Building content apps

Simeon GriggsPrincipal Educator at Sanity

The Sanity App SDK is a collection of utilities for building content applications backed by the Content Lake. It is headless by design, so you can use whatever front-end framework you like. In the React package, almost all of its functionality is provided by React Hooks.

It is the fastest way to rapidly build task-specific applications for authors and editor teams to perform content operations.

Sanity Studio is a powerful and nearly infinitely customizable admin panel for creating and editing content. However, given its flexibility, it can become so complex that it becomes difficult for authors with a specific task in mind, especially one that needs to be done repetitively, to perform it efficiently.

So, while Sanity Studio may be the default experience for all of your content operations, the Sanity App SDK provides a way to build novel applications with a specific job in mind.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Sanity Studio is a hammer, but not all content operations are nails. Sanity App SDK is a scalpel. And this is a tortured metaphor.

For example, imagine a content author at a media publication who needs to process feedback. They could click through a Studio to find what they need, or you could build an application to do what they need faster and better.

And that's what you'll build in this course.

This course expects that you have a reasonable understanding of the Command Line, NPM, React, TypeScript, and Sanity. You will not need to be an expert in any of these, but this course is written with the expectation that this is not your first time encountering these words.

If you would prefer to get a top-to-bottom look at how to work with Sanity, the platform, you may be better served by the Day One with Sanity course.

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You'll be building a single-purpose application for processing feedback. You might imagine this feedback is received from a comments form or email account. Your content authors need a more efficient way to see which feedback:

• is pending approval to proceed down the work stream
• should be marked as spam and dismissed
• should be deleted
• and to mark the sentiment of any feedback as positive, neutral or negative.

Let's begin in the next lesson by first creating a new Sanity project and Studio.