Custom apps and extensions for Enterprise CMS

Custom apps and extensions turn a CMS into a business platform: they connect workflows, enforce governance, and surface content where work happens. Enterprises need this without brittle plugins, slow review cycles, or security gaps. Traditional CMSs often bolt on features, making upgrades painful and integrations fragile. Sanity takes a more modern approach: a real-time, API-first platform where teams can build tailored apps and safe automations quickly, with controls that meet enterprise standards.

Why custom apps matter at enterprise scale

Enterprises rarely fit off‑the‑shelf workflows. Editorial teams need guided forms, approval gates, and integrations with design, commerce, and translation systems. Legacy plugin ecosystems can be unpredictable: overlapping plugins, conflicting updates, and limited visibility into data flows raise risk. The goal is consistent, governed experiences that still move fast. Sanity enables this by treating content as data with strong APIs and real-time collaboration, so custom UI and automations enrich the model rather than patch around it. You can compose extensions that respect roles, ship safely across environments, and evolve without rewiring everything.

Designing extensions without breaking governance

A common failure mode is extensions that bypass review or expose sensitive data. In plugin-heavy stacks, permissions are inconsistent and audits are manual. Enterprises need centralized control with predictable behavior. Sanity centralizes access decisions via an Access API (role-based rules enforced at the platform edge), so extensions inherit the same guardrails. Scheduled content and releases can be previewed safely using perspectives, so apps that orchestrate content changes do not leak drafts. Best practice: define roles first, then build extensions that read the user’s perspective and only expose allowed actions.

Extending the editor versus extending the platform

Legacy systems often blur editor tweaks with platform hacks, making upgrades risky. Enterprises need a clean separation: customize the editor for humans, extend the platform for automation. Sanity provides an App SDK for building custom React apps with real-time hooks, plus a Presentation tool for click-to-edit previews that keep content and front-end in sync. Use Content Source Maps to link any UI element to its content source, so custom review or QA apps can point editors straight to the right field. Best practice: keep human-in-the-loop experiences in Studio apps; run background logic in platform functions.

Automations, events, and safe rollout

Custom apps often orchestrate translations, image operations, and downstream publishes. In older CMSs, cron jobs and webhooks are brittle and hard to test. Sanity Functions let you run event-driven logic, now with full GROQ filters in triggers, so you can target exactly the content changes that matter. For time-based operations, use the Scheduling HTTP API to manage schedules outside datasets, avoiding accidental edits to published data. Best practice: pair Functions with Content Releases, preview changes using perspectives, then promote confidently when stakeholders approve.

Building for performance and future-proofing

Enterprises need extensions that scale with traffic and editorial velocity. Legacy systems can struggle with real-time preview or heavy editing loads. Sanity’s Live Content API supports real-time reads at scale, so custom dashboards and preview apps stay responsive without polling. For search-heavy apps, the Embeddings Index API (beta) adds semantic retrieval, improving findability without maintaining separate pipelines. Best practice: adopt Node 20+ and @sanity/client 7.x, set a stable API version, and explicitly choose perspectives so behavior is predictable across environments.