What is involved

Once assembled, your team should work through the “Hello, Structured Content” module, which includes identifying the content needs of an imagined event venue business. This exercise should prepare you for what it takes to create an initial content model for your project.

There’s also an example spreadsheet to draft your early content model. Tempting as it is to start a new project by picking colors and fonts and writing code, nothing beats collaborative planning with simple tools that everyone can relate to.

Composable architecture involves orchestrating individual best-of-breed providers into a cohesive workflow – connected by APIs. This can be dizzying to understand without proper planning and may benefit from drawing a basic technical diagram. Similar to mapping out schema types and their connected relationships in the content model exercise.

Congratulations! You made the right choice.

Once complete, your Sanity Studio will be the central location for content creation, as well as the previewing of how that content is rendered in potentially multiple outlets. It can also be uniquely configured depending on a content creator’s responsibilities in their role, team, or market.

Sanity Studio can be hosted anywhere any React application can be hosted. So your Studio may live inside your Remix or Next.js application. Or be deployed to the hosting that Sanity provides. Either way, your Studio will behave the same as it relies on publicly available APIs.

It’s also inconsequential where the applications you’re developing consume or update content from Sanity. The JavaScript Sanity Client package is designed to run in all modern hosting environments. Sanity also provides clients for other languages, such as .NET or PHP.

Like the Studio, all these clients are built upon the same HTTP API, which can also be used directly.

Your primary front end is likely a website or mobile application. However, your content may be rendered into multiple other outlets like emails, open graph images, or more.

While the Sanity Studio is built with React, your front end does not need to be. Starter templates are available for various frameworks if your team wants to experiment first. However, it’s likely your development team already has a preference.

The most popular framework for building websites with Sanity is currently Next.js, for which the next-sanity package offers a library of functions to make this integration simpler.

As mentioned above, with Sanity client libraries, no one framework gets a privileged experience accessing Sanity content as they all rely upon the same HTTP API.

Your Sanity project’s vision should extend beyond your website, but as your website is likely the primary outlet for it, it’s important to consider how you analyze the success of that content.

Creating a relationship between your website’s analytics and your content is commonly done by matching a document’s slug field value. You may choose to build an integration that shows analytics reports in a view pane so that your content creators can take actions based on the performance of that content.

It is possible to create basic personalized experiences with structured content and Sanity. Making audience profiles part of your content model allows you to take user information and have it influence queries for Sanity content.

In a large-scale, production-grade project, you’re likely to integrate a specialized service to gather and report user data, so you may wish to integrate a third party into this part of the project as part of your composable stack.

While Sanity plays a central role in storing your content, that content is likely influenced by more than one external service.

Your e-commerce provider should be able to keep product data in sync with your Content Lake. Sanity offers an integration for Shopify. Other providers may also offer integrations.

Translation services may be required to scale content for multiple locales rapidly.

AI services can help create or augment the content creation experience.

Sanity offers AI Assist to get started quickly and natively in the Studio.

Some assets are better stored in dedicated services as their size or usefulness may be larger than reasonably expected for a Sanity project. For this, you may integrate your PIM or DAM.

Other assets – such as video – are better delivered from sources other than the Sanity CDN and would be better from a dedicated external provider such as Mux

If an integration for a service you already use does not yet exist, you may find inspiration from existing integrations to quickly build your own.