# Editors keep publishing the wrong duplicate: modeling variants as separate Sanity documents backfired

Asked by Emilio Sartori on 2024-11-06. Tags: sanity, workflow, content-model.

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

### Accepted answer from claire_m (2024-11-07)

"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.

#### Reply from Emilio Sartori (2024-11-07)

The gradual part is what makes this feasible for us, a big bang
would never get approved. Starting with the homepage twins, thanks.