Community Digest #10: Anti-siloing, onboarding, and some praise
Don't start with the site map, start with structured content. How to onboard clients to their new content management. A bunch of new site launchese. We share some praise. And a new developer profile; this week, Holly!
Knut Melvær
Head of Developer Community and Education
The dust has barly settled after the launch of Document Actions and GraphQL out of beta last week. And here we are again with a new Community Digest with a bunch of new stuff that has been tweeted and launched. We have musings on content modeling, a well as great ways of onboarding clients. Art collections and Sanity.io is a great fit, and we get to know one of the devs in our community a bit better.
A selection of interesting things that you have shared since last week.
We're fans of content strategist Carrie Hane (co-author of Designing Connected Content) here at Sanity HQ! Recently, she published a post arguing that you shouldn't start web design projects with a site map. Yes! That's a great approach to working with structured content. Ronald Aveling picked up at this and offers some insights and links to the conversation.
@carriehd Amen to that. @carriehd have you worked with @sanity_io from a modelling first point of view? I've found it very empowering and it's very dev friendly. Can be a great way to get content/dev silos working collaboratively early on.
Ideally, you build the Sanity Studio together with your clients, and using the process to let them work with real content, and get to a content model that makes sense for them. That's not always feasible, and your clients may want to onboard their colleagues and future team members later. We love this idea by Henrique of creating short screencasts showing the functionality of the customized studio, and embedding them on the Dashboard.
With @sanity_io , even onboarding clients to the CMS is easy 😍 https://t.co/1j6nBdYN7H
External validation of the thing you're making feels nice, so we thought we might unapologetically share some tweets from this week with y'all. We're still blown away by these.
@dylanjha @rauchg @sanity_io Dove into https://t.co/VepupkuCa0 this weekend and am totally sold. In love with the DX, first-class graphql support, and beautiful open-sourced editor. Gonna use it for a new livepeer site. Cool seeing y'all using it at @MuxHQ as well!
D45/#100DaysOfCode
Got up to speed on @gatsbyjs and setup a starter Gatsby frontend with a @sanity_io headless CMS.
Super impressed with Gatsby's speed + Sanity's Studio SPA with real-time updates. Stoked to start building with these tools!
Once again another successful @syntaxfm sponsor recommendation. Just spent the last 20 minutes trying out @sanity_io and it's safe to say I kept my sanity.
Thanks for the rec! https://t.co/sudtNN3eBg
@bri_downing Big fan of @sanity_io. It’s the first CMS I’ve ever been enthusiastic about.
Setting up a quick schema in @sanity_io is the first time I've felt a headless CMS has gotten it right.
Everything just works, it's intuitive and within 2 hours I'd read the Getting started docs and got a CMS up and running that I wanted with references and other cool stuff.
My wife 😍 had her baby shower today, so I spent the time porting blog posts and writing @sanity_io plugins. My fingers are literally hurting from all the typing, copying and pasting 😅
Have you launched something with Sanity.io? Or made a plugin? Remember to tell us about it! Either in a tweet or the #i-made-this channel over at Sanity.io Land.
How to build a website without anything like a normal budget, project plan, process or resources? Reduce the developmet to its absolute minimum by utilizing the amazing array of available tools and services.
Let's say they nailed it. Only spending something like 25 hours to do so. And they share the recipe as well!
How to build a website without a budget, plan, process or resources? Utilize the amazing array of tools and services available: https://t.co/VSxYWu34Nc Hat tip and thanks to @tailwindcss, @sanity_io, @nuxt_js and @nystudio107
Jay Bowles posted the new site for Hua Explore in #i-made-this. We see an emerging number of art and museum sites powered by Sanity, like the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Nobel Peace Center, and Astrup Fearnley.
Speaking of art collection sites, Alejandro V. Rojas shared the new website of Kunsthall Trondheim, migrated from Wordpress into a Sanity + Vue + Express stack. Looking at the Studio, you'll see an excellent implementation of structured content, and Alejandro tells us that the editors “have been pretty pleased with a more flexible system.”
Andreas Straub shared this website for fitness groups. He tells us:
We have made the first release of the new website for the german fitness group. They have 15 studios. And this is the main landing page. The entire content is managed by Sanity Studio!
It’s a Gatsby Site hosted on Zeit Now. In this project we have also created an own componentPictureAssetthat can convert theSanityImageAssetto the new<picture>tag likegastby-image. It supports also the crop and hotspot information from Sanity. In the studio itself, it was exciting to use the colors of the course categories in preview components.
If you join our developer community you'll be able to get the code for the PictureAsset component. Andreas also shared screenshots from the studio, showing the color coded categories:
These developer profiles start to become the highlight of our week. We almost wish weeks were shorter so that we could do more of these. This week we got to talk to Holly, full-stack developer from Canada.
– Who are you and what do you do?
Holly Gronau, I am a Full Stack Developer from Toronto who loves video games, manga, and anime. Recently I have been playing Project Diva Mega 39s on switch and reading Skull-face Bookseller Honda san. I have a Basset hound named Olive and a Cat named Oni.
– Tell us what you're working on at the moment
Right now, at work, I am primarily working on a Sanity/Gatsby relaunch of a client site. Primarily we are using Sanity to move off of Wordpress entirely. I am happy to share it when it's launched.
– What is your go-to stack these days?
No defined stack for me at work. I am coding everything from in house tools using jQuery to working on our Sanity Gatsby Project, and even doing some Wordpress work right now. On a personal level, Node.js with create-react-app and using Firebase was my go-to stack. I like SQL for the most part too, especially with sequelize.
– If you had to pick only one, what is your favourite Sanity feature?
For me, the best thing about Sanity is the ease of use. Sometimes it feels like magic. Utilizing the API is great, and it's really easy to add webhooks too.
– Do you have a recommendation that developers should check out this week?
I have been reading a lot about SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and JSON-LD this week and found this guide from Brafton to be a great resource.