Introducing WollyCMS
Why we built a headless CMS specifically for Astro — and what makes it different from everything else out there.
We built WollyCMS because we needed a CMS that actually understood how modern Astro sites work. Not a generic content API with an admin panel bolted on. Not a page builder pretending to be a CMS. A real content management system with the composition model that content-heavy sites demand.
If you have ever used Drupal, you know the power of its paragraph/block system — typed content blocks arranged in named regions on a page. Hero goes in the hero region. Rich text and images go in the content region. Related posts go in the sidebar. The structure is clear, the editing experience is intuitive, and the frontend has full control over rendering.
WollyCMS brings that same model to Astro. Every CMS block type maps to an Astro component. The BlockRenderer component handles the mapping automatically. You define the structure once, and content editors manage everything through the visual admin — no code, no pull requests, no deploys.
What makes it different
Most headless CMS platforms give you a flat content API. You get a page object with some fields. Maybe a JSON body field with nested components. But none of them give you named regions with typed blocks that your frontend components render directly.
WollyCMS does. A page has regions. Regions have blocks. Blocks have typed fields. Your Astro components render them. The content model mirrors your frontend architecture, which means the CMS and the site are always in sync.
Built for Astro, deployed anywhere
The @wollycms/astro package gives you everything you need: a typed API client, BlockRenderer component, menu helpers, image optimization, and SEO utilities. Install it, map your block types to components, and you are up and running.
WollyCMS itself runs on Hono with Drizzle ORM, so it deploys to Cloudflare Workers, Docker, or bare Node.js. SQLite or PostgreSQL for the database. S3 or R2 for media. Your infrastructure, your choice.
What is next
We are actively building the module system — a way to package and share content types, block types, and starter configurations. Think of it as themes and plugins, but for a headless CMS. More on that soon.
In the meantime, WollyCMS is open source under the MIT license. Try it out with npx create-wolly my-site and let us know what you think.