Conceptually, there are two types of content on the site: community content such as guides, decks, users, stories, artworks and so on, and site- or game-related content like cards, books, release notes, donations, etc.
The latter is only available to administrators (official staff) to minimize risks and impact on the site. Editors (Discord moderators and other trusted community contributors) can access and edit all the community content.
In Sanity, documents can either be drafts or published. To preview a newly created document or a content update before it gets published, one can use the content preview mode.
At the top of the form, you should see two tabs: one called “Editor” (where the form is) and one called “Preview” which you can use to preview the content before publishing it.
Switching to that “Preview” tab will open the official site in an iframe, but with the preview mode enabled. This works by setting a small cookie in your browser to know that you have enabled the preview mode. A banner at the bottom of the page should make that clear as well, as well as offer you a way to turn off the preview mode.
Alternatively, look at the top right corner of the page for 3 little dots. Clicking it should open a dropdown menu with an “Open preview” link (ctrl + alt + o).
In that mode, every request made to the CMS will bypass cache and query draft versions, so you will see unpublished content. You can safely browse the website or refresh the page — the preview mode will remain active for an hour or until the next website deployment (or until you remove it).
Note
Tests can also be run with preview data. Unit tests need the SANITY_PREVIEW_TOKEN environment variable (so they fetch the preview data during the setup), while end-to-end tests need the SANITY_STUDIO_PREVIEW_TOKEN environment variable (so they enable the preview mode before running).
When a document gets published in the CMS, the cache for relevant pages gets invalidated (see Next.js docs). For instance, updating a guide document causes the page for the guide to be updated almost immediately (or within a few seconds). Adding a new story causes this story to be visible immediately. And so on.
When updating card documents however, the site will need to be rebuilt, because cards are used all over the site, and therefore require an entire rebuild to be accurate everywhere. This can be done by pushing some code to the main branch or redeploying via the interface on Vercel (or asking Kitty).
If necessary, a specific path can be revalidated at any time via the bin/revalidate.js script or the dedicated GitHub Workflow that can be triggered manually (and uses the same Node script under the hood).
Sanity is surprisingly resilient to mistakes. There are 3 levels of defense for undoing mistakes:
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If the undesired content update has not been published yet, click on the arrow at the bottom right of the document, then “Discard changes”. This will discard unpublished changes, effectively restoring the form to the currently published version.
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If the undesired content update has been published, click the “Current version” at the top right of the document, then find the previous “Published” version, click it, then click “Restore” at the bottom of the screen. This will essentially roll back the document to that specific version.
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If the undesired content update is irreversible, the whole database is backed up every 3 days, so it can be restored to the latest stable version. That’s a little more complicated, but that’s a good way to recover from large mistakes.
To export the cards data as a JSON file, run the following command (after having installed Node modules):
npm run export-cards