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MastheadNews on EmDash

A newspaper-style news theme on EmDash CMS: editors publish from an admin, and the site runs on Cloudflare Workers.

v1.0.11since 2026

Masthead's front page: The Alden Ledger nameplate over a lead photo story and a Latest column.Masthead's front page: The Alden Ledger nameplate over a lead photo story and a Latest column.
A Masthead article: a large headline and summary above a sepia photograph of a storm on the seawall.
Masthead's podcast page: The Ledger Podcast with episodes of season 2 as photo cards.
Masthead's City section: a lead story with photographs beside it and a grid of stories below.

Editions

Personal and Team include every release within the major version you buy. Refunds within 14 days, no questions asked.

Masthead is a newspaper-style news theme for EmDash, the open-source CMS built on Astro. It is for local papers, magazines, student newspapers, and newsletters with many writers: editors publish from an admin screen, not from Markdown files in a repository.

How it looks

  • A front page with a full-width nameplate, a lead story with a drop cap, and a dense column grid split by thin vertical rules
  • Articles in one readable column, with bylines, reading time, and photo credits
  • Section, tag, and author pages; full-text search; dark mode; works down to 360px wide

In the free edition

  • The EmDash admin: write posts and pages in a rich-text editor and upload media
  • Sections, tags, authors, menus, and site settings (title, tagline, logo) are edited in the admin, not in code
  • The front page’s lead, top stories, and section columns are chosen in the admin
  • Sample content (24 articles, 7 bylines, 6 sections) is applied on first setup, so the site is complete from the first run

What Pro adds

  • Podcast: seasons, episode pages with a player and transcript, a podcast strip on the front page, and an RSS feed ready for Apple Podcasts and Spotify
  • Membership: readers sign up and sign in with an email link, no password. Articles and episodes marked members-only stop at a paywall for everyone else
  • Forms built in the admin, with submissions kept there: newsletter sign-up and a corrections report
  • Page layouts chosen per page: Standard, Cover, and Sign-up
  • Social share images generated for every article
  • Sign-in emails sent through Cloudflare Email Sending, with rate limiting

Under the hood

  • Astro 7 and EmDash, server-rendered on Cloudflare Workers with D1 (database) and R2 (media)
  • Pages cached at the edge and refreshed when content changes
  • RSS, sitemap, SEO metadata and JSON-LD; no client-side framework on public pages
  • AGENTS.md and EmDash agent skills for Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI coding tools
  • Needs a Cloudflare Workers Paid plan (the bundle is over the free plan’s 3 MiB limit)

Both demos have an admin demo at /demo that signs you in as a contributor, with no sign-up.