SSG support

[mmikhan]

One of the advantages of Astro is SSG. Content driven sites usually stay static after the content is published. Once a content is published, we can take the advantage of Astro's SSG. When the relevant content is updated, a hook can fire of to clear the cache and the relevant content will be regenerated. Payload CMS works exactly in that way. SSG makes every pages of the sites instant. Good for everything.

[gruntlord5]

Not sure how it would work on cloudflare but official support for it would be nice

[JUVOJustin]

Isnt that already possible? Simply set all your astrojs pages to prerender = true. https://docs.astro.build/de/guides/on-demand-rendering/#enabling-on-demand-rendering

[mmikhan]

@JUVOJustin how will it invalidate and regenerate the relevant static page upon updating from the EmDash content editor?

[JUVOJustin]

If we are talking static and not cached we need some way to trigger a new build. I do this with a cron based GitHub action. You can also use the webhook plugin to trigger an action.

[mmikhan]

Yeah, exactly. We need a way to trigger a new build but a new build is not efficient for the entire site. Imagine every time you are updating the content of a page and that triggers a new build.

Instead, a sort of hook that will only rebuild the relevant page where the content is updated will be needed.

[JUVOJustin]

Guess that would be caching then no? Created a discussion with my thoughts about this already: #329

[mmikhan]

I think it would be both cache + static generation. Once the cache is invalidated upon the page update, the build will regenerate upon visiting that page.

[gruntlord5]

Yea it has to replace just the single file, otherwise its going to be rebuilding hundreds of pages each time, which will add huge latency to actually making changes on a production site.

[MA2153]

This can also be done on Cloudflare with deploy hooks: https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-04-01-deploy-hooks/

[JULJERYT]

deploy hook only triggers a new build/deploy. it doesn't tell the build script how to build it (in that case we want everything excluding /_emdash/* static)

[MA2153]

I am aware. We can do some changes in EmDash to accommodate that. Also some parts of _emdash can probably be static (skeleton, fonts, etc.). But more importantly, we need to be able to switch from live to normal collections.

[MA2153]

Maybe there can be an option for "content update policy" or something similar. Be it cache invalidation, rebuilding, etc.

[nickgraynews]

Yes please!! Would love an easy way to do static sites with EmDash CMS