Comments

Use document comments to drive collaborative authoring, editing, and reviewing of your content without leaving the studio.

Use document comments to drive collaborative authoring, editing, and reviewing of your content without leaving the studio.

About comments

Add comments to documents, reply in threads, and mention users.

As your content grows, so does your editorial team. Projects become more complex, and multiple authors collaborate on the same content across many documents. It’s hard to scale collaboration while keeping it effective and pleasant: online meetings to stay aligned, long threads in the chat, not to mention time zone differences.

How can you reduce friction while keeping the positive sides of working together, regardless of the collaborators’ location and time of the day?

Sanity Studio ships with a commenting feature currently in beta release. Authors and editors can collaborate on a document and coordinate their efforts by adding and replying to comments. They can mention other users, provide feedback, and align on upcoming tasks—asynchronously and without jumping on a “quick call” (they’re never quick.)

Collaborative commenting

In the current beta release, you can use comments to make sure everyone is on the same page while working on a document.

You can:

• Create, edit, and delete your comments.
• Read and reply to your comments, as well as to comments from other users.
• Create a comment thread similar to Slack threads. Comment replies in the thread trigger email notifications to the author of the parent comment.
• Mention other users, as well as yourself. Mentioned users receive an email notification about the comment so that they can act on it, without the risk of communication getting lost in the cracks.
• Resolve and reopen a comment to mark it as done or resume the discussion.
• React to comments with an emoji for quick expressions of sentiment.

Workflows

You can create, review, finalize, and publish documents without leaving Sanity Studio. This is an example of a simple review workflow using comments:

1. You can share your draft with the relevant stakeholders when it’s ready.
2. Participants can comment asynchronously to leave feedback, suggestions, and remarks.
3. You can follow up on their comments in the same way to mention stakeholders, reply, and discuss.
4. After completing the review, you can finalize the draft to polish your content and make it shine.
5. When your document is ready for the world to view, publish it.

Comments fit in seamlessly in a content creation and publication process.

Access to comments

Comments inherit the same permissions as the document they belong to. Document permissions are set at the project level. This affects the users’ ability to access them:

• All users who have access to the document can also view the comments:
  • If they have read-only permission, they can view comments and replies on the document but can’t reply or create new comments.
  • If they have read and write permissions, they can also create, edit, reply to, and delete comments and replies, as well as mention users.
• Users with no access to the document cannot view the corresponding comments.
• Users with partial access to a document—they can only access some but not all the input fields of the document—can view only the comments related to the fields they can access.

Comment lifecycle

Whether you are the author of a comment, and therefore the owner, or if you reply to it as a commenter, affects the actions that you can perform:

Whether you create or reply to a comment, you can go through different workflows.

More focus, less clutter

The current beta functionality enables setting in place simple workflows to structure content reviews, requests for feedback, and similar collaborative actions. This enables editorial teams to carry out creation, review, update, and publication steps within Sanity Studio. No more copying and pasting content to a different tool to share the document and collect feedback. No more file-named version control such as “World_domination_PoC_edited”, “World_domination_PoC_commented”, “World_domination_PoC_final_GOOD”, “World_domination_PoC_final_GOOD_USETHIS”.

Less clutter means diminishing the risk of errors and the unwanted extra noise from switching contexts often before a piece of content is ready for publication. Authors and editors can manage the process within one tool, which contributes to reducing their cognitive load and increasing their focus.

Known limitations

• Comments in Sanity Studio are available for Sanity projects on the Growth plan and higher.
• While in beta, comments work with an opt-in mechanism. To enable comments:
  • Update your Studio instance to the latest version.
  • Update your Studio configuration file.
• While in beta, a created comment counts as a document unit in the context of the number of documents included in your subscription plan.
• While in beta, you can add a comment to an input field in a document, and the comment refers to all the content inside the field. It’s not yet possible to select some text inside a field and create a comment that only targets the inline selection.
• Creating a new comment enables email notifications by default. While in beta, it’s not possible to opt out.