Accessible website starter for civil society
- Phases
- understand define deliver sustain
- Modality
- Community
- Status
- Active
Open-source Astro starter that gives civil society organisations a website foundation. Accessible, privacy-conscious, and editable through a visual CMS. It probably has what you are looking for.
Most civil-society teams shouldn't have to choose between a website that meets their stated values — accessible, privacy-respecting, governable — and a website they can actually edit. Scaffold is Draftlab's attempt to close that gap: an open-source starter built on Astro, Tailwind, and React, wired through PagesCMS so non-technical editors can contribute without touching code.
It comes pre-baked with tons of defaults: WCAG-friendly components, a working consent banner, a status workflow with draft / published / archived across every collection, and a content model that keeps editors and developers in the same source of truth. Atomic design for components, type-safe schemas.
Scaffold powers this site, and is the foundation we hand off to teams we work with.
Skills applied
Updates
Docs, search, and a clean entry for LLMs
Added a multi-chapter docs section and an llms.txt at the root. Site search now spans articles, resources, and documentation.
Lorem Ipsum for the modern practitioner
Replaced the dummy content with a public-interest-tech and digital-rights theme so the starter previews look like the kind of site it's actually going to run. Also added a feature-showcase page so editors can see every section type before they dig in.
Until now, Scaffold's dummy content was generic — corporate stock language with stock people in stock departments. Replacing it with civil-society-flavoured content (digital rights, internet freedom, fictional public-interest projects) wasn't a vanity change. The defaults a starter ships with are an editorial signal: they tell adopters what kind of site this is for.
In the same push: a working cookie banner with a real consent flow (GA4 only loads after opt-in), a unified status field across every collection so drafts stay out of production builds, a CMS-editable homepage, and a Resources collection for reports and whitepapers.
First release
Pushed the first usable cut of Scaffold with accessible-by-default components with drop-down navigation, a table-of-contents pattern, and entity filtering across articles, people, and partners.