Discussion about using 11ty and Sanity as part of a website stack, with positive feedback and resource recommendations.

is this channel active?For me it is empty(of messages) which i think may be to do with slack plan only allowing the most recent 10000 messages…or maybe it just isn’t an active channel?

They’ve been lost to the Slack Retention Machine, unfortunately.

Thats Ok Geoff. Out of interest is there much content on here referencing 11ty? or active members who use it as part of their stack. I’m considering a move from middleman and datoCMS to eleventy and Sanity and would like to get some insight from anyone who has used all of them

There are a few guides and tools in the Community Exchange . There are definitely 11ty users—and there’s a good chance they’re in this channel—but you could also post in help.

I just helped a friend set up their 11ty project. It’s a good pair. ^_^

thanks Geoff, I’ll get a good look through those resources. Bryan Robinson looks like he could be a good guy to talk too, is he still part of your team? I remeber seeing some 11ty videos of his on youtube some years back. He got me interested in it as an alternative to middleman!

Awesome Julia. I don’t suppose you documented any of that process. What specifically did you like/dislike about that stack…oh and did you use netlify or vercel to deploy? I probabaly should add that although I am a ‘veteran’ front-end developer/designer, been building sites since 1996!! I am NOT a JS programmer. I tend to fumble through some of this new jamstack stuff. I really ought to learn JS eh!! lol

here’s my fork of their frontend. This was written by Mia, who authors a lot of sass and css standards. Here’s the studio I wrote for them - it needs a few tweaks but is good enough until I can start adding some new version methods. And here’s the finished site .

This is a relatively basic studio with some creative flourishes to let it function for purchase tracking and ticket taking at the door. She is using some netlify actions along with stripe as well.

We had planned to make it a monorepo eventually, but that’s not really necessary at the moment.

I have the studio hosted on vercel for its handy cicd, but it can be hosted with sanity or netlify very easily as well.

I got the ball rolling for her to move her previous md+yfm pages into structured content then helped her write queries. She took the ball and ran with it after that!

They just wrapped their first show run on the new studio. I honestly expected SOMETHING to go wrong, but it went the entire sale and performances run without a hitch. We are slowly working on some sales charts and preview features to really make it shine by the next show.

It was my first chance to really make a studio on my own terms for someone else’s production project, and if you get a chance to do some builds for friends or non-profit orgs, it’s an amazing learning op!

I’m going to have to look into the pros of vercel CI/CD over netlify. Ma I correct in saying that unlike a lot of the hosted headless CMS with sanity I would have to create manually my own deploy/build hooks in code/config files rather than via UI (like for example DatoCMS does)

Your project looks awesome. A bit more involved than i probably need but I think it will be useful to work through your repos to extract what will apply to what I need to do. Thanks a bunch I appreciate your input JuliaDo you think it is wise to try jumping over to sanity and 11ty when i am not really a JS programmer??

We don’t have frontend build hooks at this time, but it’s on our agenda. We’ve just paused work and implementing things like the netlify plugin for after next week (see announcements) - but the schema methods shouldn’t change and you should keep working!

yeah i here there is a studio v3 imminent, so I’ll watch and see what develops. I think it might be better to jump in once it is up and running rather than have to make a sort of transition between the 2 given I’m very new to all this!! lol

The schema structure itself is very FUN to work with. And you just need to know some JS object/array basics to get a ton of functionality out of it. If you’re more comfortable with md than portabletext, this works well in the studio also - but pt comes with a lot of nice advantages and is advised if non-dev users are writing content.
If you are comfortable enough with HTML and ground level JS, you won’t have to think very much about more advanced JS or React methods at all beyond what you can copy-paste easily from
sanity.io

can you point me to any good resources to get a good foundation on said JS object/array basics pertaining to sanity/11ty. I am very comfortable with HTML, CSS (not so much the very new stuff) and rudimentary JS, also templating languages and so long as the docs are good and I can find plenty of exmples and repos to sort of backward engineer I usually do OK 🙂🤞

I honestly don’t know how specifics with v3 are going to pan out. But just using my project example linked here, I was able to copypaste my schema documents into the new build without any changes. (*not 100% guarantee there won’t be something, but don’t let it give you pause right now - get some practice with schema structures now, it will all continue to be useful)

hmm you should go through this walkthrough , it’s freshly updated and fantastic.

A very wise woman once told me..a good place to start is at the beginning 😜

And for how to make schemas do what you want once you get comfortable enough to write them, check out examples in schema types API docs.

thanks Julia, I don;t want to take up anymore of your time this evening, but if it is OK with you maybe i will ‘hit you up’ sometime in the future?

And the cherry on top - (install node v16+) install the sanity cli and start playing with a few of the example schemas:

(this are *nix directory commands, but similar for windows)

I’m a *nix kinda guy!! lol

hit me up or drop a note on getting-started or help any time! 🐧

((I am using mac for my job, but I am also running raspbian, fedora, and popOS around the house))

as chance would have it I have node 16.15.0 all ready to go. I might try the 11ty/sanity starter, seems like a good place to get my feet wet, rather than jump straight into a production project!!!!🤷‍♂️

v16 and v18 (post release) work well for me. v17 is ok, but I don’t trust odd releases!

mac for work, web dev, video editing, mint on backup dev laptop, elementary OS on kids laptops and a pitop ceed from kickstarter when I was trying to get into rasberry pi. mr Robot has a lot to answer for!! We sound like a right pair of geeks eh!. TBH I’m just trying to talk a good game, I’m very old school, trying to keep up to date. 😉

last question, would you advise installing sanity cli globally or just on a project by project basis. I often end up with weird permissions issues and then spend days trying to fix it all using forums!!

I can get a linux desktop or server on the wire and run what I need easier than pc, but for fancier linux hacking - if I can get rsync to work reliably, I’m pretty proud of myself.

I’d advise installing globally. Then

sanity login

to auth the cli app. When deploying to something other than sanity hosting, I add cli to the deps so the host server can build it.

But you don’t HAVE to install globally. It’s just super handy, especially while learning and rebuilding things.

if installed globally I won’t run into issues with newer versions breaking older projects???

you shouldn’t. But as with all things, if an issue happens you should update the global install version or re-install it. If a future studio release requires an updated cli, there will be an easy method available to use older studio versions until they are retired (which wouldn’t happen for at least 2-3 quarters).

okay, I’ll ponder that a bit more. While i enjoy a good tinker, I did a few years back resolve to stop wasting time trying to keep my dev tools all working smoothly and have been known to get a stack working and then just not update it at all…don’t tell anyone though 🤫

We are reviewing all official starters now, so please forgive us if some are currently getting really old. The getting started walkthrough is the best resource on the site, and the cli studio install template is always up to date.

thats were I’ll start then (thats tomorrow sorted!). Feel free to update the 11ty starter first…or not 😜

you know what… I don’t think we have one at the moment outside of the getting started walkthrough! I’m a total noob with 11ty but a big markdown fan. I do have an updated version of the previous svelte starter pending release. Maybe I can adapt this. I’ll give it a shot!

I think I came upon an 11ty starter but its a bout 2 years old, alot has changed in both 11ty and sanity in that time I’m sure. Give me a holler if you get one up in the next few weeks, I’d love to take a look at it and try and learn some stuff.
I did contemplate just moving ahead with 11ty and using MD YFM etc, but for a client project (mostly non profits, community groups, nursery schools etc) I really need to offer them a CMS dashboard UI and one ideally that rebuilds the site as soon as they update or add any content. I’ve used DatoCMS a bunch (they had a plugin for middleman so it was an easy job setting it all up, didn’t even have to worry about writing GraphQL or anything, but I really like the look of sanity and judging by this interaction I think it could be a great move for me, The community support is well frickin awesome tbh!! lol. just need to get my JS a bit more polished. i think the docs you pointed me to should help a lot. Now I really feel i need to let you get back to your day
D

Sanity and Groq are awesome and a great choice (not a sponsored message!). You really don’t have to know very much js to get a very good and accessible studio running.