Guide to Headless CMS for those that usually work with HTML, CSS and Vanilla JS

Hey guys, I just want to get something off my chest. I think it's pretty hard to get a guide on how to use the headless CMS for people who only know HTML CSS and vanilla JS. Maybe it's me who is just not skilled enough for this but I think many topics are not explained well. For instance I didn't get a clear guide on how to setup a very basic headless CMS for my portfolio and how I would connect it. I either found overkilling guides which would be too much setup for my case or It's that I need to setup with react, gatsby, nextjs or the like.
Again, maybe it's only because I'm too unskilled to get it, I don't know.

Are you a developer, or do you just know some basic web programming things?
Putting up a static site and making minor edits to a single set of html, css, and javascript is not going to be the same experience as developing a server backend and database relationship for use in the frontend. While Sanity is great at reducing the amount of development you would have to do with setting up and maintaining a database, and comes with a pretty great javascript client, it can't do
everything.
If you do have several years or more of development experience and you are finding it hard to get going with a headless CMS like Sanity, then I'm curious what you do have experience with and how that experience differs from Sanity? Have you worked with WordPress before? WordPress is not a headless CMS, as in the frontend and the backend are locked in with each other. You can use WordPress in a headless way, and I love doing that, but most people's primary experiences with WordPress is in minor updates to the theme or a plugin amongst a sea of already developed code.

I think the simple answer here is that webserver programming and full stack development is much more involved than just html + css + javascript. While there are no quick and easy solutions in this space to bridge a gap between the frontend and backend; please know that there is hope on the horizon. People like myself, and the people at
Sanity.IO , and all of the JAMstack crowd seem to have your use case in mind: how easily can we get frontend developers up and running with what they need so they can get back to focusing on the frontend part?

Thank you for this feedback, it is very helpful. We are currently discussing and working on more explicit documentation to help frontend developers get started with sanity.io as quickly and as painless as possible. One of our goals is to make sure that anyone who wants to learn and use Sanity is able to do so regardless of development experience.

Although I'm very deep in the weeds, I can relate to this feeling, Adam. When I got into Sanity all I knew was some very basic JS and a bit of HTML & CSS, and it was super painful to get the whole picture.
While the team works on providing better documentation as lauren put above, I'm glad to help you get started, just DM me
🙂(it's something I've been wanting to do for a while:
https://sanity-io-land.slack.com/archives/C9Y9GF1QD/p1615924827023400 )

I would recommend Eleventy for you then as it’s closer to the vanilla JS and HTML you’re familiar with BUT... I think it’s the most difficult Site Generator to understand the relationship between queried data and your templates.
I’d also say to get started, looking at Sanity Starters is helpful – but you’ll learn heaps putting it all together from the most basic, bare bones setup.

Thank you for this - its much appreciated and highlights conversations we’ve had over the past weeks about offering some tutorials that can help people get on at the ground floor, making as few assumptions as possible.

and , thank you for listening. I know you guys are doing the best to make it as easy as possible and I think you are not far away from the future you are seeking for