Spike: Research Sanity.io as a headless CMS solution

[2nPlusOne]

Spike: Research and Prototype Sanity.io Integration as a headless CMS solution

Problem Statement

Our current project structure tightly couples the view and content, which could potentially lead to difficulties in managing content as the project scales. We aim to simplify the view by separating it from the content, hence making content management more straightforward for the future.

Goal

To research the viability and benefits of using Sanity.io as a headless CMS for our Next.js project, and to create a prototype branch to integrate Sanity.io, evaluating the ease of integration and the extent to which it meets our requirements for content management.

Hypothesis

Integrating a headless CMS like Sanity.io will decouple the view from the content, making the view simpler and content management easier. Sanity.io, with its real-time content updates and customizable content studio, could be a good fit for our project's needs.

Questions

• How seamless is the integration of Sanity.io with our existing Next.js project?
• What are the key benefits and limitations of using Sanity.io as our headless CMS?
• How does Sanity.io compare to other headless CMS options in terms of features, ease of use, and community support?

Research Tasks

• Set up a prototype branch integrating Sanity.io with our Next.js project.
• Evaluate the ease of managing content using Sanity.io's content studio.
• Compare the features and community support of Sanity.io with other headless CMS options like Contentful and Strapi.
• Document the process of integration and any challenges encountered.

Results and Conclusion

Sanity.io has powerful content management features: content schema files along with an embedded studio UI allow for non-technical users to create content easily. GROQ is a query language that lets the front-end query the content from sanity servers and populate components. While powerful, sanity integration has a significant learning curve (a new schema language, a new query language, and restructuring the way we think about content). At this time, it would be dangerous to switch over to sanity. After MVP is complete, it would be worth revisiting this an a more long-term content solution.

Further research is needed regarding flat file CMS options.