Rebuild for Astro’s v5 Content Collections update

Astro’s steady evolution finally caught up with my site. The latest v5 update, specifcally the changes to Content Collections, required enough refactoring that a full rebuild became the sensible option rather than patching things piecemeal.

Reworking the Content Layer

The biggest challenge was rebuilding the logic that transforms the Content Collections into usable data for the table of contents, recent posts, categories, and tags. Restructuring the reducers that shape the collections into usable arrays, to produce clean, predictable structures took the most time, but the end result is far more maintainable.

Goodbye Preline, Hello DaisyUI

Since I was already deep in the rebuild, I took the opportunity to switch my UI layer from Preline to DaisyUI.

Preline’s JavaScript has always been awkward to integrate cleanly with Astro, specifcally importing JavaScript from Preline packages. DaisyUI avoids that entire problem by shipping 0 KB of JavaScript, relying instead on semantic, Tailwind‑style classes. It feels like an integral part of TailwindCSS, rather than a component framework that needs to be managed and debugged seperately.

To complement DaisyUI’s theming system, I also added Tailwind CSS Typography to provide consistent styling across the site. After ironing out a few quirks with overriding prose defaults, the result was a cleaner, more content‑focused layout.

Rebuilding the Layouts

Switching to DaisyUI meant revisiting every layout and component. I rebuilt the site using DaisyUI’s component patterns while keeping as much of the original structure as possible. The process was surprisingly smooth, DaisyUI’s class‑based approach made it easy to drop in components without fighting a framework‑style API like Preline.

The Result

I’m genuinely happy with how the rebuild turned out. The site is cleaner, more consistent, and the underlying code is far easier to work with. The new Content Collections setup is more predictable, DaisyUI integrates beautifully with Astro, and the whole project feels more maintainable going forward.