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PayloadCMS: Open-Source, Fullstack Next.js Framework

214 points by stefankuehnel 2y ago

attah_ 2y ago
So let me get this straight... PayloadCMS is a framework, for Next.js which is a framework for the React framework. Yo dawg, i heard you like frameworks!
- _heimdall 2y ago
  "Framework" isn't really the best term for them to actually use to describe Payload. Its basically a tool for NextJS developers to quickly build a custom CMS. I'd think of it more like CMS-in-code than a framework.
- cle 2y ago
  Yes? I think this is great. IMO our goal should be to enable building higher-level abstractions on lower-level ones.
  - jstummbillig 2y ago
    Sure, if the lower level is stable. Nothing in this chain is close to stable.
    - aduffy 2y ago
      React is arguably quite stable?
      - jstummbillig 2y ago
        RSC was marked stable in Mid 2022 and this major change is still in the process of unfolding through the ecosystem, because of course these things take time. And even though react might be the future, I have a hard time understanding a client side framework that currently becomes more of a server side framework being stable.
        zztop44 2y ago
        By that standard, nothing is stable. New features are added to HTML, the Linux kernel, x86, PHP, etc all the time. In fact, building on top of higher level abstractions can sometime insulate your application from this change too.
- mzronek 2y ago
  A common misconception. React is a library. These are examples for React frameworks: https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project#production-grade-react-frameworks https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project#production... Next.js is a React framework. If Payload is a framework or not is debatable. I think it's more like a data layer around a database for a any js app and an Admin Panel (that uses Next.js now). It might be called a framework for your own Headless CMS, because it is code first. So you basically code the panel and the data structure yourself.
  - vasergen 2y ago
    > React is a library Can a library have compiler?)
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      That's an optional step for JSX cross-compilation. It's a language plugin; nothing really to do with frameworks or libraries.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - tmtwhn 2y ago
        They're going further than jsx transpilation[1] [1] https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler
        zdragnar 2y ago
        Nothing in that is actually doing what a compiler does above and beyond what babel, swc and esbuild are capable of. What they've added is wrapping your code in more memoization functions, basically. All stuff that doesn't fundamentally transform the code, aside from inserting more `useMemo` and the like. The JSX macro - which is itself already optional but everyone uses it - is just that, a handy macro with implementations available in every common bundler and transpiler out there.
- mrexroad 2y ago
  s/framework/abstraction/g With that said, yep, I do like robust/stable and purposeful abstractions.
sroussey 2y ago
Would have been nice to post when they released v3 as they are close.
- thawab 2y ago
  i got excited seeing the post, because i thought v3 was released. For anyone who want's to know more about v3 here is a link: https://payloadcms.com/blog/30-beta-install-payload-into-any-nextjs-app-with-one-line https://payloadcms.com/blog/30-beta-install-payload-into-any...
adhamsalama 2y ago
So it's a full stack framework for a full stack framework? Right...
desireco42 2y ago
They do mention WP (Word Press)... I am confused. What exactly this does? I get it takes care of content and they mention Stripe, so that is good. But is this WP compatible layer or this is accidental use of shorthand for something else? It is more like those templates that people use to jumpstart sites, I think this can be very useful. I don't want to sound too complainy over the free code you can get and examine yourself, maybe adding thumbnails of 3 templates would be fantastic. Overall some clarity would be great, maybe developer should talk to someone outside his little circle and explain and see what they should include.
- mzronek 2y ago
  They seem to recently position themselves as a Wordpress alternative. There is a blog post about migration from Wordpress to Payload including code: https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to-payload https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to... No, it's a Headless CMS, so no frontend themes and templates. They have an official demo page including a frontend, that you can base your work on: https://github.com/payloadcms/public-demo https://github.com/payloadcms/public-demo If you are looking for a Wordpress-clickety click solution with templates, Payload is not a candidate.
  - throwaway83yqr 2y ago
    I think any solution that does not use PHP will not replace WordPress for most users, unless WP itself stagnates. "Anyone" can install Word press on a cheap shared hosting device and get started. That's why I think a real WP alternative will need to be based on PHP (Laravel?)
    - chilldsgn 2y ago
      I've migrated from WordPress to Laravel-based CMS before. There's Statamic, but it's not free, though. It's good, my users love it and I can easily add functionality in contrast to WordPress, you'd have to install a plugin or dig into the digustingly messy code. Hated it.
marpstar 2y ago
I've been using Payload for 18 months. They're only recently (with the upcoming v3 release) really piggy-backing on Next.js' server and routing. Before that, it was "just" a really nice headless CMS built on Node/TypeScript. This was obviously posted in the wake of the WordPress drama, but I landed on Payload while feeling stagnant after 10+ years building on WordPress. Everything else I was doing was 100% TypeScript, my entire professional career had been working with metadata driven data structure, I felt right at home with Payload. It's just enough structure (full admin area, API, GraphQL) to make scaffolding a basic site (with authentication) quite easy. I had built an app using Next 13 before Payload began integrating directly and using the local API (versus making HTTP calls to a server endpoint) is very clean. It feels like WordPress (i.e. you're editing "client" code on the "server") but with a LOT less cruft. Because it's headless, anything goes on the front end. One big reason that WP got so big was because of the theming capabilities. Payload has extensibility by way of plugins, but it's (obviously...) not as robust as what's available in the WP plugin repo. It'll be interesting to see how these alternatives fare against the more prescriptive tools like Ghost (which does support theming, but does not support custom fields in any way, shape, or form). That being said, I'm all in on Payload moving forward. If you're curious, go straight to the v3 beta -- it's very close to release and plenty stable, in my opinion. Happy to answer questions. (Not affiliated with Payload, just a big admirer of their work)
- synergy20 2y ago
  how does it compare to Django as far as battery-included goes
  - marpstar 2y ago
    NextJS instead of templates. Full-featured admin area. I'd say Payload is more akin to Wagtail than Django itself. It feels ridiculously modern compared to other CMSes I've touched, Wagtail included. Payload doesn't prescribe i18n like Django. When you need to, you can step down into NextJS and write custom endpoints and the like.
    - andybak 2y ago
nerveband 2y ago
The pitch alone on PayloadCMS shows that this is still a developer-focused CMS. Just look at the difference between the github page, the Payload website, and wordpress.org's landing. This is not purely a marketing difference but a strategic conversation. I'm all about transitioning CMSes and yet WordPress has got the turnkey part of their open-source platform clear and easy to understand. You can self-host or choose a provider. Payload doesn't make that clear, it's either too dev-centric for running or wants you to "Schedule a Demo" (which is a way to capture enterprise dollars). What about more consumer-friendly pitches and deployments? Any recommendations on that?
- paulpopus 2y ago
  I work on Payload and this feedback is noted! You can deploy Payload anywhere you can deploy any Nextjs app, and as of v3, you'll be able to deploy it to serverless environments too like Vercel and Netlify. We'll work on adding more deployment guides directly into our docs for various platforms as well to help with this. Again, we read everyone's feedback about Payload itself and our website so it's very much appreciated and we'll be addressing this gap in how we present ourselves! edit: I may have misunderstood your initial point, oops Yeah we're not consumer facing in the way Wordpress is. It's quite a huge gap to fill
- obvi8 2y ago
  I worry about the criticisms I see about Payload not marketing to marketers and site builders, because as a dev I’m a huge fan and would love to see it thrive. It’s a fair point, especially given that in so many cases the marketers are the ones procuring the CMS. And people who don’t code at all are a big portion of WP’s market. My main concern is I’m not sure it’s easy for non-devs to see how much of the PHPish ecosystems are filling gaps in the CMS core. I don’t know how many previous CMSes the Payload folks had used before going about building it, but I’ve built tons of features and templates on most of the big ones, and IMO they did a phenomenal job of boiling it down to exactly what a developer needs to build any feature any customer or employer could ever want. There’s no need for, say, a heavy SEO plugin. You can just define the fields you want your people to fill out and attach those fields to whatever content types you’d like. Then use those fields in the head when presenting the content out front in whatever frontend you want to use. On top of that, you have all of the JS ecosystem you can plug right in. Dataviz for custom dashboards, data crunching, video and image processing, all of it. And because you’re not starting with a huge, opinionated plugin/module/contrib, it’s not the clunky and unfun when you need a feature that wasn’t there before. It’s so much easier to build exactly what you need if you’re comfortable with code. SO much of a serious CMS is just content CRUD, and Payload makes it so simple to define your content types in code, where they objectively should be defined for the sake disaster recovery and reliable builds across all environments.
dirtbag__dad 2y ago
I tried to switch to this from keystonejs. Keystone’s documentation is painfully inconsistent with its library. I have lost entire days over it. but “it works.” Was expecting more with payload but seems to be another buggy experience but with better UI. Eagerly waiting for a player in this space that isn’t just developer-first but also developer-friendly.
- jobsdone 2y ago
  What bugs did you run into? This sentiment is not shared by the Payload community that I've seen.
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Hey! I'm CEO of Payload and want to make sure we resolve any bugs you found. Pretty much the whole team is focused on closing issues right now as we work toward 3.0 stable so depending on when you were trying out Payload, I'd imagine you might see lots of the bugs you faced as already resolved. Keystone would be my other vote though, if I were looking for a CMS and Payload didn't exist. I think that is a solid crew.
lmarschk 2y ago
PayloadCMS is looking really nice for us. However, for us a as a small non-profit organization with ~100 people having access to our systems the missing SSO feature (enterprise only) is really a blocker. I understand what the idea is to make SSO an enterprise feature but I really think this hurts security for small and medium sized organizations as well (not only with this project, as this is a common pattern in my experience).
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Hey there - small to medium orgs can use one of the available community, open source SSO plugins, with the only caveat that they are not officially supported by Payload. Or you could build your own! Question - does the word "enterprise" make you think that the amount we charge would make it unfeasible for your org to pay to use Payload? I don't think it's ideal that we hide all our "premium" features behind the word "enterprise" and have been thinking of alternative words / messaging to describe that.
  - lmarschk 2y ago
    Hey, in my opinion it is fair to have some features behind a paywall for an open core model (although I am not a fan of it, but I really understand the reasons). But personally, I think having core security features (which I believe SSO is, e.g. also for small orgs) behind such paywall is not really helping the product. Using a free plugin developed independently from the core product does incur other issues e.g. during updates etc. Also, it does present an additional hurdle for all non-enterprise users to make use of the, typically, more secure SSO solution they might already use leading to - in my opinion - more unsafe deployments of Payload (or any other product). It is also not helping to overcome the cybersecurity poverty line anytime soon. When I am deciding whether to buy the enterprise version of a product, for me a main concern is whether I would also be able to use the product with its core features without any subscription (preventing vendor lock-in, in worst case I would be able to run the product on my own for a specified period of time). This wouldn't be the case if no user can login any more ^^ One last aspect: We as an organization also provided and extended SSO implementations in various products in the last years. But we only do this if the SSO code is free software. In our experience SSO implementations are way better if they can be improved by the community.
bartligthart 2y ago
It looks like a top choice for me. But a big part of why I'm probably still going to use WordPress is because of the Gravity Forms plugin. A place where it's easy to drag and drop forms, do conditional stuff, edit thank you messages, connect inputs to other stuff like spreadsheets, zapier etc. If any CMS / plugin could fix that for Payload. Please let me know!
- theyknowitsxmas 2y ago
  Google Forms in iframe?
  - bartligthart 2y ago
    It's not really an option because we need to be able to style it.
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Payload has a form builder plugin - https://payloadcms.com/docs/plugins/form-builder#form-builder-plugin https://payloadcms.com/docs/plugins/form-builder#form-builde... have you seen that?
  - bartligthart 2y ago
    Oh this looks pretty good! Will investigate!
YuukiRey 2y ago
We are using this at work. Generally I'm pretty happy with the configuration driven approach. You have config objects for all your collections where you define the types of the fields and everything else happens automatically. With this comes a few gotchas. It's easy for an unassuming developer to change the name of a field (e.g., upper to lower case) and suddenly all data is gone in production since this affects the database. What you should do instead is write a migration. I'm also not a fan of Lexical. It's very focused on being a good rich text editor but not on being a good document format for your clients. For example the way they render lists is, in my opinion, simply wrong (see https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/2951 https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/2951). Or this https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/6269 https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/6269. You also have the added complication of using the Payload flavor of Lexical, which can add its own complexities. I haven't had time to look into its GraphQL API yet. Documentation wise I'd compare it to working with NixOS. For some simple tasks the documentation is useful but for anything more complicated you want to look at the Payload source code. Especially when you start customizing the UI. Which generally works pretty well. I wish they had thought about versioning the Rich Text somehow, so a client knows which version of your documents they get. Overall I like it.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
We've been using it for a year and we hate it. Not flexible enough, performance problems, doesn't provide much ootb. You're better off just writing a service from scratch, the time you are saving is minimal (this applies to most products before we get to django or wordpress imho) We tried and abandoned keystone too.
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Hey! Would love to hear more about this. Performance problems are usually something related to maybe missing indexes in your database for fields that you query on often, or similar. Payload itself is super thin. Can you give me an example of where you're seeing slowdowns? Maybe I can point you in the right direction. Also I would love to hear about where Payload is not flexible enough. Extensibility is one of our priorities so if there is something you'd like to accomplish, but can't, I will see what I can do about it!
tomw1808 2y ago
I don't know why, but it very much reminds me of Pimcore [1] back when they started. Not the functionality, but the feeling when I look at the code. Pimcore was awesome, it was clean, considering the alternatives - it was a basically a dynamic objects store which would load dynamic blocks to generate content and theming on the frontend - and editable blocks in the admin panel. It was so relatable from a webdev standpoint, and very "hackable" - I loved it. The idea at that time was so appealing (mind you, afaik that was before React or even Angular. Jquery was a thing at that time and ExtJS, Pepperide Farm remembers...). Now it gotten much much bigger of course, but in the beginning, it kinda reminds me of this: sleek, extensible also very relateable. Definitely not made for the size of a multi billion dollar franchise, but fun to hack around while still maintaining relatively clean code. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110606024114/http://www.pimcore.org/products-and-solutions http://web.archive.org/web/20110606024114/http://www.pimcore...
seamossfet 2y ago
How does this handle threejs content? I've been looking for a good CMS for making interactive articles.
- paulpopus 2y ago
  We have a few field types that can help you structure your content however you need for this such as a JSON field if you need to add config and upload field with various adapters if you need to upload 3D models for example. Both of which can be included in blocks which can then be included in the rich text editor (lexical) so you're still keeping all your content in one place. Flexibility is the name of the game here but I can give more advice if you've got specific needs or questions around this
arnejenssen 2y ago
In june evaluated PayloadCMS (v3 beta), Strapi and Sanity for powering an app with (30+ content types) and a website. In the end i chose PayloadCMS. - I can programatically define content types in typescript - selfhosting - localization support. Sanity: _Pros_: great DX, easy to start _Cons_: i was afraid of exploding bills, it felt a bit slow/sluggish STRAPI: _Pros_: open source, selfhostable, managed solution available, _Cons_: too much clicking in the UX, and having to write middleware to get related data. So far I am pretty happy with PayloadCMS.
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Happy to hear this! Thank you for chiming in here. Hope to see you around the community.
kiddjones 2y ago
Looks like I really have to buy into React in order to choose this... Kind've a non-starter.
- paulpopus 2y ago
  What frontend libraries do you use?
  - kiddjones 2y ago
    Vue is my preferred framework.
RobotToaster 2y ago
Appears to be open-core only https://payloadcms.com/enterprise https://payloadcms.com/enterprise
- sneek_ 2y ago
  Hmm, one clarification - there is no enterprise Payload version. All of our enterprise features are just plugins - which anyone could build. In this way, would you consider WordPress to be open-core as well, considering the amount of paid plugins there are available?
  - graypegg 2y ago
    Maybe just one feedback item for the site: "Visual Editing" shows up at the top of a few use case pages, and in other spots around the site. When you click on it, it's not very obvious you've been brought to the "enterprise" site. Just a clearly different nav bar on the enterprise pages, or callout badge on Enterprise features would be good. I feel like a few people could be convinced that visual editing is part of the open source base product, not the enterprise plugins.
    - sneek_ 2y ago
      100%. We are actually working on a little "badge" style thing. Needed bad.
  - RobotToaster 2y ago
    > In this way, would you consider WordPress to be open-core as well, considering the amount of paid plugins there are available? Because several of those are sold by Automattic, the company that owns wordpress, I have made that argument before, yes.
MongoTheMad 2y ago
This CMS appears to be a breath of fresh air amid the toxicity in the WordPress world. Considering devs are looking at complaints/features in this thread, I will post one: In WordPress, I can copy a plugin folder from one old project into a new one and enable it in the ui without touching code or cli. I see the benefit of defining plugins through a cli tool, but I also like the copy-paste folder structure of early 00's software.
- parsadotsh 2y ago
  You should try Directus! I'm using it for a project right now and it's very nice. It has the plugin folder you mention too.
theflyinghorse 2y ago
I really want to explore Payload. Initial install is rocky though. Im stuck on something drizzle-kit related

214 points by stefankuehnel 2y ago

So let me get this straight... PayloadCMS is a framework, for Next.js which is a framework for the React framework. Yo dawg, i heard you like frameworks!

_heimdall 2y ago
"Framework" isn't really the best term for them to actually use to describe Payload. Its basically a tool for NextJS developers to quickly build a custom CMS. I'd think of it more like CMS-in-code than a framework.
cle 2y ago
Yes? I think this is great. IMO our goal should be to enable building higher-level abstractions on lower-level ones.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  Sure, if the lower level is stable. Nothing in this chain is close to stable.
  - aduffy 2y ago
    React is arguably quite stable?
    - jstummbillig 2y ago
      RSC was marked stable in Mid 2022 and this major change is still in the process of unfolding through the ecosystem, because of course these things take time. And even though react might be the future, I have a hard time understanding a client side framework that currently becomes more of a server side framework being stable.
      - zztop44 2y ago
        By that standard, nothing is stable. New features are added to HTML, the Linux kernel, x86, PHP, etc all the time. In fact, building on top of higher level abstractions can sometime insulate your application from this change too.
mzronek 2y ago
A common misconception. React is a library. These are examples for React frameworks: https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project#production-grade-react-frameworks https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project#production... Next.js is a React framework. If Payload is a framework or not is debatable. I think it's more like a data layer around a database for a any js app and an Admin Panel (that uses Next.js now). It might be called a framework for your own Headless CMS, because it is code first. So you basically code the panel and the data structure yourself.
- vasergen 2y ago
  > React is a library Can a library have compiler?)
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    That's an optional step for JSX cross-compilation. It's a language plugin; nothing really to do with frameworks or libraries.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tmtwhn 2y ago
      They're going further than jsx transpilation[1] [1] https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler
      - zdragnar 2y ago
        Nothing in that is actually doing what a compiler does above and beyond what babel, swc and esbuild are capable of. What they've added is wrapping your code in more memoization functions, basically. All stuff that doesn't fundamentally transform the code, aside from inserting more `useMemo` and the like. The JSX macro - which is itself already optional but everyone uses it - is just that, a handy macro with implementations available in every common bundler and transpiler out there.
mrexroad 2y ago
s/framework/abstraction/g With that said, yep, I do like robust/stable and purposeful abstractions.

sroussey 2y ago

Would have been nice to post when they released v3 as they are close.

thawab 2y ago
i got excited seeing the post, because i thought v3 was released. For anyone who want's to know more about v3 here is a link: https://payloadcms.com/blog/30-beta-install-payload-into-any-nextjs-app-with-one-line https://payloadcms.com/blog/30-beta-install-payload-into-any...

adhamsalama 2y ago

So it's a full stack framework for a full stack framework? Right...

desireco42 2y ago

They do mention WP (Word Press)... I am confused. What exactly this does? I get it takes care of content and they mention Stripe, so that is good. But is this WP compatible layer or this is accidental use of shorthand for something else? It is more like those templates that people use to jumpstart sites, I think this can be very useful. I don't want to sound too complainy over the free code you can get and examine yourself, maybe adding thumbnails of 3 templates would be fantastic. Overall some clarity would be great, maybe developer should talk to someone outside his little circle and explain and see what they should include.

mzronek 2y ago
They seem to recently position themselves as a Wordpress alternative. There is a blog post about migration from Wordpress to Payload including code: https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to-payload https://payloadcms.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to... No, it's a Headless CMS, so no frontend themes and templates. They have an official demo page including a frontend, that you can base your work on: https://github.com/payloadcms/public-demo https://github.com/payloadcms/public-demo If you are looking for a Wordpress-clickety click solution with templates, Payload is not a candidate.
- throwaway83yqr 2y ago
  I think any solution that does not use PHP will not replace WordPress for most users, unless WP itself stagnates. "Anyone" can install Word press on a cheap shared hosting device and get started. That's why I think a real WP alternative will need to be based on PHP (Laravel?)
  - chilldsgn 2y ago
    I've migrated from WordPress to Laravel-based CMS before. There's Statamic, but it's not free, though. It's good, my users love it and I can easily add functionality in contrast to WordPress, you'd have to install a plugin or dig into the digustingly messy code. Hated it.

marpstar 2y ago

I've been using Payload for 18 months. They're only recently (with the upcoming v3 release) really piggy-backing on Next.js' server and routing. Before that, it was "just" a really nice headless CMS built on Node/TypeScript. This was obviously posted in the wake of the WordPress drama, but I landed on Payload while feeling stagnant after 10+ years building on WordPress. Everything else I was doing was 100% TypeScript, my entire professional career had been working with metadata driven data structure, I felt right at home with Payload. It's just enough structure (full admin area, API, GraphQL) to make scaffolding a basic site (with authentication) quite easy. I had built an app using Next 13 before Payload began integrating directly and using the local API (versus making HTTP calls to a server endpoint) is very clean. It feels like WordPress (i.e. you're editing "client" code on the "server") but with a LOT less cruft. Because it's headless, anything goes on the front end. One big reason that WP got so big was because of the theming capabilities. Payload has extensibility by way of plugins, but it's (obviously...) not as robust as what's available in the WP plugin repo. It'll be interesting to see how these alternatives fare against the more prescriptive tools like Ghost (which does support theming, but does not support custom fields in any way, shape, or form). That being said, I'm all in on Payload moving forward. If you're curious, go straight to the v3 beta -- it's very close to release and plenty stable, in my opinion. Happy to answer questions. (Not affiliated with Payload, just a big admirer of their work)

synergy20 2y ago
how does it compare to Django as far as battery-included goes
- marpstar 2y ago
  NextJS instead of templates. Full-featured admin area. I'd say Payload is more akin to Wagtail than Django itself. It feels ridiculously modern compared to other CMSes I've touched, Wagtail included. Payload doesn't prescribe i18n like Django. When you need to, you can step down into NextJS and write custom endpoints and the like.
  - andybak 2y ago

nerveband 2y ago

The pitch alone on PayloadCMS shows that this is still a developer-focused CMS. Just look at the difference between the github page, the Payload website, and wordpress.org's landing. This is not purely a marketing difference but a strategic conversation. I'm all about transitioning CMSes and yet WordPress has got the turnkey part of their open-source platform clear and easy to understand. You can self-host or choose a provider. Payload doesn't make that clear, it's either too dev-centric for running or wants you to "Schedule a Demo" (which is a way to capture enterprise dollars). What about more consumer-friendly pitches and deployments? Any recommendations on that?

paulpopus 2y ago
I work on Payload and this feedback is noted! You can deploy Payload anywhere you can deploy any Nextjs app, and as of v3, you'll be able to deploy it to serverless environments too like Vercel and Netlify. We'll work on adding more deployment guides directly into our docs for various platforms as well to help with this. Again, we read everyone's feedback about Payload itself and our website so it's very much appreciated and we'll be addressing this gap in how we present ourselves! edit: I may have misunderstood your initial point, oops Yeah we're not consumer facing in the way Wordpress is. It's quite a huge gap to fill
obvi8 2y ago
I worry about the criticisms I see about Payload not marketing to marketers and site builders, because as a dev I’m a huge fan and would love to see it thrive. It’s a fair point, especially given that in so many cases the marketers are the ones procuring the CMS. And people who don’t code at all are a big portion of WP’s market. My main concern is I’m not sure it’s easy for non-devs to see how much of the PHPish ecosystems are filling gaps in the CMS core. I don’t know how many previous CMSes the Payload folks had used before going about building it, but I’ve built tons of features and templates on most of the big ones, and IMO they did a phenomenal job of boiling it down to exactly what a developer needs to build any feature any customer or employer could ever want. There’s no need for, say, a heavy SEO plugin. You can just define the fields you want your people to fill out and attach those fields to whatever content types you’d like. Then use those fields in the head when presenting the content out front in whatever frontend you want to use. On top of that, you have all of the JS ecosystem you can plug right in. Dataviz for custom dashboards, data crunching, video and image processing, all of it. And because you’re not starting with a huge, opinionated plugin/module/contrib, it’s not the clunky and unfun when you need a feature that wasn’t there before. It’s so much easier to build exactly what you need if you’re comfortable with code. SO much of a serious CMS is just content CRUD, and Payload makes it so simple to define your content types in code, where they objectively should be defined for the sake disaster recovery and reliable builds across all environments.

dirtbag__dad 2y ago

I tried to switch to this from keystonejs. Keystone’s documentation is painfully inconsistent with its library. I have lost entire days over it. but “it works.” Was expecting more with payload but seems to be another buggy experience but with better UI. Eagerly waiting for a player in this space that isn’t just developer-first but also developer-friendly.

jobsdone 2y ago
What bugs did you run into? This sentiment is not shared by the Payload community that I've seen.
sneek_ 2y ago
Hey! I'm CEO of Payload and want to make sure we resolve any bugs you found. Pretty much the whole team is focused on closing issues right now as we work toward 3.0 stable so depending on when you were trying out Payload, I'd imagine you might see lots of the bugs you faced as already resolved. Keystone would be my other vote though, if I were looking for a CMS and Payload didn't exist. I think that is a solid crew.

lmarschk 2y ago

PayloadCMS is looking really nice for us. However, for us a as a small non-profit organization with ~100 people having access to our systems the missing SSO feature (enterprise only) is really a blocker. I understand what the idea is to make SSO an enterprise feature but I really think this hurts security for small and medium sized organizations as well (not only with this project, as this is a common pattern in my experience).

sneek_ 2y ago
Hey there - small to medium orgs can use one of the available community, open source SSO plugins, with the only caveat that they are not officially supported by Payload. Or you could build your own! Question - does the word "enterprise" make you think that the amount we charge would make it unfeasible for your org to pay to use Payload? I don't think it's ideal that we hide all our "premium" features behind the word "enterprise" and have been thinking of alternative words / messaging to describe that.
- lmarschk 2y ago
  Hey, in my opinion it is fair to have some features behind a paywall for an open core model (although I am not a fan of it, but I really understand the reasons). But personally, I think having core security features (which I believe SSO is, e.g. also for small orgs) behind such paywall is not really helping the product. Using a free plugin developed independently from the core product does incur other issues e.g. during updates etc. Also, it does present an additional hurdle for all non-enterprise users to make use of the, typically, more secure SSO solution they might already use leading to - in my opinion - more unsafe deployments of Payload (or any other product). It is also not helping to overcome the cybersecurity poverty line anytime soon. When I am deciding whether to buy the enterprise version of a product, for me a main concern is whether I would also be able to use the product with its core features without any subscription (preventing vendor lock-in, in worst case I would be able to run the product on my own for a specified period of time). This wouldn't be the case if no user can login any more ^^ One last aspect: We as an organization also provided and extended SSO implementations in various products in the last years. But we only do this if the SSO code is free software. In our experience SSO implementations are way better if they can be improved by the community.

bartligthart 2y ago

It looks like a top choice for me. But a big part of why I'm probably still going to use WordPress is because of the Gravity Forms plugin. A place where it's easy to drag and drop forms, do conditional stuff, edit thank you messages, connect inputs to other stuff like spreadsheets, zapier etc. If any CMS / plugin could fix that for Payload. Please let me know!

theyknowitsxmas 2y ago
Google Forms in iframe?
- bartligthart 2y ago
  It's not really an option because we need to be able to style it.
sneek_ 2y ago
Payload has a form builder plugin - https://payloadcms.com/docs/plugins/form-builder#form-builder-plugin https://payloadcms.com/docs/plugins/form-builder#form-builde... have you seen that?
- bartligthart 2y ago
  Oh this looks pretty good! Will investigate!

YuukiRey 2y ago

We are using this at work. Generally I'm pretty happy with the configuration driven approach. You have config objects for all your collections where you define the types of the fields and everything else happens automatically. With this comes a few gotchas. It's easy for an unassuming developer to change the name of a field (e.g., upper to lower case) and suddenly all data is gone in production since this affects the database. What you should do instead is write a migration. I'm also not a fan of Lexical. It's very focused on being a good rich text editor but not on being a good document format for your clients. For example the way they render lists is, in my opinion, simply wrong (see https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/2951 https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/2951). Or this https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/6269 https://github.com/facebook/lexical/issues/6269. You also have the added complication of using the Payload flavor of Lexical, which can add its own complexities. I haven't had time to look into its GraphQL API yet. Documentation wise I'd compare it to working with NixOS. For some simple tasks the documentation is useful but for anything more complicated you want to look at the Payload source code. Especially when you start customizing the UI. Which generally works pretty well. I wish they had thought about versioning the Rich Text somehow, so a client knows which version of your documents they get. Overall I like it.

jokethrowaway 2y ago

We've been using it for a year and we hate it. Not flexible enough, performance problems, doesn't provide much ootb. You're better off just writing a service from scratch, the time you are saving is minimal (this applies to most products before we get to django or wordpress imho) We tried and abandoned keystone too.

sneek_ 2y ago
Hey! Would love to hear more about this. Performance problems are usually something related to maybe missing indexes in your database for fields that you query on often, or similar. Payload itself is super thin. Can you give me an example of where you're seeing slowdowns? Maybe I can point you in the right direction. Also I would love to hear about where Payload is not flexible enough. Extensibility is one of our priorities so if there is something you'd like to accomplish, but can't, I will see what I can do about it!

tomw1808 2y ago

I don't know why, but it very much reminds me of Pimcore [1] back when they started. Not the functionality, but the feeling when I look at the code. Pimcore was awesome, it was clean, considering the alternatives - it was a basically a dynamic objects store which would load dynamic blocks to generate content and theming on the frontend - and editable blocks in the admin panel. It was so relatable from a webdev standpoint, and very "hackable" - I loved it. The idea at that time was so appealing (mind you, afaik that was before React or even Angular. Jquery was a thing at that time and ExtJS, Pepperide Farm remembers...). Now it gotten much much bigger of course, but in the beginning, it kinda reminds me of this: sleek, extensible also very relateable. Definitely not made for the size of a multi billion dollar franchise, but fun to hack around while still maintaining relatively clean code. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20110606024114/http://www.pimcore.org/products-and-solutions http://web.archive.org/web/20110606024114/http://www.pimcore...

seamossfet 2y ago

How does this handle threejs content? I've been looking for a good CMS for making interactive articles.

paulpopus 2y ago
We have a few field types that can help you structure your content however you need for this such as a JSON field if you need to add config and upload field with various adapters if you need to upload 3D models for example. Both of which can be included in blocks which can then be included in the rich text editor (lexical) so you're still keeping all your content in one place. Flexibility is the name of the game here but I can give more advice if you've got specific needs or questions around this

arnejenssen 2y ago

In june evaluated PayloadCMS (v3 beta), Strapi and Sanity for powering an app with (30+ content types) and a website. In the end i chose PayloadCMS. - I can programatically define content types in typescript - selfhosting - localization support. Sanity: _Pros_: great DX, easy to start _Cons_: i was afraid of exploding bills, it felt a bit slow/sluggish STRAPI: _Pros_: open source, selfhostable, managed solution available, _Cons_: too much clicking in the UX, and having to write middleware to get related data. So far I am pretty happy with PayloadCMS.

sneek_ 2y ago
Happy to hear this! Thank you for chiming in here. Hope to see you around the community.

kiddjones 2y ago

Looks like I really have to buy into React in order to choose this... Kind've a non-starter.

paulpopus 2y ago
What frontend libraries do you use?
- kiddjones 2y ago
  Vue is my preferred framework.

RobotToaster 2y ago

Appears to be open-core only https://payloadcms.com/enterprise https://payloadcms.com/enterprise

sneek_ 2y ago
Hmm, one clarification - there is no enterprise Payload version. All of our enterprise features are just plugins - which anyone could build. In this way, would you consider WordPress to be open-core as well, considering the amount of paid plugins there are available?
- graypegg 2y ago
  Maybe just one feedback item for the site: "Visual Editing" shows up at the top of a few use case pages, and in other spots around the site. When you click on it, it's not very obvious you've been brought to the "enterprise" site. Just a clearly different nav bar on the enterprise pages, or callout badge on Enterprise features would be good. I feel like a few people could be convinced that visual editing is part of the open source base product, not the enterprise plugins.
  - sneek_ 2y ago
    100%. We are actually working on a little "badge" style thing. Needed bad.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  > In this way, would you consider WordPress to be open-core as well, considering the amount of paid plugins there are available? Because several of those are sold by Automattic, the company that owns wordpress, I have made that argument before, yes.

MongoTheMad 2y ago

This CMS appears to be a breath of fresh air amid the toxicity in the WordPress world. Considering devs are looking at complaints/features in this thread, I will post one: In WordPress, I can copy a plugin folder from one old project into a new one and enable it in the ui without touching code or cli. I see the benefit of defining plugins through a cli tool, but I also like the copy-paste folder structure of early 00's software.

parsadotsh 2y ago
You should try Directus! I'm using it for a project right now and it's very nice. It has the plugin folder you mention too.

theflyinghorse 2y ago

I really want to explore Payload. Initial install is rocky though. Im stuck on something drizzle-kit related