Sanity CMS vs WordPress: Content modeling and extensions

How a CMS handles content is a big deal for businesses. It’s about organizing data in a way that works for your needs whether you’re running a blog, managing e-commerce, or creating a complex platform. In context of Sanity vs WordPress, both platforms offer tools to model content, but they take very different approaches.

Sanity’s schema-driven modeling

Sanity uses schemas to define your content. Think of schemas as detailed blueprints for your data. For example, you can create a schema for “Blog Posts” with fields for the title, date, and author, and another for “Authors” with fields for name, photo, and bio. You can also link these schemas, so each post automatically connects to the right author.

Example
Let’s say you run an online magazine. You could create schemas for:

• Articles: Fields for headline, publication date, and body text.
• Categories: Fields for category name and description.
• Authors: Fields for the writer’s name, profile picture, and bio.

By linking these schemas, you ensure every article shows the right author and fits into the correct category.

Sanity’s Content Lake stores all this data in a central hub. It’s built to handle large volumes and sync updates across platforms. If your magazine has a mobile app, Sanity ensures that a change made in one place appears everywhere.

While the schema-first approach enforces consistency, updates like renaming fields or adding new ones still require coordination to prevent disruption, which is something shared by all CMSs, including WordPress.

WordPress Custom Post Types and ACF

WordPress offers Custom Post Types (CPTs) to go beyond default posts and pages. For instance, you could create a “Projects” post type for a portfolio, with fields like “Project Name,” “Client Name,” and “Completion Date.”

Example
Imagine a real estate company. You can use CPTs to create:

• Properties: A custom post type for listings.
• Fields for Properties (via ACF): Add details like price, location, square footage, and images.

Here’s where Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) come in. ACF lets you create extra fields for any content type, making it easy to add specific data. For example:

• A “Price” field for a property listing.
• A “Video Link” field for a project portfolio.

WordPress makes it simple to manage these fields directly from the admin dashboard, so even team members without technical skills can update listings or pages.