CMS Stuff
Hello everyone, I am sorry if this is a bit off-topic but If I need to have a blog and ebook like style sections on my site with images, videos, rich text etc... with categories that can have subcategories, can be sorted, searched etc... Would you guys recommend using Convex with Algolia for example or use a dedicated headless CMS like Sanity, PayloadCMS etc... for this?
15 Replies
hey there
so, we originally used (and still do to some extent) sanity for our CMS for various things
as time has gone on and convex has matured, we're actually using convex as our CMS more and more, and we're pretty happy with it. it's pretty easy to build a nice CMS on convex
in fact, convex is built "on convex" more and more as the months go on
so yeah, convex can do this job pretty well
and yes, we use convex with algolia
algolia powers our stack search, docs, search, discord search, etc
and there is a convex app that's responsible for tracking and indexing all of these when they change
Amazing, thanks. Could you provide some examples where you use Sanity? Also why did you choose Algolia over Convex full text search?
like these messages we're typing to each other right now are being handled by a convex http action and then indexed in algolia 😄
we use sanity for stack.convex.dev
but now I think mostly as an authoring environment -- the actual storage/serving has moved to a convex service at this point vs. being served by sanity itself
why algolia? two things. 1. convex text search didn't exist when we started the project
2. convex text search didn't have features that allowed us to specify things about ranking, etc. and it doesn't have analytics the way algolia does. but, if the text search had existed when we started, possibly we would have just used it to keep things simple and keep dogfooding
Amazing, thank you very much. I wanted to use Sanity for blog/ebook type sections, but since it is not fully typesafe by default I am thinking that Convex might be a much better fit. If Convex had a premade UI for publishers aka authoring environment it would be much more appealing for me to use it (I know that Convex is not a CMS so this is very unlikely.).
Also just a quick question do you guys use sanity as is or something such as sanity-typed?
I think we just use sanity, but mostly for the authoring side now. I think most of our usage of e.g. GROQ has now been replaced by convex b/c we use convex for actually storing/serving the authored data. @ian I think would know more here about the current state of affairs
Do you replicate data from Sanity to Convex?
Or is the Sanity studio modified to use convex directly?
We have some data only in our convex-cms project but it hasn’t yet replaced Stack content. I do think a CMS company would do well to build on top of us though. We recently upgraded sanity and it can emit types which helps btw
Okay, thanks. You use sanity type gen right.
I would be interested in a stack post on cms data in Convex DB
Same, would be great and very helpful.
Can you provide some info about convex-cms project?
It's currently just being internally used as an experiment. All of the content on https://convex.dev/can-do and https://convex.dev/templates can be edited in a basic form GUI we built which is behind an employee-only login, using Convex as the backend. At website build time the content is pulled, since it's all static. It would be easy to have the page itself dynamically change on edits, but that hasn't been necessary since the GUI can also render the same components while you're editing.
The core pieces are just some re-usable form builders and validators configured with zod and translated to client-side validation, argument validation, and schema definition.
The repo is private right now I believe, but we're considering making it more generic & making it a template others could use
Convex can do that
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Wow, this sounds amazing. I was looking for exactly something like that.
Do you use sanity typegen to emit the types??
Yes we recently started emitting the types for Sanity and it helps.
+1 on the CMS post/template etc. We have been slowly figuring out our CMS plans and been playing with Sanity. We aren't going for the CMS market but between our full privacy controls and extensive permissions and roles setup and other unique value props for teams, if we pulled off a full CMS design sooner than later it would be quite interesting to see how it does in the market. Its helpful and appreciated to get any examples to help speed us up 🙂
Working on it!