Community Digest #8: Browser tabs, Figma integrations, and a developer profile
Learn how Jamie found Sanity, what keeps us up at night, and some of the highlights from this week in the community.
Knut Melvær
Head of Developer Community and Education
In this digest we'll get to know one of the developers in the Sanity community a bit more, as well as get some of the highlights from the past week.
We hope you'll all have a great weekend — we can't wait to be back next week, because we will have some great things to show you all!
Community highlights
A sprinkling of tweets with tips, tricks, and praise from the community.
Wordpress arrivals
The number of tabs I have open doing research & testing w/ https://t.co/J1cf9bpLdW @ 4:29am 😬 🤓.
The Structured Content and Sanity Studio are quite 🔥.
Obviously, I am impressed👀.
Imagine if you can code your own WordPress w/o all the bulk, lag, vulnerabilities, etc 🤯. https://t.co/7L9xmDryDd
We can relate to Naya’s tweet! Both in terms of having a lot of tabs in the browser and figuring out how all the things can be built.
Figma + Sanity?
We're huge fans of Figma here at Sanity HQ. So seeing that people are working on integration like this makes us really happy. Henrique is looking for contributors. If you're interested do let him know!
I've finished a first version of a figma2code generator that uses @figmadesign 's API and layer names to produce production-ready markup in @sveltejs , editor-friendly content schema for @sanity_io and a bit of SASS code.
Currently looking for ppl interested in contributing https://t.co/EKAsVQY29F
Developer profile: Jamie Bradley
We have a solid group of helpful and industrious developers in o community. Jamie has been one of them for a long time. He has given talks about Sanity at JAMstack_conf London 2019, as well as meetups. This week, he launched a new site with split pane previews for unpublished changes. We took the opportunity to have a chat.
— Who are you and what do you do?
I'm Jamie! I'm a Front End Engineer and the founder of Endeavour Digital. We're a UK based digital agency that specialise in anything front end – especially JAMstack!
— You just launched a site, tell us about it!
We've been working with a business called Distinct Performance. We were tasked with designing and developing a content managed website within a short time frame. I’ve worked with Sanity before and on reading the brief I instantly knew Sanity was the right tool. Sanity’s flexibility, intuitive interface and development experience definitely contributed to the fast turnaround.
The feedback we received following the launch has been great. The client is very happy and the user feedback has also been positive.
I integrated the Production Preview Plugin in @sanity_io for one of our sites this evening. This platform never fails to amaze me. The JS Client even handles authentication against draft documents. Pure Awesome. I'll certainly be adding this to my #JAMstack talk next week! https://t.co/yxM9HeoKM3
— What is your go-to stack these days?
I'm a bit of a JAMstack fiend! So I'm always looking for ways to incorporate JAMstack into our projects. The majority of our projects usually include:
Outside of the day job, I've been playing with 11ty a lot. I'm actually in the process of dusting off my blog and bringing 11ty into the equation.
— Tell us how you discovered Sanity!
I think it was nearly 2 years ago now! I'm part of a Slack group with front end developers and one of them shared the Sanity website. I took a look at the website and took some time to read the documentation. About 50% of the way through I couldn't wait to get started. Next thing, I was integrating Sanity into Endeavour's Gatsby website 🎉
— If you had to pick only one, what is your favourite Sanity feature?
There's lots I love about Sanity. But Portable Text has to be my favourite feature. I've had so much grief in the past when dealing with Rich Text content through other Headless CMS.
I love that Portable Text gives your content some structure. It means you can handle the rendering of elements easily - goodbye dangerouslysetinnerhtml!!
I also love that you can create your own blocks. I created a Youtube embed block for another website (with the help of a Sanity tutorial - thank you for that!) in a matter of minutes and that was a great feeling.
— Do you have a recommendation that developers should check out this week?
Colby Fayock realased a great article about JAMstack this week I would recommend checking that out. I'm not usually one for sharing my own things but I wrote an article about how I'm trying to use JAMstack to tackle a problem that diabetics face. It's going to be a series of posts and I'm hoping to release my next post at the end of the month.
Built with Sanity
Kunzt.no
Kunzt is a awardwinning Norwegian television show about art and artists. Alexander Sundli-Härdig and his team at KeyTeq made the vlog website using Sanity in combination with Next.js, styled-components, Memberful, and Heroku.
This week in praise
In danger of being a bit self-serving we include some of the praise that has been given this week. That being said, we love all sorts of feedback, also when it's about stuff that could have been better. Use whatever medium you feel most comfortable in, we're most present on GitHub, Twitter, and Slack.
Finishing our first web project with Sanity CMS @sanity_io. A unique blend of fairly-priced hosted data and GraphQL APIs with an open-source, self-hosted CMS framework. Tight integrations with @gatsbyjs and @gridsome and a great Slack community. Feeling empowered.💕
@figmadesign @sveltejs @sanity_io Oh, and just another message of appreciation to @sanity_io and the smart brains behind it: this is why schema config through UI is a limiting solution, you can't leverage code to automate it or extend it.
You make it hard *not* to become a fan 😍
(Well, we're not trying to make it hard 😆)
@hcavaliericodes I just recently came across @sanity_io and thought do a quick search to see what experience other devs have had with it (and other CMSs). I have had exactly the experience you described in your post here: https://t.co/H9e1IqVQUi
Go read Henrique’s post – and no, we did not pay for it (even though we maybe should).
@laurie_jim @sanity_io @syntaxfm @strapijs In comparison, Sanity feels more like an open-source CMS framework for JS developers who want complete control over how their own CMS works. My initial reaction was 'I can do anything that I want with this!'
and reaction('Portable Text') => 🤯🥳👌
I finally got round to updating my website to use @sanity_io. For all the documentation there is it really doesn't take much to get something working. Very pleased indeed. 😄🎉
One more thing…
Did we mention that we're hiring?
- Engineering Manager (Oslo)
- Account Executive (San Francisco)
- UI/UX Developer (Oslo/San Francisco)
- Digital Product Designer (Oslo/San Francisco)