What are some nice modern stacks for Astro (or other) frontend sites?

Choosing the Right Modern Tech Stack for Static Websites with Content Management

Transitioning from backend development—primarily using Python and Django—to full-stack web development often involves exploring new frontend frameworks and content management solutions. If you’re building small, content-rich websites that prioritize speed, security, and ease of deployment, selecting the right modern tech stack is essential. This article discusses some of the best practices, tools, and configurations to help you set up efficient, maintainable, and scalable static websites, especially when aiming to keep content editing accessible for non-technical users.

Embracing Static Site Generation and Cloud Deployment

One of the popular approaches today is to build completely static sites. Static sites are pre-rendered at build time, ensuring fast load times, reduced hosting costs, and enhanced security. Tools like Astro facilitate modern static site development with a flexible component-based architecture.

Deploying these static sites can be straightforward, especially with serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Pages or Cloudflare Workers, which support continuous deployment workflows. When content updates are required, rebuilding and redeploying the site becomes a simple, efficient process, providing a customer-friendly experience for content updates.

Selecting a Content Management System (CMS)

A key consideration in this setup is choosing an appropriate CMS to allow non-technical content editors to modify website content without direct code changes. Here are some popular options aligned with the static site approach:

1. Headless CMSs (API-Driven)

Headless CMSs enable content management via APIs, making them ideal for static sites that fetch data at build time or during runtime on the client side.

WordPress (with REST API or GraphQL): Traditional WordPress can be operated in a headless mode, exposing content via REST API or GraphQL. This approach leverages a familiar interface for editors while allowing developers to build modern frontends with Astro.
Drupal (with JSON:API module): Drupal offers robust content management capabilities and can expose data via JSON:API, making it a solid choice for enterprise-grade content management.
Wagtail (via REST API): Built on Django, Wagtail is an open-source CMS with a user-friendly interface. When configured with REST API endpoints, it allows seamless content editing while serving static frontend sites.

2. Dedicated Headless CMS Platforms

Strapi: An open-source, Node.js-based