How to Integrate Front with Your Headless CMS

What is Front?

Front is a customer operations platform that combines shared inboxes, team collaboration, routing, analytics, and customer communication in one workspace. Teams use Front to handle email, SMS, social, chat, and other customer conversations without losing ownership or context. It's commonly used by support, success, logistics, marketplace, and operations teams that need shared visibility into high-volume customer communication.

Why integrate Front with a headless CMS?

When product details, help articles, policy updates, and launch notes live outside Front, support teams end up copying content between tabs. That creates small but expensive errors: an outdated refund policy in a reply, a missing release note in a launch conversation, or three teammates answering the same question with different wording.,Connecting Front to a headless CMS category system gives your team a single path from approved content to customer communication. With structured content in Sanity's Content Lake, you can send only the fields Front needs, such as title, summary, audience, product area, published URL, and internal handling notes. GROQ can join related content, like a product, feature flag, locale, or escalation owner, before the update ever reaches Front.,The alternative is usually manual copy and paste, scheduled exports, or a bot that scrapes rendered pages. That works for five articles. It breaks when you have 500 help articles, multiple locales, and support teams across time zones. Real-time webhooks and Functions let you trigger a Front update the moment content is published, changed, or unpublished, without running a separate polling job.

Architecture overview

A typical Front integration starts when an editor publishes or updates a document in Sanity Studio. A Sanity webhook fires on the publish event and sends the document ID to a webhook handler, or a Sanity Function runs the server-side sync directly. The handler uses @sanity/client and a GROQ query to fetch exactly the fields Front needs, for example article title, summary, slug, product name, locale, priority, and an internal note for agents. It then calls the Front API with a Bearer token, commonly POST https://api2.frontapp.com/channels/{channel_id}/messages, to create a message in a dedicated Front channel or team inbox. From there, Front rules can route the update, assign it to a team, add tags, or keep it visible in a shared inbox. The end user might be a support agent reading the update in Front, a success manager using it to answer an account question, or a customer receiving an approved response based on the synced content.

Common use cases

Step-by-step integration

1. 1

   Set up Front access

   Create or choose a Front account, then create an API token in Front's developer settings. Give the token access to the channel or inbox you want to post into, and copy the channel ID from Front's API or admin settings.

2. 2

   Create a dedicated Front channel or inbox

   Use a channel such as support-updates@yourcompany.com or an internal team inbox for content notifications. This keeps Sanity updates separate from customer conversations while still letting Front rules assign, tag, and archive them.

3. 3

   Model the content in Sanity Studio

   Create schema fields that support teams actually need: title, slug, summary, body, product reference, locale, audience, priority, published URL, and internalSupportNote. Avoid sending full rich text when a 2-sentence summary and link will do.

4. 4

   Create the sync trigger

   Add a Sanity webhook filtered to the document types you want, such as helpArticle, releaseNote, or policyUpdate. For server-side processing without separate infrastructure, use a Sanity Function triggered by content mutations.

5. 5

   Call the Front API

   In your handler, fetch the published document from the Content Lake with GROQ, format the message body, and call Front's channel messages endpoint with your API token. Store Front credentials in environment variables, not in Sanity documents.

6. 6

   Test routing and the agent experience

   Publish a draft article in a staging dataset, confirm a Front message appears in the right inbox, and test Front rules for tags, assignments, and archiving. Then test a real support workflow: can an agent understand the change in under 30 seconds?

Code example

import {createClient} from '@sanity/client';

const sanity = createClient({
  projectId: process.env.SANITY_PROJECT_ID!,
  dataset: process.env.SANITY_DATASET!,
  apiVersion: '2025-01-01',
  token: process.env.SANITY_READ_TOKEN,
  useCdn: false,
});

export default async function handler(req: any, res: any) {
  const id = String(req.body._id || '').replace(/^drafts\./, '');

  const article = await sanity.fetch(
    `*[_id == $id][0]{
      title,
      summary,
      "product": product->title,
      "url": "https://example.com/help/" + slug.current
    }`,
    {id}
  );

  if (!article) return res.status(404).json({ok: false});

  const frontRes = await fetch(
    `https://api2.frontapp.com/channels/${process.env.FRONT_CHANNEL_ID}/messages`,
    {
      method: 'POST',
      headers: {
        Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.FRONT_API_TOKEN}`,
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({
        sender_name: 'Sanity',
        to: [process.env.FRONT_UPDATE_RECIPIENT],
        subject: `Help article published: ${article.title}`,
        body: `<p>${article.summary}</p><p>Product: ${article.product || 'General'}</p><p><a href="${article.url}">Open article</a></p>`,
      }),
    }
  );

  if (!frontRes.ok) throw new Error(await frontRes.text());
  return res.status(200).json({ok: true});
}

How Sanity + Front works

CMS approaches to Front

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