✶ Sanity CMS in Practice

Most CMS tutorials focus on "how to use the software"—click here, configure that. This course focuses on real-world patterns and use cases to build production systems and apps.

You'll learn how to model content that scales, build intuitive editing experiences for content teams, and integrate it all into a frontend. By the end, you'll have the foundation to build content systems for blogs, marketing sites, portfolios, or anything else that needs structured content—and you'll know how to make them a pleasure for editors to use.

This isn't a beginner's introduction to web development. You should be comfortable with JavaScript/TypeScript, React, and the basics of how web apps work. We'll move quickly through setup so we can spend time on the parts that actually matter in production.

What you'll learn

Module 1: Data Modeling & the Studio

The foundation. You'll build a content model from scratch, learning how Sanity thinks about documents, fields, and relationships. We'll cover schemas, slugs, images, rich text, and block content—the building blocks of any Sanity project. You'll also learn how to structure your Studio so it's intuitive and easily operated by content editors, not just developers.

Module 2: Querying & Integration

Connecting your CMS to a frontend. You'll learn GROQ (Sanity's query language), fetch content in Next.js, handle references and filtering, and optimize images for the web.

Module 3: Advanced Patterns

Real-world complexity. We'll cover pagination for large content sets, integrating third-party data (like events from Luma), and patterns for scaling your content infrastructure as projects grow.

What you'll build

A personal site with articles, projects, and events—a realistic foundation you can extend for your own work. Each content type teaches specific concepts: articles cover rich text and slugs, projects cover images and relationships, events cover external data integration.

Who this is for

Developers who learn by building. You might be a frontend developer adding CMS skills, a freelancer who needs to ship client sites faster, or someone evaluating Sanity for a larger project. If you want to understand how Sanity actually works—not just copy-paste from docs—this course is for you.

Your instructor

This course is taught by Conor Davidson, a developer and designer who has built content platforms for clients including the Brooklyn Museum, Stripe, Hinge, Nike, and The Light Phone. His work spans software and physical products, with a focus on polished user experiences, full-stack systems that hold up in production, and elegant solutions that solve the problem at hand.

Format

Three modules, each designed for a focused session. The course includes written materials you can reference during and after, plus a starter repo with checkpoints so you can catch up if you fall behind.

If you're taking this course in person at Index Space, you'll have live instruction and hands-on support. If you're working through it online, everything you need is in the materials.