Review Changes: Make it happen together

Written by Alyssa Blake Nader

When authoring web content people often don't start in their CMS. They start elsewhere. Like Google Docs or similar. The main reason for this, we think, is that you can't see what people have done so you can't really work together.

Today we're very proud to release Review Changes. You now get full document revision history right inside the Sanity Studio. Down to click and keystroke, you can see who contributed what to any version of a document and roll back a single field. All without needing to teach your marketing team Git…

Review Changes is the latest in a series of improvements we have made to the authoring experience in the Sanity Studio. Previews, workflows, and most recently the release of Presence, making it possible to find and join your teammates editing and revising structured content. With Review Changes, Sanity is now clearly the best place to collaborate on content and then flow it over APIs as structured data.

A hotspot and crop modal with Review Changes activated showing that Even changed the hotspot area

Review anything

You can make it your own. The ability to build your own input components for your own data structures sets Sanity apart. We made sure you can now also make your own custom diff components. That means you can replace the built-in diffs with your own, customized for your data.

A custom diff component for the Google Maps plugin showing two locations on a map with an arrow between them

A new API for changes

Review Changes not only brings editorial control that is unparalleled in the content space, it also introduces this control on the API-level. With the new open diff-format for structured documents, Mendoza, you can query a document’s transaction history and efficiently stream it to clients for processing.

The new Mendoza patches will be part of the existing History API under a new key called effects. You can use the open-source mendoza-js to parse these patches in your application.

In closing

Tracking changes in documents isn’t exactly new. Word has been at it since version 3.0 for DOS, released in 1986. Yet Sanity isn’t an authoring system for flat files that you finish and then print off and mail to someone.

Sanity is all about APIs, processes, and structured content. Sanity is a content platform that should feel like a shared workplace for editors and as a feature-rich database to developers. With the release of Review Changes and Presence, Sanity is now a fully auditable database that lets your organization work with trust and transparency in real-time to unlock content velocity and get your products shipped.

We can't wait to see what you do with it.