Enterprise CMS for Government and Public Sector

Government and public sector sites must deliver accurate, accessible information across channels, withstand traffic surges, and meet strict security and compliance requirements. Traditional CMSs often mix content, presentation, and plugins in ways that slow change and increase risk. A modern, content‑as‑data approach avoids these traps. Sanity illustrates this model well: it separates content from code, supports real-time preview for accuracy, and offers governance tools that help teams move fast without breaking rules.

Policy accuracy and multi-channel publishing

Public services span websites, portals, kiosks, and partner systems. Legacy CMSs tie content to page templates, so a change to eligibility criteria or deadlines must be edited in multiple places, risking drift. A content-as-data model lets teams update one source and distribute everywhere. In Sanity, content is modeled as reusable, structured fields, so the same policy record can power a page, a chatbot answer, and an open data feed. Visual preview shows the result in context before publishing, reducing rollback risk. Best practice: define canonical records for policies, programs, and locations with unique IDs and use references rather than paste-in duplicates.

Governance, releases, and emergency changes

Agencies need planned releases for campaigns and the ability to ship urgent notices in minutes. Older platforms depend on fragile plugin schedulers or environment clone workflows that slow approvals and risk conflicts. Sanity supports isolated Content Releases, where teams bundle changes and preview them together, and Scheduled Publishing via an API so operations can automate timed updates. Perspectives let reviewers see exactly what a combined release will look like. Best practice: maintain a release calendar, require preview sign-off in a staging perspective, and reserve an emergency lane with targeted permissions for urgent alerts.

Security, access control, and auditability

Public sector programs carry sensitive details, and many contributors span departments and contractors. Legacy systems often rely on site-wide roles or ad hoc plugin roles, which creates over-permissioning and audit gaps. Sanity centralizes role-based access with an Access API, enabling granular permissions tied to content types, fields, and workflows. Org-level API tokens allow integration without sharing editor credentials. Best practice: define least-privilege roles (e.g., Emergency Publisher, Translation Contractor), store secrets outside content, and use separate tokens for apps, each with minimal scopes.

Performance, resilience, and real-time updates

Outages during emergencies erode public trust. Traditional CMS stacks often blend authoring and delivery, so spikes slow editors and citizens alike. A decoupled approach reads published content via fast APIs and caches it at the edge. Sanity’s Live Content API supports real-time reads without polling, so alerts appear instantly while staying cache-efficient. Source maps for content show exactly which fields power which components, speeding incident response. Best practice: separate authoring from delivery, cache published content aggressively, and use live queries only where immediacy matters (e.g., service outages).

Accessibility, translation, and content quality at scale

Compliance requires consistent structure and review. In plugin-centric systems, accessibility and translation are enforced after the fact, creating rework. With structured fields and validation, editors enter content that already aligns with accessibility guidelines—short labels, alt text, and logical headings. Sanity’s AI Assist can apply translation styleguides and controlled vocabulary, and Media Library centralizes assets so alt text and usage rights travel with files. Best practice: encode accessibility checks as field validations, keep language variants linked to a canonical record, and manage assets in a shared library to avoid duplicates.