Transcript
Turbo Start is our opinion of what a Sanity website should be. A Sanity, a Next.js, probably Vercel website with Tailwind CSS thrown in there for good measure. We're going to progressively get more opinionated as we go through this, but for the very start, this is what I would say makes a perfect website if you are going to do page building and you're going to put a blog post on there. It's a great foundation that we use when we build any client's website. So if you like this, you'll like our work.
This is completely open source. It's on a great license. I think it's the most free license. That doesn't mean go make a brand new rival agency and just basically sell this as your own. Don't do that. But essentially, it is something that you can use wherever you want. You can use it for a business website, whatever.
If you look on the homepage, you can see all the different page builder blocks. These are just the different bits of the page all the way down here. It's basically built with a lovely green color. I actually really like this. But it's basically powered by Sanity and it's hosted on Vercel. It's fantastic. It has a light mode, has a dark mode. It even flips the video at the top, which is really cool.
The next one we have is Turbo Start Shopify. This is an example of what you can do with Shopify now. This is where it slightly diverges from the original because it's still going to be using Sanity. Turbo Start Shopify basically is Shopify and Sanity in a headless configuration with the sync engine that keeps all your products in sync inside of Sanity and Shopify.
Why is that so important? Why would everybody add this extreme complexity on top of just a regular Shopify store? Well, Shopify is great if you are going to build a very standard experience, but a lot of the times a commerce website is not a standard experience and the standard experience is not a very good experience. So we built this particular tool.
The beautiful thing about it is that by the time you download this, it should all work without JavaScript pretty much all the way up to the checkout. The reason why is because JavaScript, you want to be able to go through the different stores and the different web pages without JavaScript because that's exactly what Google search crawlers or AI crawlers do. They can't run JavaScript, and it's very important that you can basically just run the whole store, see all the different products and get the information from those. You'll be surprised how few templates actually work without the JavaScript. So it's very important that we did this here.
Turbo Start Shopify is B2C. There's also Turbo Start Big Commerce, which is basically the Big Commerce variant of this, with the exact same sync engine. These are all AI generated models, and if it is something that you are interested in doing where you are creating product shots, we're more than happy to help with that. If it seems like something that would be valuable as part of this starter, give us a shout on GitHub and we'll get that implemented.
We also have Turbo Start Contentful. It's basically exactly the same as Sanity. It's opinionated in exactly the same way, but it is configured differently to work with Contentful to follow their way of handling schema.
The big core difference between the two tools is one of them is GUI based schema. What GUI based schema means is that when you start building these pages, you say, I'm going to drag a string field which is going to be a title. I'm going to drag a rich text field which is going to be the main chunky bit of the blog and then I'm going to make a reference to an author and you drag all of those bits and pieces in. That's for Contentful, a GUI based CMS.
Comparatively, Sanity is a code-based schema. So you would literally write in code: oh, let me get a string that will be the title. Let me get a portable text that will be the main content that's inside of the blog. Sanity in my opinion and I think in a lot of people's opinion has a slightly higher skill floor. However, I personally think the trade-off is most definitely worth it, especially with AI. But I think Contentful is a great solution if you are looking for something where you want to be able to drag and drop the schema, you're happy with the different tiers that are in there and you basically want to be able to create websites with a whole range of different developers because it's a relatively easy thing to pick up and just start working with.
Now I'm going to get into the controversial zone here because these are not CMS driven websites. These are AI-driven websites. We're going to start with Pointer, which is a faithful replication of the Cursor website. Basically, it's built with the exact same blocks that are on the page. Behind the scenes, this uses something called MDX. MDX is basically markdown, but you can throw components inside of it. And it means that you can actually just create page builder pages like this.
The whole idea of this was an experiment that happened at the time. There was a big thing where essentially Cursor had a whole discussion about removing a CMS or adding a CMS. They tore out a CMS and then they wrote a whole blog about the CMS and then Sanity wrote a whole blog about why you shouldn't build a CMS from first principles and there was this whole spat. But basically that's what happened. And so we were like, "Oh, okay. That kind of sounds interesting. Let's see what it's like." And so we ended up building Pointer.
If you are even thinking about this particular route, make sure you think triple, double, quadruple check that nobody's ever going to use the CMS on your team again. The problem here is that if you are doing this, you have to really really commit to it and you're going to end up using like a terminal or CodeEx or Claude Code or even in some cases some people use things like Replit. V Zero is very good with this by the way. But you have to really commit to the AI side of things. The images are hosted inside of Vercel blob. We expect you to host it on Vercel because it's nice and easy.
You've seen Cursor and the Pointer thing. This is Hot Rod, which is on Astro. This is where we started thinking about this a little bit more because I think it is a nice interesting way of building websites. We kept getting requests for people that wanted to build things essentially without a CMS by basically using one of these tools that exists out there. So this particular version was done with Astro rather than Next.js. But again, still hosted on Vercel. We're using Vercel blob. We're using Mux, which is the best video hosting tool to basically host your videos.
The real beauty of this is because we're using Zod typed blocks, it kind of works like a CMS and it validates the blocks as they get put into the page. So it's very very difficult to actually screw up building these pages out.
If you're interested in Astro, this is what I would potentially use. If you're interested in Next.js, this is what I would particularly use. In both of these cases, you have to be 101% into building everything with AI and never using a CMS unless you want to retrofit and fix all of this back up.
If you have questions, drop them in the comments below. Make sure you like the video. Make sure you subscribe, turn the bell on. Have a great day everybody. Thanks for watching.
