Astro Weekly #7

Hello Astro enthusiasts!

There’s a lot to cover this week, with one of Astro’s biggest minor releases ever, the usual awesome resources from the community, plus our weekly showcase, so I’m gonna keep this intro Qwik and jump right in! 🚀

This week in Astro ✨

Astro 3.5 released ⚡

In what has been described as one of Astro’s biggest minor releases in history, Astro 3.5 is now available, and with it a raft of new features such as prefetch optimisation, form support in view transitions, performance improvements to content collections, and more.

Astro 3.5 also introduces an experimental i18n routing API that facilitates the integration of multilingual content in your Astro project.

Creating multilingual apps with Astro is now simpler than ever.

To enable this experimental routing option, incorporate an i18n object into your Astro configuration. This object should include a default location and a list of all the languages you intend to support:

// astro.config.mjs
import {defineConfig} from "astro/config";

export default defineConfig({
  experimental: {
    i18n: {
      defaultLocale: "en",
      locales: ["en", "es", "pt-br"]
    }
  }
})

This feature supports configuring a default language, computing relative page URLs, and accommodating preferred languages from your visitor's browser.

Additionally, you have the flexibility to specify fallback languages on a per-language basis, ensuring that your visitors are seamlessly directed to existing content on your site.

For a more comprehensive look at i8n routing in Astro, I encourage you to check out Astro’s official documentation.

To learn more about all the new features in Astro 3.5, head on over to the official Astro blog for all the details.

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Astro Qwiker than ever 💨

While one of Astro's key features is its default approach to zero JavaScript, many developers still desire interactivity in their projects. This typically involves integrating a JavaScript framework like React, Vue, Svelte, and others, which inevitably introduces the framework runtime to the project.

Qwik is Astro’s first resumable UI framework.

Qwik builds upon Astro's foundational principle. By leveraging resumability, Qwik ensures that components are only executed when explicitly resumed, contributing to an efficient and optimised execution flow. No hydration directives are required either.

Here’s a quick explainer by Steve Sewell, co-founder and CEO of Builder:

With Qwik, you can feel confident your Astro project starts fast and stays fast! If you’re interested in reading further, check out the official release post.

Embed tweets in Astro 🐦

Sriram has done an awesome job porting the react-tweet package by Vercel to Astro, enabling you to embed tweets in your Astro project without any client-side JavaScript.

Tweets can be embedded with just a single line of code, without sacrificing performance. Check out the demo: https://astro-tweet-demo.vercel.app/

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

AstroXtra 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Direct link for web version: https://twitter.com/NikolovLazar/status/1721883913851965539

Astro Showcase 🌠

Web development is undeniably exciting, but the plethora of choices can be overwhelming. Enter Choose Tech – a community-driven project designed to provide comprehensive tech comparisons.

Built by Florian Lefebvre, Choose Tech uses Astro’s SSR capabilities and View Transitions to provide up-to-date comparisons across the web development ecosystem, from databases to JS libraries, helping to simplify the decision-making for your next project.

Choose Tech relies on community contributions and welcomes your active participation. You can contribute by adding new resources, suggesting improvements, and showing your support by upvoting Choose Tech on ProductHunt.

Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X

Beyond the Astrosphere 🪐

What caught my eye outside of Astro this week…

• GeistFont — a typeface made for developers and designers by Vercel

• LunaNotes — a browser extension for taking notes on YouTube

• Hackreels — create effortlessly beautiful code animations in seconds

That’s a wrap for this week!

As always, if you have something you wish to contribute to Astro Weekly, please feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] or via DM on X.

Have a great week, Astronauts!

– Nathan 🧑‍🚀