What's new in Astro - October 2023

By
Elian Van Cutsem

Releases

Astro’s development keeps marching forward, with several notable releases in October:

  • Astro 3.2: This update gives you more control over the browser history stack, enables page navigation with View Transitions, includes a route announcer for screen readers, and integrations can now dynamically add other integrations.
  • Astro 3.3: This release introduces an experimental <Picture /> component, enhances syntax highlighting, brings package provenance, and adds various quality-of-life improvements.
  • Astro 3.4: Introducing Page Partials, along with improvements in image optimization and a first preview of an experimental dev overlay.
  • Starlight 0.11: Adds support for customizing Starlight’s UI with component overrides, adding attributes to sidebar links, and improves <title> tags.

See the #announcements channel in the Astro Discord for releases across all our repos, including Starlight, the VS Code extension, compiler, packages, and integrations! Follow Astro on GitHub for all updates.

Hacktoberfest

Hacktober is officially over now! Thank you all for your amazing contributions and PRs! Here are some of our statistics:

  • 2 Astro core PRs
  • 49 Starlight PRs
  • 95 Docs PRs (and counting…)

Docs

We extended the tutorial with some highly requested features!

“Talking and Doc’ing” is our weekly live Discord call where we involve the community as we work on docs projects! Often we jump into a shared Codespace or HackMD document and everyone can participate. This month’s activities included:

  • Live reviewing and testing the two new mini-tutorials
  • Improving our docs PR template and creating a new GitHub action to welcome first-time contributors
  • All hands on deck reviewing translation submissions using the Astro Docs checklist to get everyone’s hacktoberfest-accepted PRs merged

Community

Community Awards September

Each month, Astro recognizes contributors from around the community, supported by Astro’s Open Collective funding. Join us in celebrating the following people who made Astro great this month!

  • @lilnasy: $500 for outstanding contributions to the Astro codebase and community ⭐️
  • @itsmatteomanf: $250 for initiative taken translating our docs into Italian 🍾
  • @alexanderniebuhr: $250 for leadership in the development of the Cloudflare adapter 🎉
  • @HiDeoo: $250 for taking ownership in Starlight’s maintenance, support, and new features 🥳
  • @OliverSpeir: $250 for a significant presence and impact in Discord support 🎈

ViteConf

This month, three Astro Core members presented talks at ViteConf 2023.

Learn more in our ViteConf blog post and watch the YouTube playlist of all the talks.

Content

Project: U2 Space Baby: read about Chris Garrett’s companion app for U2’s residence at the Sphere and see the new Space Baby app for U2 live in action!

Code Fix: The SIBA Website’s Move from Create-React-App to Astro: read about converting a legacy CRA project to Astro by Brittani S. Avery

Translate routes in Astro with Content collection, subpage, optional trailingSlash and base support: a guide to translating routes for content collections and subpages by Artur Sopelnik

Add comments Section to your Astro blog: a guide to adding Giscus to your blog for comments powered by GitHub Discussions.

Astro Weekly: a free 5-minute weekly email roundup packed with the latest insights and resources from the Astro universe.

Showcase

Each week on the Astro Community Call in Discord, we shine the spotlight on projects posted by community members in our #showcase channel from the following week. Here’s a sample of what we saw this month!

Tools

Themes

Websites

Starlight in the wild

Need inspiration for your documentation site? Here are the new Starlight sites we spotted this month!