portabletext VS slate

Sanity is a headless content based CMS. You write in a rich text editor, which creates portable text. So unlike markdown you wont have to convert header # items but you will have to serialize the portable text into something that Gatsby can understand. I won't dive too deeply into how you create a site using sanity.io there are some great guides for that using gatsby-source-sanity.

I get it. I get the tangibility of flat files. I get that it feels good to take your coding skills into your prose. But it's not the best way to work with content. Text editors with familiar affordances that produce typed rich text that can be queried and serialized into whatever you need are better. Where developers can define the data structures they need, and editors get easy-to-use tools to get their work done. Like what we're building at Sanity with Portable Text.

Portable text is a JSON-based open specification with a renewed approach to handling and presenting rich text in modern applications. Portable text is created to solve challenges in creating rich content and its presentation in various differing interfaces.

- it creates a layout based on rows and cells, so it support multi-column layout - each cell can contain a different "cell-plugin", - richt-text editor based on https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate is built in and comes with its own plugin system. It can do weight, italic, block-types, alignment and lists and can be extended as you want (even with elements storing data and interactive components) - you can create custom cell plugins based on a schema (or custom control ui) and a component that should be rendered - it stores an object tree that represent it, not html. It therefore can contain any react component, which is great if you want to allow your editors to add interactive components or components that you already built as part of the app - i carefully optimized for SSR and bundle size, so no editor ui is rendered nor loaded. editor ui is only loaded on the client if you disable readOnly. (lazy loading) - it mainly tested with nextjs, since i used it for content-heavy pages. - its not yet tested with react-server components, but it should actually work in read-only mode

Finally there's Slate and Lexical which are super powerful in terms of customizability and extensibility. They're great options for when the editing experience plays a major role in the product.

Slate, as per its documentation, is a completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. Therefore, it doesn't offer a feature-rich text editor but instead provides tools to build one. Let's create a component called Slate and see what the Slate editor looks like.

Link to Repo

Word of warning about Slate: I love the API and the design goals, but it appears to suffer from some fundamental issues. We were experiencing issues similar to this one and a team of multiple 10+ year experienced frontend devs couildn't figure out what was going on. I had to completely rip out a feature we had built with Slate and had to reimplement a new version from scratch with Lexical. So far we have no issues other than those inherent to rich text editing.

We're trying to choose between Lexical and Slate at work. Do you have any examples that would be similar to this? https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/blob/main/site/examp...

If you are going to customise a ton of functionalities and/or implement new functionality I suggest using SlateJS. If not, have a look at Sun editor.

You definitely need to give Slate (https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate) a try - the best editor framework I've used.

Slate: Looks very promising, but it's for React. (Someone has floated the idea of making it framework-agnostic, but the maintainers haven't committed to that goal yet.)