Introducing the new Dashboard

Written by Even Westvang

With the launch of sanity.io/create we wanted to introduce developers to their new stack with a feed of guides, tutorials, and videos. But where would we put this feed? This posed another challenge that we had to solve first. So we did. And it's called Dashboard. It has widgets that you can install, configure, and make yourself.

Sanity Studio is a Single Page Application built with React that connects to our hosted real-time APIs. Most people who start using Sanity get familiar with the Desk tool, where you have your documents and fields, configured by JavaScript schemas. People have been using the command sanity init plugin to bootstrap custom tools that live alongside the desk too. The dashboard is just another tool.

You can install the Dashboard by running sanity install @sanity/dashboard in your project folder. As with structure builder, you can inject a dashboard config to control the size and layout of the widgets, as well as any configuration they may have. Widgets are React-components that you can build locally in a project, or install from npm with the Sanity CLI. We made a selection of example widgets that you can modify or pick apart to build your own.

A configurable dashboard is useful for building custom workflows shaving minutes of useless toil off of people’s workdays through ruthless optimization. But hey, it also paves the way for fun stuff! Like a randomized cats widget. We’re super curious to see what you will use it for. Do let us know on slack.sanity.io in #i-made-this!