If you enjoy shipping content and care about the UX nuances for a smooth editorial experience, you’ll want to check out Sanity’s new Canvas release.
It’s designed for teams like ours that thrive on collaboration - imagine all your content being edited in one place, with faster feedback, shared ideas, and one-click integration with Sanity Studio.
This really marks a new era of writing where ideas and execution are closer than ever and there are more reasons than you can shake a stick at as to why you should be choosing Sanity for your web-dev experience
Most exciting features
Automated context extraction
Canvas allows users to add context in several ways; however, our favourite one is to add a link directly from a URL and watch the magic happen.
All you need to do is paste the associated link, and depending on the URL's accessibility, Canvas automatically pulls data in text format. Of course, you can manually add context. However, automatic data rendering from the URL saves a ton of time and feels great. It also keeps up to date if the context on the website changes.
See how we do this internally.
Complete toolkit for modern content writing
With Canvas, you can create tone of voice guides, collect inspiration, and facts - all in one place. This helps you stay focused, so you don't have to switch between documents or platforms to organise your thoughts.
We expand on our previous example and show how you can utilise this below.
AI that completes your thoughts
Once you have all of your thoughts collected in the notes, you can go ahead and start using the ghost writer for contextually accurate assistance when you hit a writers block and just need a gentle push to speed things up.
Bonus points, because your feeding it context, it doesn't typically hallucinate like other AI chat interfaces out there.
Check out how the auto complete works here.
Write better, together
We love Canvas for allowing a shared creative space for every team member—from marketing to dev. We all have strong opinions on matters we share with the world, and sometimes it’s just nice to have a second pair of eyes reviewing your content.
See how you can collaborate with your colleagues.
If you are looking forward to taking your visual content creation a step further using Sanity and OpenAI, we got a perfect guide for you.
Content mapped and ready for Studio
Once you have all this content ready, or even before it's finished, you can link up a document inside your Sanity Studio. This takes all the content you've written within canvas and maps it to the appropriate fields within your Sanity Studio.
It's very clever, as it can map fields to code examples, images, headings and everything in-between.
See the example below.
Our final thoughts
When it comes to writing tools, less really is more. With Canvas, you can focus on your ideas instead of getting distracted by flashy, often unhelpful UX.
Writing feels natural, and adding media or creative elements is seamless. However, that being said, there are still a couple of rough edges at the moment, which we know the Sanity engineering team is working hard to get flawless. If you do happen to come across any, feel free to get in touch with us or the Sanity team to help you get moving again. If you are looking for the right sanity CMS agency, we've got you covered as well.
Hope you enjoyed this article, as much as we enjoyed writing it (in canvas).