Building a Real Blog in Astro

Setting up a basic blog in Astro is easy because you have tutorials all over the world teaching you how to do it. But setting up a real blog, one that has great UX (for the writer) and great DX (for you as the developer), with Astro is much harder. Because you have to figure out what’s needed and build things up yourself. In this article, I’m going to break down what a real blog needs and how to create that easily. This is part of Practical Astro (Content Systems). A basic blog Every blog post needs five things: title a permalink (via slug) description tags a published date The most basic blogs put all of these in the posts’ frontmatter. my-post.md---title: 'My post'slug: my-postdescription: 'Description for my post'tags: ['tag 1', 'tag 2']pubDate: '2026-02-24'--- We can already make some improvements here by dropping slug because the file name already carries the information. my-post.md---title: 'My post'description: 'Description for my post'tags: ['tag 1', 'tag 2']pubDate:…