collapse into a plain grid on large ones, with no carousel library
- Dual light and dark syntax-highlighted code blocks rendered at build time by Shiki, with a copy button and no client-side highlighter
- Responsive Astro image handling with WebP output, appropriate sizes, and eager loading for the largest contentful paint
- Sticky masthead with category navigation, a folding submenu, an accessible mobile drawer, search, and social links
- Dedicated about, contact, privacy, RSS, robots.txt, sitemap, and custom 404 pages
- Provider-neutral newsletter and contact forms, disabled until real endpoints are configured
- Canonical URLs, Open Graph metadata, Twitter/X cards, RSS, sitemap, and Article and WebSite JSON-LD
- Centralized publication settings, navigation, categories, author portraits, social links, form endpoints, SEO defaults, and production URL configuration
- Self-hosted Geist and Geist Mono with local social icons, and no third-party font or icon requests
- System-aware light and dark modes with a saved reader preference and tiny inline JavaScript only where needed
- Accessible skip navigation, semantic landmarks, logical headings, visible focus states, labelled controls, and keyboard-friendly menus and search
- Tailwind CSS 4 design tokens for colour, spacing, typography, radii, and layout
- Mostly static Astro output with minimal client JavaScript and no hydrated framework islands by default
- Commercial theme structure ready for customization, deployment, and reuse
Best Used For
- Technology magazines
- Product and device journalism
- Software and platform coverage
- Security and privacy publications
- Robotics and hardware reporting
- Engineering and developer blogs
- Design and product team publications
- Company engineering journals
- Industry analysis and commentary sites
- Newsletter-backed tech publications
- Independent technology writers
- Review sites that lead with photography
- Agency and studio editorial sites
- Startup and SaaS content hubs
- Publications that need fast static performance, strong SEO, accessible structure, and a confident editorial identity
