Visual editing for Astro MDX sites, with AI translations that only touch what changed.
Your React components become the editor's blocks. Editors fill in the props you expose, and nothing else, so they can't break the design. The admin ships inside your static site, clones the repository into the browser and publishes with a git push. No server, no database, no lock-in.
Warning
Plinto is very early and experimental. It has a lot of features, but APIs and file conventions can change between 0.x releases. Try it on a site you could fix by hand.
- A real git checkout in the browser. Decap, TinaCMS and Keystatic talk to the GitHub API file by file, or to a backend. Plinto clones the repository with isomorphic-git, so reading, diffing and merging happen locally, and saving is an ordinary commit. That local checkout is what makes the translation sync practical.
- Translations that carry only the change. Edit a page in any language, and a Claude agent applies what changed to the other languages instead of re-translating the whole page. There's no master language. Powered by Obelum.
- Your components are the blocks. The visual editor (Puck) places your own React components, and the fields are the props you declare.
- Your files stay yours. Pages are plain MDX a person could have typed. An untouched page saves byte-identical, and a one-word edit is a one-block diff. Remove Plinto and the site still builds, byte for byte.
Plinto is built for one frontend developer who builds an Astro site, and non-technical people who edit it afterwards.
Everything about the site is ordinary Astro code, written by the developer: routing,
layouts, components, styling, i18n, sitemap, redirects, robots.txt, meta tags,
favicon. Plinto doesn't edit any of that, on purpose.
Editors work inside that frame. They place the blocks you registered and fill in the fields you exposed. They can't add arbitrary HTML, change styles or reach anything you didn't hand them, so the design survives every edit.
The repository includes a complete example site in three languages:
git clone https://github.com/maxmart/plinto.git
cd plinto && npm install
cd examples/playground && npm run devOpen http://localhost:4321/plinto/admin. In dev mode the admin edits your working tree directly and needs no GitHub token. Translation sync asks for an Anthropic API key the first time you run it.
npm install @plinto/astro @astrojs/react react react-domThen register the integration, point it at a CORS proxy and your block registry, and
open /plinto/admin. The full setup, including a few one-line config requirements, is
in packages/astro/README.md.
What you need:
- Astro 6 or 7,
@astrojs/react5, React 19, MDX - Tailwind 3 configured for the admin, even if your site doesn't use it
- A git CORS proxy for the deployed admin. A small Cloudflare Worker to copy is in
examples/proxy. It holds no credentials. - Per editor: a fine-grained GitHub token with write access to the repository, and optionally an Anthropic API key for translations and merging
Editing. In dev mode the admin reads and writes your working tree through the dev server. On the deployed site it clones the repository into the browser (IndexedDB), commits there, and pushes. If your CI deploys from the default branch, pushing is publishing.
Editors and credentials. You invite an editor from Settings: create a GitHub token for them, and Plinto bundles it with an API key into a setup code. The setup code is those credentials, base64-encoded, so send it like a password. The secrets are kept in memory for the tab, not stored in the browser. Closing the tab logs out, and a password manager fills the login back in.
Translations. Each language keeps a copy of every sibling page as it last saw it,
under .obelum/ at the repository root. When a sibling differs from that copy, the
language is behind, and the agent is shown only the difference. Fix marks an edit as
local (a typo, say) so it isn't propagated. Conflicting concurrent edits are merged by
an agent that asks the editor plain-language questions when it can't decide.
Media is stored in Git LFS. Uploads are downscaled in the browser before anything is committed.
- Pages must be made of blocks. Root-level prose in MDX isn't supported yet. A page of loose prose is refused, never rewritten, so existing MDX pages keep building and you can convert them one at a time.
- GitHub only for now: the invite flow, tokens, LFS and the default proxy targets assume it.
- One token per editor, made by hand on GitHub. There's no OAuth login.
- The packages ship uncompiled TypeScript, so your Vite config must list them in
ssr.noExternal.
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
@plinto/astro |
What you install: the Astro integration, admin routes and dev API |
@plinto/admin |
The editing app: React, Puck, MDX as storage. Not tied to Astro |
@plinto/core |
The headless engine: content model, storage, git, agents |
examples/playground |
A complete three-language example site, also the test corpus |
examples/proxy |
The git CORS proxy, a Cloudflare Worker |
MIT