payload VS public-demo

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.

If you're open to other headless CMS, I'd really recommend Payload. You can get a blog content structure setup SUPER easily and it is all code based and extensible. You can poke around this demo to get a feel for it and see if it's something that interests you https://demo.payloadcms.com/

Update your own Payload project or head on over to the public demo and give it a shot.

Hey HN, my name is James and I founded Payload (https://payloadcms.com/) with two close colleagues, Dan and Elliot. We're a dev-first headless CMS [1] that's half app framework and half CMS. We're closing the gap between the two.

Imagine you're going to build a new SaaS app. Would you think of building it on a headless CMS? Probably not. To devs, "content management system" is usually a swear word. If a team of engineers gets assigned a CMS project, it's less than thrilling. Engineers want to avoid roadblocks, write code, and build things they're proud of—but existing CMS get in the way of that left and right.

Rather, you'd build your backend on an app framework like Django, Laravel, etc—and for good reason. Ownership over the backend, better access control, customizable auth patterns, etc. Typically, headless CMS are super limiting; you'll end up fighting the platform more than having it help. But, with app frameworks, you're often left to roll your own admin UI, and that takes time. Not to mention building CRUD UI gets old quick after you do it a few times. That’s where a headless CMS could shine, because they instantly give you admin UI that non-technical teams can use to manage digital products. That saves a ton of UI dev time but without an extensible API, headless CMS are far too limiting.

Payload provides the best of both ends—a powerful and extensible API and a fully customizable admin UI out-of-the-box. All with a developer experience that we obsessed over.

Typical CMS’s squabble over winning the minds of marketers, but we know that marketing teams pretty much need table stakes when it comes to CMS. Log in, create a draft, preview the draft, publish the content. Go back and update some pages. Define editor roles and localize content. There's no point in competing with that noisy market, so we're undercutting it wholesale and treating developers as first-class citizens.

It uses your own Express server, so you can open up your own endpoints alongside of what Payload does, and you can extend just about every single thing that Payload does all in TypeScript. It's MIT and open-source, fully self-hosted, comes with GraphQL and REST APIs, and completely customizable.

We realized the need for Payload while we were building the corporate website for Klarna. The Klarna engineers we were working with were among the best in the world, and while they evaluated headless CMS options, they saw restrictions in how all of the normal contenders "black-box" away the API. They wanted to build their CMS, deploy it on their own infrastructure, and truly "own" their CMS. They fell back to using WordPress. When that happened, Klarna inadvertently shined a spotlight on the CMS market and pointed out a significant void in proper code-based, developer-first CMS. There was no one to give them the DX they needed. So we built Payload.

Our business model is based on two things:

1. Enterprise features like SSO, audit logs, publication workflows, and translation workflows. Of course, as Payload is open-source, you can build these functions yourself, but enterprises are opting to pay for our official functionality and SLAs rather than rolling it themselves.

2. Cloud hosting. Now that Payload 1.0 is released and ready for production after more than two years of development and dogfooding, we've shifted focus to building a deployment platform for Payload that will deliver permanent file storage, database, API layer, and CI. It will be the easiest way to deploy Payload, but not mandatory to use—much like the NextJS and Vercel model.

You can get started in one line by running `npx create-payload-app` or you can try out our public demo at https://demo.payloadcms.com. The code for the demo is open source and available at https://github.com/payloadcms/public-demo.

We would love to hear your feedback. If we don't have something, we'll build it. If there's a sticky spot in the DX (developer experience!), we’ll fix it. Looking forward to hearing what you think—and thank you!

[1] Quick refresher: CMS stands for "content management system" and headless just means "API-based", with no restrictions over where you use the content on the frontend.

Payload CMS has a responsive admin UI. Check out the public demo on your phone to see what it looks like!

Here's a screenshot of our public demo where you can see a custom YouTube element built. You can go play with it and check it out for yourself. That's fully custom. Also, the source code is available here.

Hey I know that software! If you haven't already, could you file an issue on their public-demo github page? If you already have, thank you for contributing to OSS!

Our public demo is open source which can probably give you a huge learning head start, and we've also got a very in-depth video series on our YouTube channel that shows you how to build a high-end website with NextJS and Payload. There will be a lot more coming from us on YouTube as well.