Introducing Content Previews in Vyuh

Today, we’re excited to introduce Content Previews, a powerful new feature in the Vyuh Framework that revolutionizes how developers work with content and layouts in Flutter + Sanity.io applications.

The Challenge of Content Development

When building content-driven applications, developers often face a common challenge: testing layouts without having actual content in their CMS. This typically leads to either creating temporary content in Sanity.io (which needs cleanup later) or hardcoding sample data (which might not represent real-world scenarios).

Enter Content Previews

Content Previews in Vyuh solves this challenge elegantly. It allows developers to:

Define preview data directly in their content types and layouts
Test different content variations without touching the CMS
Maintain type safety throughout the development process
Rapidly iterate on layout designs

Here’s a simple example of how it works:

static final typeDescriptor = TypeDescriptor(
  schemaType: 'vyuh.card',
  title: 'Card',
  fromJson: Card.fromJson,
  preview: () => Card(
    title: 'Sample Card Title',
    description: 'A preview description for development',
    imageUrl: Uri.parse('https://picsum.photos/300/200'),
  ),
);

The Content Playground

Along with Content Previews, we’re introducing the Content Playground - an interactive development environment where you can:

Browse all available content types in your application
Test different layout variations in real-time
Validate content structure and visual designs
Identify which features provide specific layouts

The playground is accessible through the Developer Tools section of your Vyuh application, making it easy to experiment and validate your content structure during development.

Benefits for Teams

Content Previews brings several benefits to development teams:

Faster Development: No need to switch between your IDE and CMS during layout development
Better Collaboration: Designers and developers can work together more effectively
Improved Testing: Easy to test edge cases and different content variations
Documentation: Preview examples serve as living documentation

Getting Started

To start using Content Previews, update to the latest version of Vyuh Framework. The feature is available out of the box, and you can start adding preview data to your content types and layouts immediately.

Check out our documentation for detailed information about implementing and using Content Previews in your projects.