Story

Show HN: Frontmatter Core – a build-time content layer for Astro

adesane Thursday, January 15, 2026

Hello,

I built Frontmatter Core after repeatedly hitting the same problem: modern frontends and CMS don’t share the same model.

Astro components define structure through props. CMS expect explicit content models.

Frontmatter Core scans Astro, Markdown and YAML files and extracts a stable, typed JSON Intermediate Representation that adapters or CMS can consume.

It runs at build time only:

- no runtime

- no client-side JS

- no database

- no CMS coupling

The idea is to keep:

- layout in .astro

- content in .md / .yaml

- structure expressed once, in code, then exposed as data

Adapters (PHP, flat-file CMS, headless CMS, etc.) plug into the same IR.

GitHub: https://github.com/withfrontmatter/frontmatter-core

Happy to answer technical or architectural questions.

Summary
Frontmatter is a lightweight and flexible content management system built on the Node.js runtime, designed to manage and serve content from Markdown files. It provides a simple and efficient way to build static websites and web applications.
1 0
Summary
github.com
Visit article Read on Hacker News