What's New - March 2025

Written by Evelina Wahlström

Welcome to the monthly edition of "What's New"! I'm Evelina Wahlström, Technical Product Marketing Manager and recent addition to the Sanity team (just over a month in!). On the first Monday of each month, I'll guide you on the most exciting developments across the Sanity ecosystem.

As always, the engineers at Sanity HQ have been hard at work, improving our existing features and building exciting new capabilities. We're also debuting Code && Content, a new podcast series hosted by our very own Simeon.

For demos of Markdown shortcuts, Content Releases, and Live Content API features (now in Presentation, as well as how you can get this working in your framework of choice), check out the video below, where I was fortunate enough to get a preview as demonstrated in demos together with Christian Grøngaard, Cody Olsen, and Pedro Bonamin.

If you're more old school and prefer reading over YouTube—and/or want to catch everything we've been up to this month—let's get to it!

What we've been cooking 👨‍🍳

Content Releases is now available

As of this month, we took Content Releases out of private beta and launched it for projects on the Growth plan and up.

Speaking from my experience at a travel tech company where Cyber Week was our biggest sales period—Content Releases would have been a game-changer. You know the stress if you've ever managed Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns (with that non-working weekend awkwardly sitting between them). Now, you can work on both campaigns simultaneously without blocking the day-to-day content work, setting each to launch at its specific time without setting that dreaded 5 AM Monday alarm to swap content manually. Huge relief!

Content Releases is enabled by default in the latest Studio version for eligible plans. For a comprehensive overview, read our launch post No More 'DO NOT PUBLISH': Introducing Content Releases. But in short, Content Releases enable teams to:

• Group multiple content changes into coordinated releases
• Publish and unpublish content in coordinated releases
• Preview and toggle stacked and individual releases
• Schedule precise publishing times or mark them as "ASAP" or "undecided"
• Automate and integrate release logic through APIs
• Validate content and references automatically
• Roll back changes instantly if needed (requires Enterprise plan)

In addition to the launch post, I sat down with Pedro to talk about the release (pun intended) of Content Releases. He walks through a demo he's built so you can better understand the concepts of stacked releases and perspectives and how, as explained above, your editing life should be smoother, thanks to it. For full video, watch here.

Visual Editing is now powered by the Live Content API

The Presentation tool now uses the Live Content API to drive the Live Mode experience in integrations like @sanity/react-loader, @sanity/svelte-loader, @nuxtjs/sanity, and @sanity/core-loader.

Here's how this makes a real difference:

• Eliminates the need for polling every two seconds
• Only refetches queries when it's actually needed
• Reduces memory usage and network load
• Improves main thread performance

The new architecture is particularly valuable for complex queries where client-side prediction of changes would be impractical.

When I sat down with Cody to discuss this feature, he walked me through its evolution from concept to current implementation. The performance gains are genuinely impressive. After seeing them in action and how they improve the developer experience, I think you'll be as excited as we both were when discussing this. For the full video, watch here.

Live Content API is now available in the framework you like!

Beyond Next.js, Cody and the team have created example implementations for frameworks like Astro and Vue. During our chat, he showcased these examples with a slick Apple Vision Pro visualization that brings the concept to life. Even if the examples don't cover your specific framework, the underlying principles can be adapted to virtually any modern framework.

Want to implement Live Content in your projects? This demo repository includes code examples to get you started, and you can find the complete repository of framework examples. If you have questions or ideas about the API, join the conversation in our #live-by-default channel in the community, where the team is eager to help you succeed. For full video, watch here.

Portable Text Editor enhancements

We're continuously improving our Markdown shortcuts to the Portable Text Editor, making rich text formatting more intuitive and efficient. Now, you can seamlessly switch between heading styles and text formatting without interrupting your writing flow. For example, you can quickly transform text into different heading levels within the editor with Markdown syntax. Some of the most useful ones are listed below:

• Headings 1-3
  • # for H1
  • ## for H2
  • ### for H3
• **text** or __text__ for bold (maps to 'strong' decorator)
• *text* or _text_ for italic (maps to 'em' decorator)
• Lists:
  • - & space will create an unordered bullet point list, which is how this list was created!
  • 1. & space will create an ordered list.
• > + space will create a quote.

Want to see these Markdown shortcuts in action? I had a great chat with Christian, who gave me all the tips and tricks for using them effectively. He even dropped some hints about exciting new shortcuts coming soon—not to be missed! For full video, watch here.

AI Assist Improvements

We've enhanced our AI Assist capabilities with several new features.

Translation style guide

You can now configure a style guide for translations, ensuring consistent tone and handling of specific terms: