AstroWind v2

[prototypa]

AstroWind v2

What you asked for in v1

Two and a half years of #392, plus every other discussion and issue in this repo. What came up most, in order:

1. i18n / multilingual — the most requested thing in the project's history, asked continuously since 2022: translated routes, translated UI, multilingual content, a language switcher.
2. SSR alongside static output — v1 only ever worked properly in static and hybrid.
3. Updatable base code — keeping a project current without hand-merging, stripping the template down to what you actually need, starting from something other than the full demo.
4. Documentation — 64% of all discussions here are people asking how to do something the template already did.
5. CMS integration — Sanity, Decap, PagesCMS, Tina, Directus, WordPress. Mostly asked as "please don't hardcode one".
6. A real token system — theming that actually reskins everything, instead of components mixing config colors with raw Tailwind.
7. The unfinished landing pages — several linked templates that contain only a hero, plus more complete examples generally.
8. More widgets — mega menu, advanced tables, gallery and carousel with lightbox, team pages, video sections, FAQ accordions, back-to-top, reading progress.
9. Forms with validation — and documented wiring to the usual providers. Also one of the most recurring support threads.
10. A blog that can grow — multiple content types on their own paths, authors and author pages, table of contents, search, tag and category indexes, related posts, full-content RSS.
11. The image component — why it exists, how to configure it, and how to stop it inflating builds. Asked as a question far more often than as a complaint.
12. Site-wide search — asked for since the earliest days of the project.

And many others: a comment system, privacy-respecting analytics and cookie consent, structured SEO and schema.org, dark/light mode that follows the system, a swappable icon system, deployment guides per platform, header and navigation robustness, trailingSlash handling, scroll animations, auth pages, newsletter integrations, CJK support. All of them, ordered by demand, are enumerated here: #392 (comment)

The one thing underneath most of it

AstroWind is a template you fork. The example code is your project, so updates become hand-merges and every project drifts. You don't fix that by adding features — you'd get a bigger thing with the same problem and worse merges.

So v2 is a rebuild on a framework, Parche, with AstroWind as its reference build: https://github.com/withparche/parche

It is alpha, and it can still change enormously — treat anything you see there as provisional, including the API. If you want to contribute ideas or help, you're welcome.

The idea

• Pages are JSON. A page is a list of sections and their content.
• A widget package covers most of what a site needs, on a flexible token system — so out of the box you get a page that is finished and working, not a stencil to fill in.
• Those widgets are not a commitment. Swap in a different widget package, or eject the ones you have and rewrite them however you want — by hand or with AI. The only rule is that a widget keeps its defined input schema. The contract is the schema, not our code.
• Apps, not just components. The blog is a real app: configurable, usable as-is. More apps follow.
• i18n from the start, because pages as JSON makes translation straightforward rather than a retrofit.
• The door to CMSs. Pages are JSON in the repo today, but nothing says they have to come from there — they can come from a remote. That is what makes real CMS support possible instead of a per-CMS integration.
• Web components for the JavaScript side.
• A builder for easily creating pages and other resources.

Plus everything already learned and applied in v1: the production-ready practices carry over.

Status

There is still a lot to do. Production release is expected for the end of October.

v1 is frozen — dependency bumps and significant bug fixes only. The latest release brought it to Astro v7. Nothing you have built breaks.

Moving a v1 site to v2 is a migration, not an upgrade. A migration guide comes with the release.

What would help

1. Which of your v1 customizations do you expect to be hardest to carry over?
2. Which widget is missing for the site you actually build?
3. If you need a CMS, which one?

#392 is closed, with a full summary of everything requested as its last comment. v2 gets discussed here.

[mandrasch]

Interesting plan, thanks for sharing it openly! Regarding feedback/customizations:

Pages are JSON. A page is a list of sections and their content.

Is https://github.com/withparche/parche/blob/main/examples/blog/src/content/pages/en/home.json an example of how this would look?

Seems like a huge paradigm change - how could I include Svelte components for example? Still possible? 🤔

(What I currently liked about Astrowind is that it was close to Astro)