A self-hosted CMS built on Astro. SSR public site, admin panel at /admin, SQLite + Drizzle, session-cookie auth, a TipTap block editor, and a runtime theme system with a hooks API.

• Astro 6 with Node adapter (output: 'server')
• SQLite via better-sqlite3 + Drizzle ORM
• React island for the TipTap rich-text editor
• Eta templates for runtime themes
• Argon2 password hashing (@node-rs/argon2)
• HTML sanitization with DOMPurify
• Zod for form validation

• Posts — draft/publish workflow, slug auto-generation, rich-text editor (headings, lists, blockquotes, code blocks, links, inline code)
• Categories — built-in news, travel, gadgets, reviews with a per-post select in the editor
• Media library — upload images, video, and PDFs (10 MB limit) stored under public/uploads/ with metadata in SQLite
• Users & roles — admin, editor, author; admins manage users, editors edit any post, authors edit only their own
• Settings — site title/description, active theme, password change

• Collapsible sidebar — full or rail mode, persisted per-user via cookie
• View site — one-click open of the public site in a new tab
• Form-POST mutations throughout — works without JavaScript, plays nicely with progressive enhancement

• Runtime theme system — themes are folders of Eta templates plus a theme.json manifest, loaded at request time (no rebuild needed)
• Uploadable themes — drop a zip in the admin; install/uninstall from the Themes page. Bundled themes can't be uninstalled.
• Hooks API — addFilter / applyFilters / addAction / doAction with priorities, wired by core for the_title, the_content, posts_list, and post_render
• Security — themes ship templates and assets only. JavaScript inside theme zips is never loaded server-side; that would be RCE-by-design.

• Dark / light slider switch in the header with no first-paint flash (inline blocking script reads localStorage + prefers-color-scheme)
• Featured grid of image cards on the homepage with a hover effect
• Tabbed category section — News / Travel / Gadgets / Reviews with horizontal swipe transitions and full keyboard navigation
• Responsive header with a hamburger nav at narrow widths
• Token-driven CSS — components use design tokens so dark mode is one selector

• Server-rendered post list at / and post detail at /posts/[slug]
• Drafts are never exposed publicly

• Node >=22.12.0

npm install
npm run db:migrate
npm run db:seed         # creates admin@zyphora.local / changeme123
npm run db:seed-posts   # optional: ~7 demo posts spread across categories
npm run dev             # http://localhost:4321

Then visit http://localhost:4321/admin/login and sign in. Change the password in Settings → Change your password immediately.

You can override the seed credentials with environment variables:

SEED_ADMIN_EMAIL=you@example.com SEED_ADMIN_PASSWORD=secret SEED_ADMIN_NAME="Your Name" npm run db:seed

Both seed scripts are idempotent — re-running them is safe.

There is no test runner, linter, or formatter installed by default. npm run astro -- check runs the Astro / TypeScript checker.

src/
├── components/        React islands (TipTap editor)
├── db/                Drizzle schema, client, migrate / seed scripts
├── layouts/           AdminLayout, SiteLayout
├── lib/               auth, posts, media, settings, sanitize, slug
│   └── themes/        registry, install, render, hooks (WP-style)
├── middleware.ts      session lookup + admin route guard
├── pages/
│   ├── admin/         dashboard, posts CRUD, media, themes, users, settings
│   ├── posts/[slug]   public post detail
│   ├── themes/[…]     theme asset serving
│   └── index.astro    public home (post list)
└── styles/
themes/
└── default/           bundled theme (theme.json + Eta templates + assets)
drizzle/               generated SQL migrations
public/                static assets and uploads (uploads gitignored)
data/                  SQLite database file (gitignored)

Environment variables (all optional):

A theme is a directory under themes/<slug>/ containing:

• theme.json — manifest (slug, name, version, author, description)
• templates/*.eta — at minimum index.eta (post list) and post.eta (single post); 404.eta is optional
• assets/ — anything served at /themes/<slug>/<path> (CSS, JS, images, fonts)

Templates render against a typed RenderContext (see src/lib/themes/types.ts) and emit content through the hooks pipeline. Post HTML is sanitized server-side on write, so the templates can render it raw with <%~ post.contentHtml %>.

To install a third-party theme, zip the folder so theme.json is at the top level (or under a single wrapper directory) and upload from Admin → Themes. Zip-slip and zip-bomb guards apply (5 MB compressed / 25 MB uncompressed).

npm run build
node ./dist/server/entry.mjs

The built server is a standalone Node process. Place it behind a reverse proxy (nginx, Caddy) and serve public/uploads/ either from the same Node server (default) or from a static file server / CDN.

Single-node only at the moment — sessions live in SQLite. For horizontal scaling, the session table needs to move (Redis is the obvious next step) and the database itself can swap to Postgres or libsql.

Major work on deck:

• Plugins — uploadable plugin system on top of the existing hooks registry. Themes will stay runtime-template-only; plugins get their own threat model and a clear extension API.
• Comments — per-post comments on the public site, plus a moderation queue and spam controls in a dedicated admin section.
• Analytics — built-in, privacy-first pageview tracking with a top-posts dashboard, referrer breakdown, and per-post stats. No third-party cookies.
• Email — outbound SMTP for transactional notifications (new comment, password reset, mentions) and an admin section for templates and delivery logs.
• Default theme — keep iterating: search, pagination, tags, author pages, archives by category, OG/Twitter card metadata.

Smaller items still on the list:

• Pages (vs. posts) with hierarchy
• Tags (categories already shipped)
• RSS / Atom feed
• Image resizing and responsive srcset
• Pluggable storage adapter (S3, R2) for media