Building a Travel Blog with Astro Content Collections and MDX

When I started building about-kazakhstan.com , I needed a framework that handled 83+ MDX articles with frontmatter validation, image optimization, and fast builds. Astro Content Collections turned out to be perfect. Why Astro for a Content Site Zero JS by default -- travel articles dont need client-side interactivity Content Collections -- type-safe frontmatter with Zod validation MDX support -- embed React/Astro components (FAQ, AffiliateBox) inside markdown Cloudflare Pages -- free hosting, auto-deploy on git push Content Schema // src/content.config.ts const blog = defineCollection ({ schema : z . object ({ title : z . string (). max ( 70 ), description : z . string (). min ( 100 ). max ( 160 ), pubDate : z . date (), updatedDate : z . date (). optional (), heroImage : z . string (), category : z . enum ([ " culture " , " travel " , " food " , " history " , " nature " ]), tags : z . array ( z . string ()), featured : z . boolean (). default ( false ), }), }); Quality Gate Script I w