Astro + EmDash CMS

Astro + EmDash publishes your site to your own Cloudflare account together with EmDash, a content management system (CMS) built into the site. A CMS is an admin area where you or your client change text, images, pages and blog posts in the browser, without touching UiChemy or code. Your exported sections become the starting layout. The CMS lets people edit their content and arrange sections without editing the section code. Preview the published site before handing it over.

At a Glance

Why It Matters

• Clients edit their own content: text, images, sections and blog posts, without asking you.
• Your design is safe: people edit content inside your sections, not the layout code.
• Your data, your account: the database and media live in your Cloudflare account.

Use Cases

• Handing a site to a client who wants to update their menu, prices or team photos.
• Running a blog: write, schedule and publish posts from the CMS.
• Small teams: invite teammates to the CMS so everyone has their own login.

What You Can Edit in EmDash

Your robots.txt and llms.txt from Site Settings come along too. On a CMS site, /llms.txt is built from the live CMS pages and blog posts, with a clean text copy of each (for example /about.md). Hidden sections are left out of those copies. A page set to "noindex" or kept away from AI tools, including by an edit in the CMS SEO panel, is left out of both. Turning off llms.txt for AI tools in Site Settings makes those text copies return "Not found".

When You Need EmDash (the Blog Rule)

When Cloudflare publishing is configured, Astro + EmDash is offered and marked Recommended. It becomes the only choice when your site has a blog, because blog posts need the CMS.

UiChemy treats your site as having a blog when a page title in your sitemap contains blog at the start of a word, or the whole word post, posts, article or articles. Then Astro frontend is greyed out with: "Your site has a blog, which needs EmDash. Remove the blog pages to publish the frontend only."

Publish With EmDash

Set Up Your Admin Login

Right after your first publish, a Set up your CMS checklist appears:

1. Set up your admin login: opens your private setup link. "Only works for you, so keep the link private."
2. Site step: keep the title and leave "Sample content" selected. That sample content is your pages.
3. Account step: enter your email and name.
4. Sign in step: create a passkey (Touch ID or your phone).
5. Edit and publish: edit under Pages, then Publish changes. For teammates, go to Users → Invite User, then send them the invite link.

Admin URL and claim URL

Until setup is finished, the main button reads Finish CMS setup and opens the setup link. On later visits you'll also see "First time? Set up your admin login (only works for you; keep it private)." Once setup is done, the button changes to Open CMS admin. If you finish setup in another tab, come back to the panel and it updates by itself.

Where CMS Content Is Stored

The database and storage are reused on later publishes to the same account. Unpublishing a Cloudflare site does not delete the original UiChemy project. CMS edits are stored in the CMS, not automatically copied back into the Design Editor.

Images and R2 Storage

When your Cloudflare account has R2 (Cloudflare's file storage) available to UiChemy, CMS sites get their own media bucket, so you can upload images in the CMS admin.

R2 must be enabled in your account and permitted by the Cloudflare connection. Enabling R2 alone may not be enough if the connection does not have access. If R2 isn't available, the site can publish with images linked by URL. The card says: "Images are linked by URL. Enable R2 in Cloudflare to upload images from the admin."

Resync and Your CMS Edits

When you change your design in UiChemy, click Resync to publish it. On a CMS site that's already set up, UiChemy merges your new design into the CMS without overwriting your edits:

• A field nobody changed in the CMS gets your new design's value.
• SEO panel values work the same way: a title, description, image, canonical or noindex setting that still holds what UiChemy last wrote takes your new Page Settings, and one someone changed in the CMS is kept.
• A field someone changed in the CMS is kept.
• A section you added in UiChemy is added. A section you removed goes, unless someone edited it in the CMS.
• A page you removed in UiChemy is set to draft. It's off the site but still in the CMS, unless someone edited it.
• An entry with unpublished CMS changes (a pending draft) is left alone.

After a Resync, yellow notes tell you what happened:

If the site hasn't been set up yet, there's nothing to merge: setup simply starts from your newest design.

Export Limitations

EmDash uses the UiChemy export as its starting point, not a copy of a running WordPress installation. WordPress-only widgets may be skipped during conversion. Forms use the exported frontend runtime and need a submission endpoint to receive data. Preview the published site and test forms before launch.

Scheduled Publishing

EmDash uses a Cloudflare scheduled task (cron trigger) for scheduled publishing and upkeep. The free Workers plan allows 5 per account. If yours are all used, the site still publishes, with this note: "Scheduled publishing is off: this Cloudflare account already uses all 5 scheduled tasks (cron triggers) of the Workers Free plan. Remove one from another Worker, or upgrade to Workers Paid, then deploy again."

Unpublish: Keep or Delete Your Content

Click Unpublish on the Your site with CMS card. You'll be asked "Unpublish this site?" with two choices:

An offline site shows Delete site and content instead of Unpublish, in case you want to remove it fully later.

When Something Goes Wrong

For connection and account errors, see Deploy to Cloudflare.

FAQ

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