Madilu Shantivana

Madilu Shantivana is three acres of fruit trees and native timber trees at Tenginamaradoddi, Kanakapura taluk, Karnataka. The farm was planned in March 2024 and planted from June 2024. I built its website, live at madilushantivana.org, in English and Kannada.

What’s on it

• Home: the farm’s story in chapters, from bare red earth to rows of young trees, with a drawing of the farm and a slider that shows the same ground two years apart.
• Story: every dated entry from the first plan onwards, by year, filtered by topic.
• What grows: the planting map, one mark per tree, redrawn from the farm’s hand-drawn sheets. You can pick out any kind of tree on it, and the page counts every kind.
• Farming: where the farm’s water, feed and mulch come from and where they go, and how it’s watered, fed, weeded and protected.
• Photos: every photo on the site, by year.
• About: who runs the farm, what the name means, and where it is.

How it works

• All content, including the interface text in both languages, is JSON in the repository. The farm edits it through Sveltia CMS at /admin/, signing in with GitHub through a small Cloudflare Worker.
• The tree counts on the site come from the planting map’s data file, so they can’t drift from the map.
• Kannada pages live under /kn/ and fall back to English for anything not yet translated. Dates are formatted from the site’s own month tables.
• Cloudflare Pages rebuilds the site on every commit.

Stack

• Astro 7 with static output
• Svelte 5 islands for the planting map and the photo viewer
• Plain CSS, Lucide icons, and the Fraunces, Source Sans 3, Noto Sans Kannada and Noto Serif Kannada fonts
• Bun for installs and scripts

Checks

A verification script serves the built site and checks every page in Chromium. A second script checks that every field in the content is declared in the CMS config, because Sveltia drops undeclared fields when it saves.

The code is source-available under CWSL-1.0. The farm’s text, photos and name belong to Madilu Shantivana.