Semnal is built for fast, polished editorial publishing with a modern technology-news feel. It combines static Astro performance, crawlable Markdown content, strong SEO defaults, accessible navigation, responsive image optimization, and flexible publication settings for teams that want a serious newsroom foundation without heavy client JavaScript.
Features
- Modern magazine homepage with hero story, latest rail, secondary story grid, popular stories, category modules, newsletter, and promo/ad placements
- Markdown-powered articles using Astro content collections
- Validated frontmatter for titles, excerpts, dates, categories, tags, authors, reading time, cover images, image credits, trending states, and drafts
- Paginated all-news archive
- Category, tag, author index, and author archive pages
- Static search page with generated JSON search index
- Article pages with related posts, previous/next links, share actions, image credits, table of contents, and structured editorial layout
- RSS feed, sitemap, robots.txt, and custom 404 page
- Canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, Twitter/X card metadata, WebSite JSON-LD, Article JSON-LD, and author structured data
- Configurable site settings, categories, navigation, author profiles, social links, newsletter content, and ad labels
- Newsletter signup component
- Ad slot and promo banner components
- Responsive Astro images with defined dimensions and layout-stable media
- Local SVG icon system for navigation, social links, search, theme mode, and share actions
- Accessible skip link, semantic landmarks, visible focus states, labelled controls, and keyboard-friendly mobile navigation
- Light and dark color modes that respect system preference, with minimal inline JavaScript
- Privacy page, contact/advertising page, about/masthead page, search page, and custom 404 page
- Lightweight Astro build with mostly static output and no hydrated framework islands by default
- Tailwind CSS 4 design tokens for easy visual customization
Best Used For
- Technology news publications
- AI and startup media
- Business, markets, and venture capital briefings
- EV, energy, science, and infrastructure coverage
- Independent digital magazines
- Editorial blogs with multiple sections
- Analyst-style publications and research desks
- Publisher themes that need fast static performance, strong SEO, and a clean modern newsroom foundation
