February 2020 Summaries

Sanity, a platform for structured content, has been actively engaging its community with several new updates and initiatives, including the release of a tutorial on CSS-tricks, the Document Actions API, and the transition of GraphQL out of beta. Community members have been showcasing creative projects, such as Henrique's site performance dashboard and Michael Eldeman's Gatsby site theme control, which leverage Sanity's capabilities. The platform has been adopted for various purposes, like bot backends and multilingual sites, as demonstrated by projects at NDC Oslo 2020 and BCN Clay Studio. Prominent community member Alan Reader, a Christian pastor and front-end developer, highlighted his use of Sanity in projects and praised its flexibility and the introduction of features like the structure builder. Sanity continues to foster a vibrant and inclusive community, encouraging members to share their work and participate in the platform's evolution.

Sanity has officially released its GraphQL APIs out of beta, enhancing them with improved filtering and sorting features, including the ability to filter by nested values and use various boolean operators. Users can now deploy tagged versions of their GraphQL endpoints, providing more stability by allowing different endpoints to run different schema subsets. The new APIs address potential conflicts by using an underscore in the DocumentFilter type, ensuring field names do not clash with Sanity’s content backend. Sanity remains committed to supporting both GraphQL and GROQ, with GROQ serving as the primary query language underpinning the GraphQL APIs, emphasizing their complementary roles in providing stable and predictable APIs.

The latest release of Sanity Studio introduces three new concepts—Document actions, Document badges, and Studio React Hooks—designed to enhance workflow customization. These features enable users to create tailored workflows by implementing custom approval processes, asynchronous integrations, and additional form steps before publishing, while also allowing for common operations like publishing and validation through React hooks. Sanity's philosophy is to adapt to user needs rather than enforcing generic workflows, accommodating varying team sizes and content velocity requirements. A demo showcasing the new document actions API demonstrates how users can assign documents, manage review states in a kanban view, and utilize full document history for verification, highlighting the balance between trust and control in workflow management.

The digest highlights developments in the Sanity community, including an integration project with Figma and a developer profile on Jamie Bradley, a front-end engineer and founder of Endeavour Digital, who discusses his recent work with Sanity and his preference for using JAMstack in projects. Bradley shares that Sanity's flexibility and features, such as Portable Text, have facilitated quick project turnarounds and improved content management experiences. The digest also shares praise received by the community, introduces the Kunzt.no website built with Sanity, and notes job openings at Sanity, reflecting the company's ongoing growth and engagement with its community.

The text highlights recent developments and community contributions involving Sanity, a platform for structured content. Key updates include Henrique Cavalieri's creation of a custom asset source for generating OpenGraph images and SEO previews, and Eric Howey's integration of Portable Text with Theme-UI for enhanced design systems. Interviews with developer advocate Kristian Freeman and Alex Petterson explore Sanity's applications, while Ronald Aveling's project showcases a performance artist's portfolio built with Sanity and Gatsby. Additional projects include a curated music album website by Henry Garrett, Artem Artemov's branded site for a recording studio, and a Norwegian e-sports portal utilizing Sanity for user authentication and results import. The text underscores the versatility of Sanity's API, enabling applications beyond traditional websites, as demonstrated by Simeon Griggs' Express.js app. Personal portfolio projects by Lucas Vocos and Dan Hollick further illustrate the creative use of Sanity in web development.

Sanity Studio has officially transitioned from version 0.147.9 to 1.148.0, marking a significant milestone in its development journey while maintaining its commitment to stability and compatibility. Despite the semantic versioning rules that allow for breaking changes in minor releases, the team has avoided disrupting documented APIs, instead opting to introduce new high-level APIs such as the validation and structure builder APIs that can be extended without affecting existing code. This careful approach reflects a broader trend in the JavaScript community, where projects like React have also taken time to move to a major version. The shift to version 1.148.0 is not indicative of a change in their development strategy but serves as a formal acknowledgment of the maturity and reliability that Sanity Studio has achieved over the years.

Cloudflare Workers is a service that allows the execution of JavaScript, Rust, and WebAssembly on the edge, leveraging the V8 engine for rapid startup and impressive technical capabilities. The Cloudflare Workers showcase site was developed using Sanity.io as the content backend, and the process was explored in a discussion with developer advocate Kristian Freeman. The conversation covered the decision to use JAMstack and Gatsby for the site, the functionality of Sanity’s source plugin for Gatsby, deploying via GitHub Actions, and the benefits of designing with a content-first approach. Additionally, it highlighted features like Workers Key-Value Store and the integration of layout abstractions with structured content. Freeman also organizes Byteconf, a free online conference series.

Sanity.io's recent community engagement highlights a series of innovative projects and collaborations centered around their platform, aiming to enhance customization and user experience. At a San Francisco meetup, discussions included rapid prototyping with Sanity Studio and a presentation on developing an official Alexa skill for a city. The community actively contributes by sharing customizations like rebranded studios and plugins, such as a new tabs feature for improved field localization. Explorations into e-commerce with the JAMstack, using Gatsby and Sanity.io, are underway, and the Hive Initiative's launch showcases the platform's collaborative potential, allowing non-developers to contribute to content creation. The community's positive feedback on Sanity.io's flexibility and execution underscores its growing reputation in the content management space.