September 2018 Summaries

Sanity Studio has addressed a frequent user request by introducing a new structure builder in its Desk Tool, allowing for enhanced control over document organization, including the management of singletons, or unique document types. This update, available through a recent release, enables users to filter, group, and display documents in hierarchical formats without altering existing content models, thus allowing for simultaneous multiple presentations of the same documents. The structure builder leverages JavaScript, and its TypeScript implementation offers features like autocomplete in supported code editors. It supports promises and observables, facilitating real-time integration with external APIs. Sanity Studio views this enhancement as a significant step forward in offering flexible content authoring solutions and encourages community feedback through their Slack channel.

Sanity proposes a shift from storing rich text as HTML or Markdown in content management systems (CMS) to using the Portable Text model, which they developed in 2015. This model allows for greater flexibility and control over text content, enabling it to be easily manipulated and rendered across various interfaces, not just the web. Portable Text is represented as a structured JSON object that can be serialized into clean text, HTML, or Markdown, allowing for customizations like footnotes or links for different contexts, such as voice interfaces. It supports complex text structures and collaborative capabilities similar to Google Docs and facilitates easier integration with frameworks and testing. By adopting Portable Text, users can structure content in a way that aligns with their organizational needs, rather than adhering to the constraints of traditional markup languages, while still maintaining the ability to convert it into other formats when necessary.

jq is a versatile command-line tool for processing and manipulating JSON data, with features such as syntax highlighting and the ability to transform JSON into other formats like CSV. This tool can be installed on most systems using package managers like Homebrew for macOS or Chocolatey for Windows. In the context of working with Sanity.io, a backend for structured content that uses the GROQ query language, jq can be used to convert structured JSON data from Sanity queries into CSV format. An example command demonstrates how to extract blog post titles, slugs, and publish dates from Sanity, format them as CSV, and output the result either to a terminal or a file, making it suitable for further use in applications like Excel or Python's pandas library.