A walkthrough of installing MDash, a lightweight Astro-based CMS, on xCloud using one-click deployment. The tutorial covers the admin dashboard, passkey authentication, and creating custom content types like Events, highlighting MDash's security and performance advantages over WordPress.
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In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up MDash on xCloud via their one-click install. First, I'm going to go over a little bit about what MDash is. If you already know and you just want to know how to install it, feel free to skip ahead. Here, let's take a look at what MDash is. It is a content management system that is very light, very fast, uses JavaScript instead of PHP, It uses either SQLite or PostgreSQL for its database. Uh, it is built on top of Astro, which is another web framework for building content-driven websites. Now, MDash was created by Cloudflare, but you're not required to use Cloudflare. You can either run it on their Cloudflare Workers or on your own server, which is what we're going to do in this video. Now I want to point out here that xCloud has done a fantastic job with documentation, not just how to install, but all about MDash. Right here it says, what is MDash CMS? And this is one of the best descriptions I've seen. So I'm going to point out a couple of things right here. It's a free open source CMS. Uh, it's an Astro integration. Featured, or headline feature is sandboxed plugins. I don't know if you knew this, but in WordPress, any plugin can do anything to everything in WordPress. They just have full admin rights to do everything. That's not the case with MDash. Uh, right here it says Cloudflare Workers or any Node.js server, not a visual page builder. So that's also important. So, uh, in addition, right here we have MDash versus WordPress. So it talks about some of the differences, and if you heavily leverage some WordPress features, then MDash is not for you. If you don't, then MDash might be exactly for you. It's incredibly fast, it's very, very secure, uh, very light, and if you're into that it can be completely managed by AI. It has a built-in MCP server. And the last thing I'm going to point out here is that there is excellent written documentation on how to do what I'm going to show you how to do in this video. So if you're more of a reader, make sure you stop by and check this out. So let's get started and I'll show you how it works, and then we'll play with it a little bit. So I'm here on my xCloud dashboard. I'm going to click Add New Site, and then I'm going to click on One Click Apps. 619. The last time I made a video the other day, there were fewer than 500. So let's put in— there we go. Click that. So I could run it on any of these. All it really needs is a Docker instance. However, I want to keep it separate from, say, Drupal. So I'm going to deploy on new server and we will continue. And I'm going to put in the server name. We're going to leave it here at Docker NGINX. And you could do Vultr if you want. Or no, you can't actually. It's just xCloud. Here you can choose what size server you want. And where you want it hosted. You can choose a database server, but I don't even have any set up, so it's going to use the default. And there's the cost. I hit pay and deploy. All right, this is going to take 5 or 6 minutes. All right, our server's all set up. Um, we can go to the site list, and here is our site. So we click here first. And here's the site admin panel. And I want to point out under access data credentials, we don't actually have like login credentials, but here's where the website is and the admin side of it. But we can visit site right here. And because this is our first step, we could just click create post and it diverts us to the admin setup. So make that a little bit bigger. There we go. So let's fill this out real quick. Uh, let's change the tagline. And you can choose sample content, an empty site, or import an existing MDash site. Uh, I'm going to choose the sample content so that you can see one with stuff inside. Put in our email address and name and hit continue. Now, mdash does not use passwords. It uses a passkey or a magic email link. So we're going to create a passkey and save it here in my Mac and then open the dashboard. And now we can either sign in with that passkey or sign in with an email link. So let's do this. And now I'm logged in. So I am an administrator. And here's our dashboard. We have 1 draft, 7 media files, 1 user. Here's a calendar. There, so this is a content calendar for publication. There are pages, we have one. We have a bunch of posts, one in draft, bunch of pictures in our media library. There are comments, we can manage menus, redirects, widgets, sections. Sections are like template types, or no, I'm sorry, template parts. Categories and tags, bylines. It has the concept of content types. And interestingly, in my demo before I did this, I made a new content type and that worked great. But unless you log into the backend and set up a bunch of JavaScript template files, you can't view it. So that was a little disappointing, but I think they'll get there eventually. Byline schema, you can manage users. There are plugins, there's a whole registry of them. You can search, you can browse, et cetera. You can import either from another MDash site or WordPress, and it'll just pull your stuff in. Under settings, like general settings is your, your site information, posts per page, that sort of thing. Social links, SEO, media usage tracking. That's pretty good. Under security settings, you can manage your passkey. You can add a passkey. Self-signup domains, API tokens. This is great for having AI manage your MDash site, basically. Email settings, backups, transfer, etc. You need to configure an email provider unlike Most WordPress sites, there isn't a mail server just readily available. And then backups, you can run regular backups right in here. So let's look at the front end. Oh, and you can switch dark and light right here. So here's my blog. You can click here. And it's got a sidebar full of widgets, stuff on the left, et cetera. Now if we go to About, we're looking at a regular old page, just plain page. Let's go back to the admin real quick and I wanna show you the media. Upload files, you can upload any image right there. Something really cool about content types. I'm gonna do a new content type and, oh, I have to save it first. So let's call it event and we'll do this and this and this and create content type. So now I have this, but when I add fields, I'm gonna add an image field right here. You get to choose It says image, but obviously some of these are not images. You get to choose what's allowed. So images and spreadsheets. And then within images and spreadsheets, you can— well, let's just do images. You can say, well, I don't want AVIFs and that sort of thing. So there's quite a lot of features. Available to things like that. It's, it's pretty well covered. I wish you could build out templates in the admin, but that's the way it goes. It is a very young platform, so I'm guessing there will be a lot more. So that's mdash. As a reminder, I strongly recommend you read the stuff in xCloud, the docs about it, because It's pretty flexible. There's a ton more that you can do that I haven't covered. And it's especially helpful if you're already an Astro developer because it's just a layer on top of Astro. So if you build a site with this, please leave a note in the comments because I would like to see it. Enjoy.
