public-demo VS pocketbase

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.

It's an obvious question, but have you looked into Pocketbase?

https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case.

Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota.

Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover.

[0] https://pocketbase.io/

What is Pocketbase? Pocketbase is an open-source backend solution offering a real-time database, file storage, and seamless user authentication with OAuth integration, all readily available right out of the box.

Browsing HN, GitHub and the like we get to see a huge variety of software products and code bases.

I often see products and think - if this product X, got together with Y, it would be pretty cool - kind of like if they had a kid together.

Not too literally, but more on the conceptual level - my level of programming is low.

E.g. Just some....

- pocketable.io & datasette (+with some more charting) [https://pocketbase.io, https://datasette.io]

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

Is there an article somewhere, outside of the Pocketbase docs, presenting that pattern?

- https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/core/ap...