Karbon is a front-end web development framework used for building Storipress custom publications. It includes the structure, route handling, data fetching, components, and tooling you need to get started so you can spend time styling and designing features that make your brand unique. It also allows developers to fetch publication data, upload custom layouts, and block styles to be used in the Storipress editor via the CLI.

Karbon transforms your content site into a sub-second consumption experience using progressive web app technology and an end-to-end headless commerce platform, empowering your brand to exceed the limits of modern content delivery, all on a unified platform.

With Karbon, you can:

Storipress’ choice to invest in the Vue ecosystem as opposed to alternatives like React is pragmatic. The fact is, Vue, is by far the best framework for the needs of publishers today.

Karbon is the approach you use to build a custom publication. It contains a framework and a library of components, composables, and utilities:

Karbon is a modern framework based on Vue3, and Nuxt3, which provides extensive resources and guidelines to help developers quickly build custom publications for Storipress.

If you need more detailed migration guidance, it is recommended to refer to the documents to learn more about the details and best practices.

Vue 3 introduced the Composition API, which provides better code organization and code reusability. It is recommended to refer to the official documentation for more migration resources.

In Nuxt 3, many APIs and configuration options have been refactored or removed. It is recommended to consult the official documentation to determine which APIs and configuration options need to be modified.

Karbon provides a starter theme to help you get started building Storipress custom publications:

Karbon is built and optimised to use data coming from Storipress’ Newstand API. The shape of the data passed to components, composables, and utilities corresponds and conforms to the structure based on the GraphQL types from the Newstand API.

Third party data sources (invite-only alpha)

Karbon can also support data from third-party sources. If you want to use Karbon components with a third-party data source, then data from the third-party source must first be transformed into the types expected by the Karbon components, composables, and utilities, and then passed on to the components, composables, and utilities.

Karbon's architecture optimises performance with a mix of static and dynamic data fetching between client and server-side. Built on modern web technology, it offers a modern approach to web development:

Automatically create article, author, desk, and tag pages without manual configuration. Combined with Storipress' data modeller, publishers have the flexibility to modify to these pages on their own.

Tag Groups

Automatically generate pages that consist of a collection of media. Combined with Storipress' data modeller, publishers have the initiative to modify these pages, without code.

The following diagram shows the request workflow for Karbon apps, based on the platform where Karbon is being hosted:

Node.js runtime

Your Karbon app can be hosted on any Node.js runtime platform like Heroku or Railway. You can also Dockerize your Karbon app to deploy to any of the major cloud providers.

By default, Karbon will generate a standalone Node.js server. If you need to integrate Karbon into an existing server, you will need to generate custom middleware — learn how to do this here.

Worker (v8) runtime

By default, Karbon includes all of the adapters for a worker platform and automatically detects the provider environment and set the right one without any additional configuration. Currently, zero-config support is limited to the following providers:

The Cache API and KV API are powered by Cloudflare, or another runtime adapter.

For a full list of providers, including those that require additional configuration, see this list.

You can manage and deploy Karbon publications to Storipress without additional cost, removing the need to maintain server infrastructure.

Karbon can only be used to build Storipress web publications. Currently, Karbon doesn't support building other types of custom publications, including mobile apps, video games, and smart devices.