ALT Since Astro 2.0, content collections have allowed you to organize your static content in type-safe collections, and then use them in any page on your site. However, as your site grows, having your content in Markdown files in a Git repository may become less practical. You might want to use a CMS, have some sections of your site powered by a REST API, or use optimized images coming from an asset management system like Cloudinary. This can quickly become a mess to manage, requiring various APIs and data-fetching strategies. The content layer is the solution to this, bringing all of your content into one friendly, type-safe data store, ready to use across your site. They are the content collections you know and love but with the extra power of loaders – pluggable functions that fetch and transform data from any source.

ALT Server islands are an evolution of the islands architecture concept that Astro helped bring to the mainstream. Server islands extend this same idea to the server. With server islands, you can combine high-performance static HTML and dynamic server-generated components on the same page. On any given web page you might have content that is: Completely static and never changes. Dynamically backed by a database that changes infrequently, but more often than you deploy. Personalized content, tailored to individual users. Previously, you had to choose one caching strategy for all of these types of content, and if the page is a logged-in experience that usually means no caching at all. Now, with server islands, you get the best of both worlds.

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