Show HN: Sanity – A Headless CMS Construction Kit in JavaScript

Perhaps this is different because of GraphQL?

In this case, I would typically reach for a battle-tested CRUD building framework like Rails that gives you JSON APIs for free. I am not as familiar with GraphQL frameworks, but I suppose that I could find one as well if I really wanted that.

I am not really sure what people mean by "CMS" anymore. I have always thought of it as a place for people to create and publish pages. It is confusing to me when people use it to mean a structured database.

Maybe we need a new word.

  https://www.sanity.io/docs/front-ends/what-about-graphql

To provide some background: Your typical modern web application typically revolves around a central CRUD API that you then build apps on top of. You'll typicall have a web app and maybe a native mobile app. But you also need an "admin app" that provides content editing, login, role-based security, and so on.

One option is to use an off-the-shelf CMS. These are almost invariably big, antiquated monoliths that want to be your entire technology stack. Most CMSes not only want to be the system for managing the content, they also want to do the delivery, through some kind of templating system that force you to write your application inside the CMS. I've never met a developer who likes their CMS.

Since CMSes suck so much, companies also very commonly roll their own content management from scratch, which means you spend an awful amount of time writing common stuff unrelated to your core app — database CRUD code, APIs, role-based security, and so on. Rails took off because it was so easy to define your data model and get the CRUD API off the ground. But you still have to do the admin UI; you still have to wire up all those forms, enforce data validation, build complicated things like photo upload and countless other things. And you have to do it all over again for the next app. No admin is reusable.

Sanity turns this upside down; it adopts a "data first" philosophy. First, you get a general-purpose data store for storing your content. It's an advanced document-oriented, transactional data store that comes with live change feeds, strict schema validation, and fine-grained permissions and an expressive query language called GROQ, which is reminiscent of (but different from) GraphQL. This data store replaces your ad-hoc CRUD API.

The second part is the Content Studio. This is a modern, extensible, customizable JavaScript framework that renders a content editing UI on top of the backend data. The UI has been designed from the ground up for the data store, and supports live collaborative, Google Docs-style editing. It's implemented in React.

So with those two building blocks, you get a way to store data and edit it, but Sanity leaves everything else to you. You can use whatever technology stack (Rails, PHP, Django, etc.) to develop your front end apps, as long as you use the data store.

Disclosure: I work on the Sanity open-source data store, called Gradient. However, I'm not directly involved in the Sanity project, so the above is just my personal perspective.

I have a vested interest in this (I work on the open-source data store used internally by Sanity), but I genuinely think Sanity is a game-changer in the CMS space.