May 2023 Summaries

Rethinking website content organization during redesigns or CMS migrations offers an opportunity to improve content structure and increase return on investment by adopting content modeling over relying on existing sitemaps. While sitemaps provide a hierarchical listing of webpages, they're limited in making content future-friendly, as they often align with current web structures rather than conceptual representations. Content models, on the other hand, document types of content and their relationships, offering a broader view that supports multi-channel use and efficient content governance. By identifying content types as entities that can stand alone or be broken into components, organizations can create flexible, entity-based content models that allow for diverse sitemaps or menus while maintaining content consistency. This approach encourages looking beyond current web content to identify potential offerings, involving stakeholder interviews and competitive analysis, ensuring the content model aligns with both current and future audience needs.

Content Source Maps, introduced by Sanity, represent a new open standard designed to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of content management in modern, decoupled CMS environments. This standard allows for the annotation of JSON data with contextual metadata, facilitating direct links from any front-end presentation back to the source content within a CMS, thus simplifying content editing, debugging, and lineage tracking. By providing a way to quickly locate and edit content across multiple platforms, Content Source Maps aim to improve the workflow for digital experience teams, including developers and content creators, in a multi-experience world. This innovation is supported by Sanity's development of GROQ and GraphQL query languages, which allow users to leverage Content Source Maps for more effective content delivery and management, promising significant time savings and improved content accuracy.

Vercel and Sanity have launched Visual Editing, a feature designed to streamline content editing workflows by allowing users to click on content blocks within a Vercel preview deployment and directly access the corresponding content in Sanity Studio. This capability addresses the common tradeoff in headless CMS architectures, where editors often face less intuitive editing experiences compared to traditional monolithic CMSes. Visual Editing simplifies the process by enabling direct navigation to content locations, thereby enhancing efficiency without requiring changes to front-end code. This feature is part of Sanity's composable content solution, which offers a flexible, API-centric framework that supports content reuse across multiple digital experiences. By leveraging Vercel’s incremental static regeneration, updates are reflected quickly across sites, ensuring a seamless and efficient content management process.