ApostropheCMS VS payload

If you are not familiar with that technology, ApostropheCMS is an open-source website builder and CMS developed with modern technologies such as Vue.js and Node.js. It enables editors to effortlessly create and manage content through an intuitive UI, while developers have the ability to customize the admin UI by overriding existing Vue.js components and extending it with new menus and field types. At the same time, you keep the ability to use your technologies of choice on the front end. Learn more in the documentation.

Apostrophe's CTO, Tom Boutell, recently presented a talk at Philly Tech Week to share his experience using the OpenAI API to integrate AI into Apostrophe. If you are not familiar with this tool, Apostrophe is an open-source CMS built on modern technologies like Node.js and Vue.js that can operate as a traditional CMS, headless CMS, and website builder.

ApostropheCMS allows multiple content contributors and editors to work on documents across multiple sites. Keeping track of when changes were made to a document and who made those changes is critical. The enterprise edition of ApostropheCMS has an important new tool for managing the content pipeline. The Document Versions tool facilitates the use and management of multiple versions of a document (page).

Integrate your technology, including Express, MongoDB, npm, Vue.js, and Node.js, with flexible and native modules content APIs. In addition, Apostrophe provides a single dashboard for every operation so that you will never lack in searching for the perfect tool for your websites. You can also integrate with Jamstack to create robust custom solutions. Currently, it has 3.9k stars on GitHub.

As someone who dabbled in PHP but is mostly a self-taught JS hobbyist dev, I have been using and loving Directus (https://directus.io) since around the time they switched to Node. Development velocity is exceptional with new features released every couple of weeks and bugfixes/enhancements even more frequent, the community and core team is fantastic, and I like the fact that if I ever decide to switch to another CMS for some reason, there's no real import/export process, I just delete the directus_tables in my database, and done.

Pocketbase (https://pocketbase.io/) piqued my interest after seeing it here and on ProductHunt, but I don't think it would be the right call for a client before it hits a stable release.

I also very much enjoyed OctoberCMS (although it has its quirks), but there was a fairly acrimonious split in the community there, and OctoberCMS is no longer open source, and I haven't used the fork (WinterCMS: https://wintercms.com/)

I enjoyed using Apostrophe (https://apostrophecms.com/) for a while, but ultimately I felt like I was doing a lot of stuff in a way that didn't come naturally to me, and although Mongo seems a logical choice when you look at Apostrophe's page model, it worried me a bit that the data would not be easy to move if I ever wanted to.

Check https://apostrophecms.com/.

In this most recent release, in addition to batch operations, and the import / export modules, we have also rolled out an update to the open-graph module for A3, as well as shared additions, fixes, and changes. These updates, and all product related notes can be found on Github Discussions. To see all that is currently in the works or planned for Apostrophe, check out our product roadmap.

Despite being a relatively newer player, Payload's GitHub repository has accumulated 18.8k stars and 1.1K forks as of April 2024, reflecting its growing community. The project has also secured $5.6 million in funding, positioning it for continued growth and innovation.

My most recent project launched in January. NextJS 14 client integrated with PayloadCMS (http://payloadcms.com) for the back-end. I love both technologies in theory, but they're both going through a renaissance period and "bleeding edge" doesn't even begin to describe it.

If I'm just building a client app, create-react-app is still my go to.

Before now, I'd been building on WordPress for 10+ years for anything client-administered. Planning on using Payload from here on out.

Payload CMS: The Customization Insurgent

Payload is free, you can self host it without paying a one time fee or a SaaS fee for its use, it even says so at the bottom of the homepage

James, the co-founder of Payload, a headless CMS with MongoDB support, shared his insights on the drawbacks and limitations of using a headless CMS in the context of web development. He challenged the promises often made about headless CMS, such as separation of concerns and ease of content migration, revealing that these claims often don't align with the reality faced by developers and clients. James is considering integrating Payload directly with Next.js to overcome these limitations and offer a better developer experience, including out-of-the-box features and simpler deployments. Should Payload move to Next.js?

Hey HN, Dan here from Payload (YC S22), an open-source headless CMS that closes the gap between CMS and traditional app frameworks. We’re excited to announce Payload 2.0!

https://github.com/payloadcms/payload

If you’ve not heard of Payload you’re probably wondering why the world needs another CMS. Payload connects to your database and runs without the vendor lock-in and black box of SaaS based CMS solutions, and it’s far more extensible than off-the-shelf SaaS options. Enterprises in specific have been finding value in this control, and they’re using Payload to power content infrastructure that simply isn’t possible through integrating with SaaS webhooks alone.

Today’s announcement is all about features that strike at two neglected areas in the world of CMS. The first is application framework level control over your database that you’d expect with tools like Ruby on Rails or Laravel and the second area is making content editors effective by seeing their edits in realtime.

Here are the highlights on what we’ve been working on:

*Postgres Support*—in the same week we launched about two years ago,people asked for Postgres support. It brings me pure cathartic joy to finally give this to our community. To be fair, MongoDB has been a perfect solution for our architecture and it’s still recommended. But with a new adapter pattern for databases, you can stand your Payload project up on Postgres and run the same functionality as you can with MongoDB now. The crazy part is that we didn’t compromise on how nesting complex fields works. We could have taken the “easy” road and wrote things to JSON, but we leaned fully into the relational way and built the right tables and native column types for fields all the way throughout.

*Database Migrations*—maintaining a production app while deploying schema changes is something you come to expect from ORMs and backend frameworks, but rarely CMS. Payload 2.0 delivers full, first-party migration support all in TypeScript. We took a lot of care on the developer experience here so that when working with Postgres, thanks to our friends at Drizzle, we generate the migration files in TS that add the tables and fields for you. If you have to manipulate data before or after, you have a clear way forward now.

*Database Transactions*—when a request involves multiple inserts, updates or deletes to the database, you need control to rollback all changes when one part fails. The built-in Payload CRUD operations do this now for you and your custom hooks and other code can too.

*Live Preview*—the ability to quickly draft content and see it in context of a website is a literal game changer. We have taken the best dev experience of any headless CMS and given the editors a reason to demand Payload over the others.

*Lexical Richtext Editor*—our original Slate based editor has seen some great features added, like storing related documents directly in the JSON, uploads and any customizations. Unfortunately Slate leaves a lot to be desired on how to extend it, especially compared to Lexical. In a few short weeks we’ve built up a new editor experience inspired by Medium and Notion. Now type “/” and have embedded relationships, uploads, and custom blocks popping right up to be dropped in. Then drag and drop them to reorder your content. If you still want Slate, we continue to support that too.

We’re not compromising on editor experience. This is how we’re bringing the “head” to the headless CMS.

Building critical applications on top of a CMS may sound like blasphemy but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Thanks for reading! I look forward to hearing what you think.