Astro Weekly #9

Greetings and salutations, Astro Weekly subscribers!

In this week’s newsletter, there are exciting Astro updates to cover, further info on Astro’s new Qwik integration, building a CMS agnostic headless Astro template, an expanded Astro Showcase, plus the chance to win a license key for Darkmatter. 🎁

This week in Astro ✨

Astro 4.0 beta release ⚡

The first draft of this week’s newsletter included details on the release of Astro 3.6, but this was followed up by the surprise release of the Astro 4.0 beta!

Astro 4.0 introduces an internal upgrade to Vite 5, the latest version of Astro's build engine, which was released last month.

Given that this is an internal upgrade, the majority of users are expected to encounter no breaking changes. If you're up for some exploration, feel free to make the leap and update to Astro 4.0 today.

npm install astro@beta
pnpm install astro@beta
yarn install astro@beta

If you’re starting a new project, you can take Astro 4.0 for a spin by running:

npm init astro@beta

Astro co-creator, Matthew Phillips, also confirmed that more features are heading our way in Astro 4.0, with some features expected to move from their experimental phase to stable status.

Astro 3.6 released 🆕

If you’re not feeling quite adventurous to update to Astro 4.0, Astro 3.6 has also been released. This update brings new events in the View Transitions router as well as a fallback for prefetch in reduced data scenarios.

You can read up on everything Astro 4.0 and 3.6 over on the official Astro blog.

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Can Qwik outpace React and Vanilla JS in Astro? 🏃

Qwik is Astro’s first resumable UI framework, but if you’re left wondering why you should consider Qwik over something more familiar such as React or Vanilla JS, Paul Scanlon has put all three to the test in a head-to-head.

In a recent blog post, Paul experimented with three approaches to build an interactive sidebar navigation in an Astro project. Who comes out on top?

Building a CMS agnostic headless template 💀

Astro is a great choice when it comes to working with a headless CMS, but it’s possible that you may need to work with more than just one across your projects.

Developing an Astro template that accommodates this level of flexibility presents some challenges, as demonstrated in this proof-of-concept by Maciek Palmowski.

Going Headless with Astro 🎙️

If you’re keen to learn more about the possibilities of going headless with Astro, Maciek joined James and Brad on a recent episode of the Compressed.fm podcast to get deep into Astro and the various strategies for going headless.

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/cpenned/status/1728431089474306303

Win a license key for Darkmatter 🎁

If you’re unfamiliar with Darkmatter, you should check out Astro Weekly #5 where I cover this awesome tool for editing content in Astro by Vadim Demedes.

Inspired by Vadim’s remarkable decision to donate 100% of all earnings to date, I’ve decided to pay forward my recent license key win, and have purchased an additional license that I’ll be giving away to one individual on X.

The winner will be announced this coming Friday (December 1st, 2023) — perfect for starting that new side-project this weekend.

Astro Showcase 🌠

This week we have a rather tasty landing page for an upcoming product, Kuizto (that’s ‘chef’ in casual French in case you were wondering)! 🧑‍🍳

Developed by Kuizto founder, Sylvain Simao, the landing page makes great use of GSAP and uses Tailwind CSS for styling. C'est délicieux!

Honourable Mentions 🤩

Since the launch of Astro Weekly, I’ve received so many submissions for the weekly showcase that one just isn’t enough! Each week from now on I’ll be sharing additional examples of great projects launched with Astro!

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…

• supastarter — popular SaaS starter kit, now with Nuxt support

• Rosefinch — simple and beautiful SQL client for Mac

• useHooks — a collection of modern, server-safe React hooks

That’s all for this week!

Feel free to drop me an email at [email protected] or send me a DM on X if you have something you wish to contribute to next week’s issue.

Have a great week, Astronauts!

– Nathan 🧑‍🚀