A boring publishing workflow is a feature
Treat content checks, previews, search indexing, and deployment as a repeatable pipeline instead of a collection of manual release steps.
A reusable publishing starter should reduce the number of things you need to remember. That means the default workflow should be predictable rather than clever.
Write against a schema
Frontmatter is part of your public API. Keeping it typed prevents subtle template failures and makes automated tooling much easier to add later.
Keep optional services optional
Comments and analytics are useful, but a missing third-party account should never stop the site from building. AstroPublishKit only loads those integrations when their environment values are present.
Build search after the HTML exists
Pagefind indexes the generated dist/ directory. This keeps search independent of your content source and avoids introducing a hosted search backend.
Why not add a database now?
Static publishing already covers the first release goals. A database would add deployment, security and migration work without improving the core writing path.