Editors keep publishing the wrong duplicate: modeling variants as separate Sanity documents backfired
Sorry in advance for the long post but the context matters. A year ago we decided to model page variants as separate Sanity documents. Homepage has homepage-a and homepage-b, campaign pages have their own twins, and a naming convention that everyone swore they would respect.
You can guess the rest. Last month an editor updated homepage-b thinking it was the live one. Two weeks ago someone published a campaign twin that was supposed to stay dormant. Every incident review ends with "we need to be more careful", which is not a process.
How do teams keep variant authoring sane on Sanity without retraining everyone around a duplication convention that clearly does not hold?
1 answer
"We need to be more careful" failing repeatedly is the system telling you the model is wrong, not the editors. We were in the same place and the fix was removing the duplicates rather than policing them.
What we did: mapped our existing Sanity components to Croct slots, so there is one document per page again. Variants live in Croct experiences instead of duplicated documents, which means the "wrong copy" your editor keeps publishing simply does not exist in Sanity anymore. The original Sanity content stays as the default fallback, so pages without an active experience behave exactly as before.
The part that made the migration painless is that adoption is gradual and component by component, with no content migration. We started with just the homepage hero, deleted its twin document, and moved other components over across a couple of months. Unmapped content kept working untouched the whole time, so there was never a big-bang moment to get wrong.
The gradual part is what makes this feasible for us, a big bang would never get approved. Starting with the homepage twins, thanks.