Thoughts on Sanity.io
It's been 4 months since I started using Sanity for a content-heavy application and I wanted to share my thoughts on the headless cms. While developing a data-driven application there are a lot of things we have to take care of like asset management, dynamic content, data security, and better control over the data. Sanity offers all of them.
So before Sanity, I tried WordPress which in my opinion was a nightmare to customize. The idea of pushing a blog post to something else didn't sound good to me. (I am not a fan of PHP by the way) But I find it easy to learn and customize Sanity and the documentations are well written. There is a good community across many platforms which I found really helpful.
So we used Sanity as the cms and Nextjs for the front end. I think the combo is really good. They get along very well and with the appropriate use of Nextjs features like static generation and serverside rendering it is possible to optimize the site for performance, SEO, and sanity data bandwidth.
I think it is possible to dynamically customize the entire website with Sanity, good imagination, and definitely more work. The data modeling is really fun to work with.
I really like the asset pipeline. The APIs allow an authenticated client to upload and delete assets. It supports almost all common image types and pdfs etc. Currently, there is no video support, I really wanted that feature too but hey at least I don't have to sign up for amazon s3 bucket or Cloudinary for file uploads. The assets are served via global CDN and the cool thing is they allow URL options to blur, crop or resize, etc so that helps a lot in serving optimized content.
So overall for content-driven applications sanity is the first choice for me. There are plenty of plugins available for most scenarios and developing custom plugins is also possible.
The most interesting thing I did was the live preview for the sanity studio. It is really simple to do and significantly improves the editing experience. For anyone using Sanity and Next.js, I recommend using static site generation since it will save a lot of bandwidth unless you want the content to be reflected as soon as you publish. When using static site generation the content will get updated on the next build but it will be faster.
I really think I didn't use the platform to its full potential but for the first time, I am really satisfied with a cms platform and will continue learning to make use of all that Sanity offers.
