building-emdash-site

Building an EmDash Site

EmDash is a CMS built on Astro. It stores schema in the database (not in code), serves content via live content collections, and provides a full admin UI at /_emdash/admin. Sites are standard Astro projects with the emdash integration.

Common Gotchas

These are the things that silently break sites. Know them before you start.

1. Image fields are objects, not strings. post.data.featured_image is { id, src, alt }. Writing <img src={post.data.featured_image} /> renders [object Object]. Use <Image image={post.data.featured_image} /> from "emdash/ui".

2. entry.id vs entry.data.id are different things. entry.id is the slug, prefixed with the locale (en/my-post) for locales whose URLs are prefixed (use in URLs; entry.data.slug is the bare slug). entry.data.id is the database ULID (use for getEntryTerms, Comments, and other API calls that need the real ID). Mixing them up causes silent empty results.

3. Taxonomy names must match the seed exactly. If your seed defines "name": "category", you must query getTerm("category", slug) -- not "categories". Wrong name = empty results, no error.

4. Register cache hints when Astro's cache is enabled. Content queries return a cacheHint; pass it to Astro.cache.set(cacheHint). Use getSiteSettingsWithCacheHint(), getMenuWithCacheHint(), getTaxonomyTermsWithCacheHint(), and getWidgetAreaWithCacheHint() when a cached route renders those values.

5. No getStaticPaths for CMS content. EmDash content is dynamic. Pages must be server-rendered (output: "server" in astro.config.mjs).

File Structure

Every EmDash site has these key files:

my-site/
├── astro.config.mjs          # Astro config with emdash() integration
├── src/
│   ├── live.config.ts         # EmDash loader registration (boilerplate)
│   ├── pages/                 # Astro pages (all server-rendered)
│   ├── layouts/               # Layout components
│   └── components/            # Reusable components
├── seed/
│   └── seed.json              # Schema + demo content
├── emdash-env.d.ts          # Generated types (from `emdash types`)
└── package.json