Content Modeling Best Practices
Principles for designing structured content that's flexible, reusable, and maintainable. These concepts apply to any headless CMS but include Sanity-specific implementation notes.
When to Apply
Reference these guidelines when:
- Starting a new project and designing the content model
- Evaluating whether content should be structured or free-form
- Deciding between references and embedded content
- Planning for multi-channel content delivery
- Refactoring existing content structures
Core Principles
- Content is data, not pages — Structure content for meaning, not presentation
- Single source of truth — Avoid content duplication
- Future-proof — Design for channels that don't exist yet
- Editor-centric — Optimize for the people creating content
References
Start with the reference that matches the modeling decision in front of you, instead of loading every topic at once. See references/ for detailed guidance on specific topics:
references/separation-of-concerns.md— Separating content from presentationreferences/reference-vs-embedding.md— When to use references vs embedded objectsreferences/content-reuse.md— Content reuse patterns and the reuse spectrumreferences/taxonomy-classification.md— Flat, hierarchical, and faceted classification
