# Course: Break up with your CMS https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms Learn how to prepare and convince your colleagues and content teams for the mindset shift towards structured content and content operations. --- ## Navigation ## Contents 1. [Selling sanity](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/selling-sanity) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/selling-sanity.md) 2. [The content operations era](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/the-content-operations-era) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/the-content-operations-era.md) 3. [AI and automation ready](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/ai-and-automation-ready) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/ai-and-automation-ready.md) 4. [What separates Sanity?](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/what-makes-sanity-different) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/what-makes-sanity-different.md) 5. [What things are, not what they look like](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/presentation-vs-structured-content) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/presentation-vs-structured-content.md) 6. [Configuration as code](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/configuration-as-code) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/configuration-as-code.md) 7. [It's all yours](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/its-all-yours) · [markdown](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/its-all-yours.md) --- ## Lesson 1: Selling sanity https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/selling-sanity This course is excellent for anyone convinced that Sanity is the best choice for content operations, but needs a plan to bring everyone else on the same journey. Congratulations, you've found Sanity, the Content Operating System. Perhaps you’ve been experimenting with it on nights and weekends. Maybe you already have some small projects published. But you’re sure you want to use it more often, and especially at work. This course is designed to explain the benefits of using Sanity in a way that makes it easier for all parties to understand, whether they are developers, content operators, project managers, or somewhere in between. Sanity is unabashedly a developer tool, but one that exists so that developers may create excellent editorial experiences for content operators. It is the union of *these two separate yet equally important groups* that leads to great implementations. ## The goal If you want to get the best out of your content operations. If you want to use Sanity at your workplace. And if that’s going to take getting all stakeholders on the same page—work through this course, take notes, and send feedback on anything that we may have missed. ## Your homework Each lesson in this course finishes with some “research prompts.” Questions that will encourage you to dig deeper into the state of your organization to better uncover how Sanity could be an even more perfect fit for your content operations. The better you understand the pain points of your content operations within an organization, the more likely you are to build a solution that benefits all parties. Let’s get started. --- ## Lesson 2: The content operations era https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/the-content-operations-era CMS-focused thinking traps content inside a presentation at a point in time, making it difficult to extract its actual value. Set content free and integrate it into daily operations. Many people think about Sanity as a Content Management System (CMS). While it can be that—[and Sanity Studio is basically a CMS](https://www.sanity.io/studio)—the entire platform can be so much more. CMSes are traditionally used as a platform where you copy content from another source (Google Docs, Notion, etc) and press “publish” to update the website. We think beyond that. ## The content lifecycle Sanity is concerned with the entirety of the content lifecycle, from the inception of an idea to its authoring, reviewing, publishing, and beyond. A few examples of this from the product include: - [**Canvas**](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/canvas/canvas-user-guide), a free-form AI-assisted authoring space for unstructured content, which can be automatically transferred to Sanity Studio. - **[Functions](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/functions/functions-introduction) **run within the Content Lake when document events occur, triggering any necessary workflows, such as translation, redeployment, and cache invalidation. - [**Releases**](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/studio/content-releases-configuration), essentially “branching” for your content, allow you to author and preview many changes in isolation, publish on a schedule, and do so without affecting your production environment. - [**Content Agent**](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/content-agent), a schema-aware AI Agent that knows your structure and all your content for insights and actions, all generated with natural language In short, **Sanity is for everything before and after pressing publish**. ## Beyond your website CMSes are also mainly concerned with what your website looks like. **Sanity is for everything your business knows.** When you go beyond storing webpage presentation and instead store information such as staff, customers, locations, etc., you are building a context that can generate much more valuable outcomes. In the same way that developers write source code, which is compiled into production, think about your content operators' role in terms of writing **source content**, which can be consumed by applications and transformed into outputs. ## The value of content ops thinking It's up to you to break the cycle of: 1. building a content management system 2. handing it to a content team 3. and never speaking to one another again. Thinking in terms of **content operations** rather than **content website management** is a far more inclusive approach to creating content-driven experiences. This is how successfully businesses use Sanity to extract value from their content, seeing it as a **value driver** rather than a **cost center**. Content operators are a traditionally under-appreciated group, often with a built-in skepticism about working with developers. However, when content operations are backed by a developer-friendly tool, this creates environments where developers are excited to build an application and can more easily respond to and fulfill the requirements of content operators. > [!TIP] > Consider taking the [Hello, Structured Content](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/hello-structured-content) course as workshop with your content teams. > [!TIP] > Before writing any code, take the [Implementing Sanity successfully](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/implementing-sanity-successfully) course along with your colleagues. ## Research prompts - How well do you know your content team—the people that keep your business's content up to date—and their day-to-day operations? - How regularly do you check in with content teams to find out how you might improve their workflows? - What events need to take place before and after content is published in your applications that could be better streamlined within a unified platform? --- ## Lesson 3: AI and automation ready https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/ai-and-automation-ready As teams contribute source content to a single source of truth, you make steps towards building a context management system. Foundational choices made when Sanity infrastructure was first built have made it the ideal candidate for integrating with AI tools. Always real-time multiplayer document editing was initially designed with individual API-driven updates in mind. And it's perfect now when co-working with LLMs. ## Building your context Since Sanity is not just for what your website looks like—but what your business knows—you are encouraged to build a single source of truth where all content is broken down to its smallest atomic pieces. For example, instead of thinking of pages and posts, think of offices, products, locations, categories, and so on. As your data set grows over time, you are knowingly or unknowingly creating context that will become increasingly useful to AI agents and users. For your end users, this may manifest as a chatbot that can reference content from your dataset. For content operators or other individuals within your organization, this source content may prove valuable to generate insights with the Content Agent. ## Choose your workflow As the most configurable content operating system available, how and where you integrate AI into your content operations is entirely up to you. Whether that is on demand at a per-document level with [AI Assist](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/ai-assist) in Sanity Studio, automatically through [AI Agent Actions](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/agent-actions) using [functions](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/functions/functions-introduction) with Sanity Client, or globally using the [Content Agent](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/content-agent). Since everything Sanity is API-driven, you may choose to integrate external tooling and leverage the [Sanity MCP server](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/ai/mcp-server). ## The value of working with AI The promise of AI tooling is that every person can work with greater ambition and speed than ever before. This is absolutely true when working with Sanity, and the choices of how to leverage AI tooling with your content are entirely up to you. ## AI-powered development As Sanity is a mostly code-driven tool, the ability to write code has always been the bottleneck for less experienced developers trying the platform. As AI development tools lower the floor and raise the ceiling of what's possible when writing code, it has never been easier for more people to do a better job configuring Sanity. While setting up the studio has always been reasonably straightforward, more complex operations, such as migrations or modifying the shape of existing content, particularly with Portable Text, can be challenging. These concerns are mostly alleviated with code that can understand these structures perfectly and easily interact with Sanity's APIs and tooling. > [!TIP] > The [AI-powered Sanity development](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/code-with-ai) course can be completed by people less familiar with development practices to get hands-on with configuring Sanity ## Research prompts - What repetitive actions are currently being done manually today that could be automated by an AI tool that has access to your content? - How much simpler would onboarding to your content management system be if you could speak in natural language to a chatbot that understands your content and its structure? - What opportunities are there to leverage the value of your source content if you could process it through a large language model? --- ## Lesson 4: What separates Sanity? https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/what-makes-sanity-different What does Sanity, the Content Operating System, compete with? Understand what makes it different by contrasting it with everything else. We've established that Sanity is more than a CMS. However, stating that it is “everything for everyone” can make it **more** difficult to understand or explain. ## Comparing Sanity Charting Sanity’s strengths on a 2x2 grid is a great way to simplify Sanity’s strengths and how it compares against its so-called competition. Compared to other content management systems, Sanity offers the greatest amount of developer control and flexibility, as well as the broadest suite of functions to build content operations workflows tailored to your individual requirements. ![Image](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3do82whm/next/dc0a31da7219413f581e24b1f7aaaa70d9931ce4-1421x1006.png) So a more refined description that “Sanity can do everything” is that “Sanity can do anything developers and content operators need.” For whatever benefits other providers may claim, none of them come close to what Sanity offers in these two areas. Teams that chose the alternatives in the lower left-hand side eventually find themselves migrating to Sanity because they have ultimately become somewhat limited by that platform. They felt like they got started faster there. However, their chosen platform soon prevents them from working the way they need to, as they are forced to work within the confines of the box they bought. There is only one option that comes close, but it has its own problems. ## Sanity vs home-grown CMS If you want true customization, the only other option afforded to you is to build your own content management system whole-cloth from raw materials. You should know, the migration from homegrown CMSes to Sanity is a well-worn path. Sanity is the best choice for teams that want the customization of a purpose-built solution, but without the hassles and edge cases that come with going down that route. Asset storage, backups, CDNs, queries, maintenance, and uptime are all things you will not need to concern yourself with. Sanity, the platform, abstracts away all of these time-consuming inconveniences, allowing you to focus on just the parts that matter: business logic and content operations. ## The perceived cost of flexibility Because of its unmatched flexibility, when you’re asked if Sanity can be used for a specific task, the answer is always “yes.” > “Yes, if you have the appetite and resources to create any content workflow, you can create it with Sanity.” This optionality is sometimes perceived as complexity or an increased cost. When comparing Sanity, instead of focusing on **customization**, consider how far you can get with just **configuration**. Sanity does a lot by default “out of the box.” It is a “nice to have” that there is always an escape hatch to customize what you need. But extreme customization should not be where you start. Configure first, customize where necessary. ## Research prompts - If you are currently on an alternative platform, what blockers do you face that would be eliminated in a more customizable tool? - If you are currently on a homegrown CMS, how much maintenance work could you eliminate by choosing a hosted platform? - Think about which dimension you're currently blocked on with your current content solution. Is it too inflexible for developers, content operators or both? And how could your workflows be better with total flexibility? --- ## Lesson 5: What things are, not what they look like https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/presentation-vs-structured-content Done right, you should never need to search and replace through your content ever again or worry that stale data is served to your users. Structured content has always been at the core of Sanity's approach. Multiple times throughout this course, we have mentioned that Sanity is not designed solely for storing the presentation of your website. Don't feel bad if you are storing presentational content today. You’re not alone! Your job going forward is to incrementally identify opportunities where structured content makes more sense than presentation. Consider a product page on an e-commerce website that displays the products details, colors, prices, variants, care instructions, FAQs, and shipping details. This page contains numerous content structures that can be individually isolated and related to one another. ## Reduced maintenance burden To content operators who are not yet familiar with the structured content way of thinking, this approach may look like hard work. Tools like WordPress and Notion encourage people to write freeform documents where what could be reusable structured content is authored haphazardly and loosely related. This leads to stale data, inconsistent formatting and structure, and ultimately a greater maintenance burden than taking the time to do it correctly in a structured fashion. ### Educating the mind shift It is your job to educate these content operators that the constraints you are putting on their authoring are in their best interest. Sanity Studio can be an intimidating interface to look at for the first time without proper training. This is why we stress the importance of working with these content operators **before** you start writing code. Identify and create **structures with them**, and then demonstrate what those structures look like within Sanity Studio. ## Structured content in presentation [Visual editing](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/visual-editing) and the [presentation tool](https://www.sanity.io/learn/docs/visual-editing/configuring-the-presentation-tool) become increasingly important the more atomic your structured content is. It may not be immediately apparent to a content operator where to find the piece of content that they want to change. However, with visual editing, they can browse the frontends with which they are more familiar to gain direct access to the content they wish to edit. Structured content makes a lot of sense to developers, but not every content creator has the same mindset. However, the combination of structured content and visual editing provides the best of both worlds. ## Research prompts - Could you, as a developer, explain the benefits of structured content to teams who update content in visual applications? - Consider how you could move the conversation away from “updating the website” to “updating content.” - How familiar are you with the visual content editing surfaces that your operators currently work in? And what do they both like and dislike about these platforms? --- ## Lesson 6: Configuration as code https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/configuration-as-code A better developer experience leads to a better user experience. When you can change content workflows at the speed of code, creating better authoring environments is effortless. By storing all your Sanity Studio, SDK applications, functions, and blueprints in repositories, you gain the benefits of source control in a multi-developer environment, similar to those found when developing any application. In the age of AI tooling, this also allows you to work faster and with more ambition, as well as involve coding agents to create updates to your configuration. The unabashedly code-first design of Sanity is fundamental to what makes it great. However, don’t forget that this design is intended to lead to better experiences for your end users—content operators. ## Talk about why code-driven is better Content teams coming from freeform authoring tools may interpret this lack of direct control negatively. They may yearn for the days when they can make changes to their content models and presentation at any moment, regardless of the impact on their audience. It is therefore essential to educate your content operators that they will no longer have direct access to content models. However, since you have established speedy development pipelines, you will be able to respond to their change requests promptly. You may also consider preview builds of schema changes, allowing content operators to see what schema updates look like before they are pushed into production. This small amount of friction also presents an opportunity to discuss the reasons behind the change. Their desired changes to the content model may not be necessary or may be better addressed in another way. Some larger Sanity teams have gone as far as to institute a “structured content council” where changes must be approved before they are pushed into production. ### Generally, people dislike change Another simple truth worth keeping in mind is that even if your content teams dislike their current way of working, it is **familiar to them**. While you may be excited about the powerful developer tooling that Sanity offers, just because it will be different from what they are used to may invoke an adverse reaction. This is why it is essential to involve your content teams as early as possible in the platform evaluation process, allowing them to share in the excitement of all that will be gained from replatforming. ## Convincing your developer team If you've made it this far, you’re likely already a massive fan of Sanity, which is excellent. To others who are not yet familiar, Sanity may be introducing too many new concepts to feel comfortable. Why Portable Text instead of Markdown? Why GROQ instead of GraphQL? > [!TIP] > Prefer [Markdown](https://www.sanity.io/plugins/sanity-plugin-markdown)? We support that > [!TIP] > Prefer [GraphQL](https://www.sanity.io/learn/content-lake/graphql)? We support that. There are compelling reasons for all of these, which are explored in the following guide: > [!TIP] > Read [How to pitch Sanity.io to your team](https://www.sanity.io/learn/developer-guides/how-to-pitch-sanity-io-to-your-team) for more details ## Research prompts - What manual work is being done today in a browser for your content operations that would be faster, safer, and more easily automated if driven by code? - What is your developer and content operations team's appetite for change? What holds them back from changing, and how might you better convince them that changing to Sanity is a change for the better? - What is the relationship like between your developer team and your content operations team? And how could the two work together better? --- ## Lesson 7: It's all yours https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/break-up-with-your-cms/its-all-yours Sanity provides sensible defaults along with the flexibility to make any part of the platform feel entirely yours. Content tools other than Sanity give the allure of having an authoring environment already built out before you begin. Pretty quickly, content teams that use these solutions find that this quick start accelerates them into a brick wall. Sanity is designed to be entirely yours: your content structure, your interface, your queries, your block content, your presentation, your integrations. Throughout this course, we've mentioned the ideal state of using Sanity to store everything your business knows. Taken further, Sanity can also become a “control plane” for how your business operates. Sanity Studio is a configurable application for authoring documents. But the act of doing so might perform business functions like alerting users of an upcoming event, modifying shipping dates on products, or literally any other mission-critical activity that happens in your business and is driven by content. ## Research prompts - If you are working within a platform designed by someone else, how many hacks and workarounds are currently involved in your content operations? - If you could own every part of your content operations, what would you change today? ## Conclusion Getting an entire organization to buy into the content operating system requires teamwork. But when you can clearly demonstrate the benefits of changing the way that you work with content and putting everything your business knows at the center of your operations, you are setting the foundations for your last ever migration to a content management system. --- ## Related Resources - [All courses and lessons](https://www.sanity.io/learn/sitemap.md) - [Complete content for LLMs](https://www.sanity.io/learn/llms-full.txt)