We spend pretty much 50% of our time with our heads lodged in the Sanity Studio, tailoring content fields, improving client UX and tinkering about with the inner workings.
What's instantly noticeable?
Dark mode
Well... it was about time. We absolutely love Dark mode's and Sanity Studio's is one of our favourites. It's simple, it's actually dark (not dark blue) and it's simple to use. With building dark modes ourselves, we're suprised how well they've transitioned, as it's no easy task (especially if you haven't opinionated it from the get-go).
Typescript
Wow, well this was a nice suprise. It's also a nice touch as intellisense is working like a charm when tweaking and messing around with what is now called the: sanity.config.js
Name changes
Something we were dreading. For anybody that's ever seen the migration document for Gatsby V2 to V3, you'll know what we're on about. Luckily, it's nothing like that. It's simply a quick refactor to the sanity.json file to a sanity.config.ts and that's pretty much it. Phew.
Reload speed... Kind of
So this was an interesting one. Something that could always be improved is DXP, and hearing the new adoption of Vite sounded great. This is definitely noticeable from the terminal, not so much from the client-side. Essentially when making changes to schema it's much much faster to update. However, unfortunately there's no hot-reloading, so if you're making a simple title change to a field, still expect to be hit by the loader and flash of fields loading.
New docs
Yes, we know we're about the most boring people in the world for getting excited about docs but... They're really nice so far. They look visually very similar to the editor and overall much cleaner.
Form customisation
As a caveat, we haven't fully dived into form customisation, as we mostly like to keep close to vanilla for the UX. However, looking through the docs and seeing the weather tools that people have created, we can see a multitude of use-cases where this will really shine. *cough* we might be building an icon picker soon.
What's not currently noticeable
Studio Speed
We'd love to see Sanity get a bit faster. It's worth noting, that out of all the CMS we've tested, this is still one of the fastest for loading. It's just we're speed freaks and we notice a little slowdown when it comes to reference sanity fields. We're not talking any more than a second or so, but let's be honest, the less time spent waiting, the better.
Loading spinner
Call us pedantic, but we love a good loader. Currently it's just a basic spinner... Wow, 0/10 what a disappointment, throw it in the trash.
This makes us think that Sanity has a new and fancy loader coming soon, and that just makes our knee's weak.
Our thoughts
We reckon this is actually a great change, and one that's minimally breaking with a large effect. Although this doesn't have the bells or whistles of Next.js updates, it does one thing better than anything - instill confidence about the future of Sanity, making incremental changes to improve the overall DXP and reliability of the studio. It's music to our ears, and a testament to "not reinventing the wheel".
When to make the jump
Currently we're keeping our Sanity studio on V2... For now
We actually really want to upgrade to the development preview, because we don't mind bugs (we use Safari as a primary browser, so of course we do). But... The issue currently is plugins. Because of the depracation of the part: system, we are waiting for our favourite plugins to be updated
Once these have been updated, we're totally jumping ship to the new hotness.
