public-demo VS decap-cms

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.

Following one of the comments in this thread I reviewed two other products in this space - https://www.staticcms.org/ and https://decapcms.org/ - and it looks like the webpages are almost a direct copy of one another, one in dark mode and one in light mode.

I'm a technical product marketer, and I find these type of landing page copying amusing to no end.

Decap CMS, formerly Netlify CMS, is an extensible headless CMS built as a single-page React app. It’s an open source and completely free-to-use option that offers rich-text editing, real-time preview, and drag-and-drop media uploads.

You can look into a Git-based CMS, such as https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms

These typically are designed to support static site generators.

I found https://decapcms.org/ which seems like an easy to use.

Did you consider https://decapcms.org/ (previously Netlify CMS)? I'm surprised it never really caught on as it seems a good fit for most small Markdown based sites. Looks like Smashing Magazine was using it before they moved to Tina CMS (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/migration-from-word...).

Products like [decap CMS](https://github.com/decaporg/decap-cms) try to bridge that gap, but I agree that this space needs to be further developed. In fact I think there needs to be a bunch more work to allow mere mortals to use version control and branch workflows in day to day work.

I've thought of something similar! A git-based flow for a friend's static portfolio site, where he can make text edits and upload images, and the site builds that content with HTML templates.

Not sure how the GitHub markdown editor would feel for the user. It might be really great, even for uploading images.

I was imagining a static admin page, WYSIWYG, that makes git pushes on submit. These were the headless CMSs that seem to be able to accomplish that:

https://www.siteleaf.com/

https://decapcms.org/

And not git based, but similar idea: https://editable.website/

And this is what the admin edit page usually looks like: https://quick-edit-demo.vercel.app/admin/index.html#/collect...

But was taking a bit of work to configure.

Since I made my post, I've also discovered Decap CMS. This looks fairly close to what I was looking for - it deploys as a static SPA alongside the site on a /admin route, allows login with Github (and several other platforms), and builds the site using a choice of static site generator like Gatsby/Hugo/Jekyll etc. The templates are relatively rigid by default though - page layouts are defined up front, and to add a page with a different layout you need to manually add some files to the repo. It seems like there's a way to work around this and add flexibility, but it needs a bit of custom React development. It seems like this might be worth the time investment for me though, since it's the closest thing I've found to what I need so far.

If you've got the content in .md and .json files and you just need a way to add or modify that content, I would recommend you look into decap CMS (formerly netlify CMS)