Astro blog starter: Build a Simple Blog with Astro, BCMS & TailwindCSS

Building a modern, fast, and visually appealing blog doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need is the perfect Headless CMS, and in comes BCMS.

Read on to learn how to build a simple blog using Astro blog starter, and by the end of this tutorial, you'll have a fully functional blog ready to go live.

BCMS is a powerful headless CMS built for developers. It allows you to manage your content easily and integrates effortlessly with modern frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt.js, Astro, and Gatsby.

Astro is a modern static site generator optimized for performance. It ships less JavaScript to the browser by default and is ideal for building fast SEO-friendly websites.

Before we start, ensure you have the following ready:

Our finished blog app will consist of:

Here’s a glimpse of what we’ll be building:

One of the standout features of BCMS is how it makes getting started with your blog project easy.

For developers using Astro, BCMS provides a start code boilerplate that is pre-integrated with Astro. This helps you save time and effort by ensuring that all the essential components you need are ready for immediate use.

Here's how BCMS does it and why it's a game-changer for developers:

The BCMS Astro start command works out of the box with Astro. What this means is that:

When you use the BCMS-Astro start command, you get access to ready-made components for your blog app for fetching and displaying content from the BCMS project dashboard to the Astro website.

The components include:

You can always customize these components to suit your needs.

The BCMS boilerplate doesn’t just give you individual components; it comes with a demo setup that includes:

With this, you can see a working example of your blog from the start, so you’ll have a clear understanding of how to build and expand on it.

The BCMS-Astro boilerplate is flexible:

With all you now know about how BCMS integrates with Astro to provide a great boilerplate code, let’s get to work building!

1. Set up a simple Astro blog

Set up your Astro blog with BCMS using this command in your terminal or the command line interface (CLI) of your preferred IDE:

2. Login or sign up on BCMS

Once you’ve run the command, you’ll be prompted to install some packages; proceed by typing “y” in your terminal. This will initialize a new BCMS project on your system, and you’ll be provided with a link in your terminal directing you to your browser to log in to your BCMS account or create one if you haven’t already.

3. Project setup

Once you’ve logged in on your browser, feel free to close the tab and go back to your terminal or CLI to follow the prompts.

4. Install packages and run a server

You’ll notice that the blog entries on your Astro webpage are the same ones in your BCMS project dashboard.

Cool! See how easily BCMS helped you set up a CMS for the Astro blog?

Moving on.

Obviously, the content of these blog posts is not the same as what you’ll want on your personal blog. What you’ll do next is go ahead and change that or create new blog entries in your project template.

So what are templates in BCMS?

Templates in BCMS are what define the structure of your content. Whether you’re building a blog app, a portfolio website, or an e-commerce website with any frontend framework on BCMS, you’ll need a template. You’ll then create entries for your website with these structures.

By default, when creating a blog or any website directly from the BCMS dashboard, you’ll have to first create a template to contain your content structure. But since you used the default BCMS start command, it provided a boilerplate for integrating your content, along with a template called Blog and the blog entries.

If you’re not ok with the template and you want to modify this template for your personalized blog properties, follow these steps:

To learn more about entries in BCMS, visit the dedicated templates doc page.

Properties (or inputs) in BCMS are used to create the data structure of your page’s entry. They are the smallest component in the BCMS ecosystem and have different types, including string, rich text, number, date, boolean, media, etc.

To create a blog app, you’ll probably make use of the property types that have been added by the Astro starter command to the default template (string, date, rich text, media, and enumeration), with corresponding labels:

If you wish to add more properties to your blog, simply drag the property type from the Properties column on the right-hand side and drop it in the middle of your page where other properties already are, like this:

NB: I’m going to remove the category label because I don’t want tags/categories in my blog posts for now. To delete a property from a template, click the particular property you want to delete, click Remove, and confirm it.

You can also change the label of any property you want. To do this, open the property, enter your desired label name, and update to save changes.

To learn more about entries in BCMS, visit the dedicated properties doc page.

Once you’re done with editing or creating properties, the next step is to create blog entries, or in your case, you can simply edit the default blog entries automatically generated by the Astro starter command boilerplate.

Entries in BCMS are records based on a template. Simply put, they are the content of your website or blog, or the values of your template’s properties.

When you used the starter command to create your BCMS-Astro project, along with the template and properties generated for you, some entries were also generated as values for those properties. Those are the entries that are currently being shown on your Astro website running on the localhost server.

Navigate to your blog entries page by toggling the Entries dropdown on the left sidebar and clicking Blog, your template. This will open up the page containing the list of entries in your project.

Now, you’ll need to either edit those entries or delete them entirely and create new ones.

A page opens up where you enter the title of your blog. The blog’s slug will be automatically generated based on the blog’s title. Input a date and article description.

To learn more about entries in BCMS, visit the dedicated entries doc page.

Apart from generating a template and creating blog entries by default for your blog, the BCMS-Astro starter command also auto-generated an API key for your blog project.

API keys connect your app with the data in your BCMS project.

To view the API key automatically generated for you, navigate to the Settings option by toggling the Administration dropdown, click the API keys tab, and then click the rectangular space with the “blog-app Auto Generated Key” name. The API key details are located on the right-hand side of the page.

By default, the template that was created automatically for you at the start of your project has already been granted the GET permission. If you scroll down that API key details section, you’ll see that the Can get box is ticked.

This means that the API key connecting your Astro project to your BCMS has permission to access the entries from the template, and the content of that template can be rendered and displayed on your Astro blog website.

If you create a new template in the project, the GET permission will not be granted by default. You’d have to come to the settings and tick the box yourself to grant access entries, along with any other permission you want your website to have, like CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE permission.

After making any change to your permission, make sure to click the Update button to save it.

And with that, you’re done with the BCMS dashboard; let’s move on to the codebase.

To learn more about entries in BCMS, visit the dedicated API keys doc page.

Open your project in your IDE and inspect the file or folder structure of your project.

blog-app/
┣ tsconfig.jsoncode/
┣ bcms/
┣ node_modules/
┣ public/
┣ src/
┣ .env
┣ .gitignore
┣ README.md
┣ astro.config.mjs
┣ bcms.config.cjs
┣ package-lock.json
┣ package.json
┣ tailwind.config.mjs
┗ tsconfig.json

See how easy it was for you. You don’t have to hardcode anything. Everything has already been set up for you when you used the setup starter command.

Now I want to change the content of the blog website being rendered a bit; for example, I have to remove the category code because I deleted the category property previously.

If you also deleted the category property with me, follow these steps:

Go to your Astro website on your browser to see the changes you made on your dashboard and the codebase reflected there.

The layout and styling of the blog app are the default layout and styling that came with the starter boilerplate. If you’re not ok with it, feel free to change it.

NB: The BCMS-Astro boilerplate uses TailwindCSS for styling.

Here’s how mine looks after styling:

That’s it! Your blog app is ready.

Building a blog application with Astro and BCMS is as easy as just starting with the boilerplate code and then tweaking a few things on your dashboard and codebase to meet your requirements.

You can also add more properties to your blog, like author’s name, author’s image, category, etc., and render them on your Astro website.

When building a modern blog application, you have to choose the right Headless CMS. While there are several options, BCMS stands out as a strong contender for developers.

Here’s why BCMS is the perfect choice for your blog apps:

Whatever you’re building, be it a blog app, a portfolio site, a business website, or an e-commerce website, BCMS provides the tools to help you do it efficiently.

The BCMS start code for Astro makes it easy, fast, and stress-free to build a blog.

It contains pre-configured components, ready-to-use content fetching logic, and a demo-ready layout that saves the time-consuming setup process and allows you to focus on creating your unique blog.

Give it a try; you might just find it’s the headless CMS for Astro you’ve been looking for.