September 2020 Summaries

The Sanity Community Digest highlights innovative uses of the Sanity platform, featuring projects like a silent auction website for the Hospital Rooms charity by Simon Rogers, which utilizes Sanity for bid management and automated notifications. Kevin Green integrated site documentation directly into the Studio for his Midway e-commerce Starter, enhancing usability for developers and editors. Ryland King shared his 923-day development journey in a Twitter thread, emphasizing resources and tools like Sanity that empowered his learning process. Additionally, the community participated in a 14-hour live schema creation stream with the Sanity team, resulting in new Starters for project development. The vibrant Sanity Community Slack encourages sharing and collaboration, inviting members to showcase their creative applications of the platform.

The Sanity community is thriving with innovative projects shared in its Slack channel, showcasing creative uses of the Sanity platform across various fields. Scott Wambach's portfolio, featuring projects like ghosts, flags, and Kentucky blue corn, highlights Sanity's role in his work, which is adorned with impressive animations. Jamie Bradley developed "HeySugar," an app designed to help diabetics manage their blood sugar, and has transformed it into a community starter, demonstrating its practical healthcare application. James Quick addressed the repetitive task of creating social media cover images by integrating Serverless Functions, Cloudinary, and Sanity, streamlining the process into a few simple steps. Simeon Griggs tackled automated backups from Sanity to S3, providing a solution for risk management concerns, with detailed installation available on GitHub. The community invites participation and encourages members to share their projects and engage with fellow creators.

Sanity.io is developing new starters for their create tool, focusing on a Studio installation without a front-end, to accelerate the development process across various frameworks. These starters serve as foundational templates for projects such as full marketing websites, one-pagers, personal CRMs, and event sites, offering a streamlined approach to building diverse digital experiences.

In a recent community digest, several innovative projects were highlighted, showcasing the versatility of Sanity, a content platform. Jennifer Shields created a microblog using Sanity and Next.js, entirely from her iPad Pro with the Play.js app, showcasing the potential of mobile devices for development. Ian Hatcher-Williams developed a CRM tool integrated with Sanity for highcourt.co, which manages applications by linking to Mailchimp and Stripe for seamless data processing and storage. Additionally, Christopher Pecoraro contributed a community-sourced starter for the Laravel Jigsaw static site generator, enabling users to create a Sanity-powered blog effortlessly. Hatcher-Williams also shared a time-aware e-commerce site for Proper sleep solutions, featuring a unique theme that changes with the time of day. These projects reflect the creativity and collaborative spirit within the Sanity Community Slack, encouraging members to share and develop their work.

The Community Digest highlights a variety of creative projects, including a music website for singer Nicolette Macleod built by Jedidiah Broadbent using Sanity Studio, and a Shopify e-commerce site developed by David Gross that features a serverless function to sync products, supporting a female-founded tech startup called EMME. James Perkins has launched a new course on building personal sites using Next.js, Sanity, and Chakra UI, while Kevin Green created a playful shopping experience for Heed Foods, tailored for dog treats, using Sanity Studio. Additionally, Eivind Lendbraten designed a portfolio website for Norwegian artist Aurora Passero, demonstrating the versatility of Next.js and Sanity. The Sanity Community Slack encourages members to share their innovative projects and collaborate with others in the community.

Drupal 7, a popular version of the Drupal CMS with a significant market share, is reaching its end of life, prompting many organizations to consider upgrading or switching platforms. Upgrading from Drupal 7 is complex due to significant changes introduced in Drupal 8 and 9, such as new templating engines and object-oriented code, which require substantial effort. In contrast, Sanity.io offers a headless, API-first CMS approach that emphasizes real-time collaboration, flexible content structures, and JavaScript-based customization. While Drupal relies on a traditional, monolithic architecture with the potential for headless configurations through additional modules, Sanity provides a fully decoupled experience with content management as data, allowing for seamless integration with modern front-end technologies. The decision between upgrading within the Drupal ecosystem or transitioning to a platform like Sanity involves weighing the complexities of migration against the benefits of modern, flexible content management solutions.

Amidst the challenges of living in the Bay Area during a pandemic and rampant wildfires, an individual devised a system to monitor air quality using the Purple Air Sensor Network. This network utilizes cost-effective sensors to measure particulate matter in the atmosphere, providing real-time data essential for assessing air quality, particularly during such environmental crises. The individual, seeking a simple solution, utilized Sanity.io for data storage and Twilio for SMS notifications, enabling alerts when air quality deteriorates to unsafe levels. Despite limited coding experience, they implemented a system using JavaScript on Vercel, overcoming hurdles in setting up Python and choosing to port libraries to JavaScript. Air quality data fetched from Purple Air is converted to Air Quality Index (AQI) values, though adjustments were necessary to account for inaccuracies in low-cost sensors, particularly with wood smoke. Notifications are sent via SMS to alert when air quality crosses certain thresholds, with measures in place to prevent spam by limiting message frequency. The project also explores adding visual data representations via Quickchart and considers further enhancements like error handling and averaging sensor data.