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payload
The best way to build a modern backend + admin UI. No black magic, all TypeScript, and fully open-source, Payload is both an app framework and a headless CMS.
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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nextjs-custom-server
Discontinued A TypeScript boilerplate for combining Payload and Next.js into a single Express server
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awesome-cms
📚 A collection of open and closed source Content Management Systems (CMS) for your perusal.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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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.
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.
Looking forward to a replacement for https://www.netlifycms.org/
Next.js works great with Payload. One cool feature of Payload is the Local API, which works awesome for server side rendered pages. You get your data from Payload right in your `getServerSideProps` functions.
You'd be interested in the example repo: https://github.com/payloadcms/nextjs-custom-server
The example is set up to manage Pages, but with a few tweaks you'd be able to manage blogs posts instead.
Congrats on the launch! Great to see more forward-thinking CMS solutions hitting the market.
We've been using Statamic[1] (built on Laravel) which is also a package that's sits atop the framework so you can build your app how you like and side-load CMS features.
It also features an API. The whole platform is steadily improving despite being a small bootstrapped team behind it.
If you're looking for something like Payload but for Laravel, give Statamic a go!
[1]: https://statamic.com
You should try to get listed on awesome-cms [1] list now too, since you're out with public release. That was the first place I checked for options last time I needed to find a headless CMS.
[1] https://github.com/postlight/awesome-cms
How does this compare to KeystoneJS, another TypeScript CMS? https://keystonejs.com/