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by snide 834 days ago
Comments coming from a years-long Astro user that loves it. I use it to power my own website. I'm familiar with this space because I also work at Xata (take that as a disclosure).

This looks like a pretty simple data solution that might work for Astro's audience (content sites and hobbyists). They've split the hosting into their studio product to provide a way to earn revenue. Essentially you host the DB with them and can access it remotely, but could also host it however you want, you'd just lose the Studio editor.

The Studio editor itself is pretty basic at the moment with a table view and a way to check SQL calls. You can't build schemas in the UI yet and what you get is mostly a dev wrap of existing tools (like Drizzle) that let you interact with your DB. Their demo shows the limitations here, with things like "email" not being able to validate in the studio editor. My guess is that's coming later, but I might have missed it in the docs. Either way, it's nice that your config is stored at the code layer.

Most of these small websites that Astro is great fit need small CMS systems, and studio doesn't look to provide any way to deal with images (at least on first check) so that's sort of a bummer. You'd need to wire up some references with Cloudflare I guess. Still reading here, but it'd be cool if that came natively. Storing, retrieving and resizing images is a pain. The column types allowed are pretty small (text, number, bool, date, json).

While simple. It looks like it'll be relatively speedy with retrieval because of it.

Right now though, as an actual CMS editor (which my guess is what most Astro folks really want) Studio feels way to simple to tell a client to use. I'm interested to see whether they go more in the direction of a generic database store (implied from the name) or more of a CMS to compete with the natural pairings of Contentful, Statamic and others. Webhooks as a launch feature is great! That'll help folks out.

Either way. I love this team and their perspective. They build cool stuff, open source a lot of it (check out Starlight for docs), and I'm excited to see where this one goes over time. Congrats on the launch.

Now I need to update my Astro site to 4.5 :)

1 comments

> a years-long Astro user that loves it

Have you tried Eleventy? If you have, how, in your opinion, does Astro compare?

Been awhile with eleventy, but I really like the "islands" concept from Astro. It lets me break out into Svelte when I need for server stuff. Astro is also excellent at building shiki, TS and content generation together natively.

Overall it feels a little less bare bones, while still being flexible.