Sanity's giant leap forward: Spring Release 2025

Sanity has unveiled a series of new tools as part of their Spring Release and evolving the CMS into a Content Operating System – a central content database that unifies your content as data in one platform, that can be distributed to multiple surfaces (websites, apps and so on).

The Spring Release is Sanity’s first version of this new Content Operating System vision, along with closing a Series C funding round for $85m – congratulations to Magnus Kongsli Hillestad, Simen Svale Skogsrud and the entire Sanity team. This feels like Sanity is taking a giant leap forward. There’s also some new branding, and while my first thought of the logo mark reminded me of the Conservative Party logo, the branding is executed brilliantly across the new website and the exceptional video below…

Dashboard

The Dashboard is a brand new home screen experience that provides observability for all of your studios and Sanity apps in one place, alongside Insights into Content performance. Apps leverage React hooks, that can enable real time updates of content changes in the dashboard.

Sanity Canvas

Sanity Canvas is the new name for Sanity Create - the free form content editing tool, which is also now an App in the Dashboard.

Canvas is an alternative to preparing content in tools such as Notion or Google Docs and enables you to create unstructured content, which automatically gets mapped into the Sanity fields in a live preview – saving time from copying and pasting content from those other tools into Sanity.

Canvas is also AI accelerated, integrated with ChatGPT, so that you can enter prompts as Instructions to create copy, rewrite your existing copy or generative AI images that can also be mapped to Sanity fields. This is a great way to focus on content creation without switching between lots of other tools. You can also provide context to the AI, with notes that contain your editorial guidelines such as tone of voice, target demographics.

Content mapping requires some configuration in the studio schemas, where you can also provide additional context around the intended purpose of a field so that the AI can make more accurate decisions when mapping content from Canvas. Fields can also be excluded from the mapping, which could be useful if you have fields that contain data synced from other sources such as Shopify.

Media Library

The Media Library is now elevated as a first class citizen, living within the dashboard as a standalone app – enabling assets to be shared across many Sanity studios.

If you’ve already been using Sanity, your existing images and files are saved in your dataset and are not automatically copied across to the new Media Library. Sanity will be introducing the ability to migrate those assets into the shared Media Library, whilst also preserving the connections so that you won’t need to re-add the assets to fields.

The new Media Library also introduces the concept of Aspects, similar to schemas for other content in Sanity, an Aspect helps to define custom metadata for assets. Aspects can be a single field or an object of multiple fields that can also contain validation rules, enabling you to add data such as Photographer and Copyright details.

Apps and App SDK

The new App SDK provides the tools to create and deploy apps inside of Sanity, building on extensions and plugins that have come before. Apps can live inside of the dashboard and are not limited to one dataset or projectId, so they can interact with multiple Sanity projects.

Apps can be built to provide new workflows for content operators to do data-intensive operations like bulk edits. In the release video, Sanity showed some App examples like Calendars and Maps.

The App SDK uses headless React hooks for fetching lists of documents, fetching an individual document and performing actions or mutations in bulk.

The Sanity UI can be used when building apps, to ensure that apps remain consistent with the studio, but you can also use use other front-end libraries such as Tailwind CSS, Base UI, ShadCN to completely customise the apps.

Apps have access to all of the content and the Media Library, and provide the ability give specific authors access to an app to complete a specific task, instead of navigating through the studio.

Combined with the new Insights functionality, Apps can be an easier way to prototype some new functionality, to see how it gets used and iterate using the Insights metrics.

Functions

Sanity has had webhooks that can take actions when content changes that could communicate to an external service. You would likely have had to set up the API and a serverless function elsewhere, such as Vercel.

Sanity’s ambition as a Content Operating System is to handle those events as Functions inside of Sanity’s Content Lake. Functions can be deployed from code, so that you can contain all of your studio code, applications and functions in one place.

When content authors publish new content, Functions are a secure way to handle events such as; syncing data between applications, using AI to translate content or sending news articles to Apple News.

Sanity are including a development playground to help test what actions are happening when content is changed, which would typically be more difficult with webhooks and a local development environment

Sanity says that Functions are the first step in a new piece of the configuration API – called Blueprints, which is going to set the foundation for everything Sanity, so this is infrastructure as code for your sanity configuration.

Docs

The Sanity Docs have been dramatically improved and restructured, with the entire documentation loaded into the AI context to search and ask questions to more quickly get the answer that you want.

Content Releases

This feature was made available to Sanity users earlier this year and we have been using it at Hanabi on our own website.

Content teams can work simultaneously to draft new versions of each piece of content as part of a Content Release – independent of the live Content.

Thinking about an ecommerce store preparing for a sale such as Black Friday, you may be used to updating individual pieces of content such as the Homepage, Product pages, Collection pages and scheduling those individual pages to publish at the same time.

With Content Releases, teams can group those individual drafts as a single Release that can be automatically published at a specified time. It is also possible to view a list of all of the Content that has been Added, Changed or Deleted as part of the Release - no more hunting around your CMS to figure out what content will change and is a quick visual check that you have remembered to prepare all of the Content for a Release.

As you would expect from Sanity, there is an API to enable Content Releases to be published through code, integrating with CI/CD pipelines alongside non-content changes that may need to be published.

It’s also possible to preview what that future Content Release looks like - useful for presenting to stakeholders and for teams to sign off before launch.

Insights

Another new App that lives inside of the Sanity Dashboard, Insights helps teams to understand bottle necks that are affecting performance or delivery of content – which documents are being worked on or have never been published.

Highly distributed teams in particular will be able to use this data to improve processes with the people that do those content operations day by day.

Agent Actions

AI tooling is expanded, building on the AI Assist that was available in the studio. Essentially a headless version of AI Assist, enabling you to create AI instructions and use them programmatically in code, which means that it’s available within Functions, CI/CD pipelines and so on.

Actions are schema-aware so you can compute new values off of values being changed in content, or create new pieces of content – content can become more like a prompt for the next action to happen. For example; Re-write the title of the document to be more engaging when the content of the document has changed or use the content to create an image.

The Translate action enables you to translate a document from one language to another, creating an unlinked draft document. You can also pass in a style guide, that can either be a simple instruction to use a specific tone when translating the content or you can pass in an existing sanity document that contains your brand tone of voice – perhaps the same document that you use within Sanity Canvas.

Get more in depth detail about all of the Spring Release features at the Sanity websitehttps://www.sanity.io/spring-release-2025