Sanity.io designer / co-founder here. We've been discussing how to explain what Sanity is and stuck with “CMS” to give people an everyday use case, casting a new product category in something old. There's the term «Headless CMS», but that doesn't capture the data modelling and query capability well either.
And for sure, this way of thinking about content isn't new. People have been building bespoke relational databases with custom forms on top since forever. But it has been time consuming and also pretty hard to get totally right. It's free form in data structure, but expensive to change.
Many who haven't needed to structure content in the past need to do so now. Both given content reuse across touchpoints, but also to be able to easily shift your content over to other services as structured data.
So we built Sanity to make this fast and easy while not compromising on the experience for the editor: real-time collaborative work on structured, interlinked data.
BTW – In order to make extending the editing UI clean we've built a system for build-time dependency injection. This gives a non-crufty way to override and compose components: https://www.sanity.io/docs/extending/parts
Looking over your landing page and docs it seems like really thought out product and a lot of effort being put in it. With that being said, I still can't understand the use cases for this. Who are your typical users? What do they use this for?
And for sure, this way of thinking about content isn't new. People have been building bespoke relational databases with custom forms on top since forever. But it has been time consuming and also pretty hard to get totally right. It's free form in data structure, but expensive to change.
Many who haven't needed to structure content in the past need to do so now. Both given content reuse across touchpoints, but also to be able to easily shift your content over to other services as structured data.
So we built Sanity to make this fast and easy while not compromising on the experience for the editor: real-time collaborative work on structured, interlinked data.
BTW – In order to make extending the editing UI clean we've built a system for build-time dependency injection. This gives a non-crufty way to override and compose components: https://www.sanity.io/docs/extending/parts