Hey everyone! I saw a couple of great Astro talks recently, one at Edinburgh JS and one at Umbraco Manchester (courtesy of @rickbutterfield) and decided to rewrite my site in Astro. I wanted to share some of my thoughts and learnings so I wrote it up: https://harrygordon.co.uk/blog/rebuilding-with-astro-and-umbraco-13/ If you have any questions/comments or edits give me a shout!

Edit: I'm reliably informed that this is not a hot-take and that no one likes Razor.

I must be the only one who likes it then 🤣

I think Razor is fine, I was feeling silly when I wrote this! It's better than WebForms 🙂

I don't really use anything else TBH, too old and set in my ways 🤣

Well the best tool is often the one you have! 😄

I also like Razor Pages but it has some outdated concepts and the naming is confusing. My second favourite templating engine would have been Vue but HTMX seems to work really nicely with Umbraco CDAPI as I showed you. Astro also supports HTMX so I guess that may be better for routing than Vue?

I need to have a good look at HTMX!

I don't see HTMX as a templating engine, but a set of utilities to load in html parts, Razor is in my opinion the best templating engine for Umbraco sites, but certainly not the best in general 🙂

I agree it's the best for Umbraco! And we all know it, which is a big advantage

Technically it's not strictly a templating engine and could in fact be used with one. But it does feel like working in Vue, a very natural extension of HTML and the tags feel like handlebars / mustache / nunjucks. I like Razor Pages as well even outside Umbraco. I think Umbraco off the shelf is more than adequate for most projects as well.