Sorry for the low-key clickbait title. But genuinely curious what others have done.

I'm wondering if there is anyone who is using Payload as a full replacement of something like Laravel or NestJS.

I'm going to start on a new project which will entail a marketplace with users logging in and I'm wondering if I can just fully build it with Payload and Next (or Nuxt) only.

Big fan of minimalism so would be awesome to be able to cut one whole framework from my stack 😃

Hello friends, I’ve been building a few plugins for my business. There’s a design system plugin and an AI LLM plugin. They work together or independently, the design system is layered with recipes for each layer that are defined in the database. You prompt the system and it generates the design, almost like loveable but it’s guided by the developers constraints. Right now I’m hosting it in a private repo. It works pretty well for my use cases but it is AI generated slop if I’m gonna be honest.

I was wondering if I should open source it and if the community would be interested in a design system that leverages payload blocks and themes to build webpages quickly via promoting?

I have a lot of web development experience so I intend to clean up the slop best I can. Trying to gauge whether the community would be interested in something like this and if I should put the little extra effort into adding this to the payload community.

I've been using the Payload skill for weeks now but this video taught me new stuff.

I didn't know the skill had guidance for making Payload plugins.

Curious how other people structure environments for Payload CMS projects.

On a larger Payload project, we ended up with 5 environments instead of the usual 3:

• dev - normal feature work
• staging - client/team review
• production - live site
• sandbox / breakable env - fast experiments without blocking anyone
• pre-release env - staging code + production data, mainly for visual regression testing before rollout

The pre-release environment was probably the most useful “extra” one. It helped catch UI/content regressions that staging alone missed, especially when QA time got tight.

What worked:

• safer releases
• fewer surprises from real production content
• easier experimentation without messing up staging
• partial release safe

What didn’t:

• more maintenance
• more naming/ownership confusion
• probably overkill for smaller projects

I’m not saying this is the right setup everywhere, but it worked well for a larger project.

How are you setting up environments for Payload CMS? Just dev/staging/prod or do you use extra environments for QA, previews, regression testing, etc.?

At FocusReactive we build projects on different CMSs - Sanity, Storyblok, Strapi, Payload. Each platform has its own unique features and limitations. And sometimes for one project we need a feature that it doesn't have, but another CMS does.

So we decided to build all of that into one open source project, we call it “Ideal CMS”. Best features from every CMS we've worked with. You can use project with everything integrated or install individual plugins to get features you need. This often helps our clients free up budget for things we believe should be included from day one.

Here's what we've developed so far:

• Presets: multiple pre-configured block configurations you can use to build up you pages. It’s like having multiple versions of default values. Because content people like editing more, then creating from scratch.
• A/B Testing: native experiments with dynamic % of traffic going to each of the content variants. Control everything from the same page you are working on.
• Comments: the way to collaborate inside CMS. It’s helpful for both content team and devs who work on the CMS. Allowing to leave feedback directly inside the admin.
• Multi-Language + AI Translation: Payload already has a localization plugin, so we built plugin to do AI translations on top of it.
• Scheduled Publishing: Payload CMS natively supports this feature, but not for the serverless platforms like Vercel. Since we deploy mainly there, we needed way to do it.
• Semantic search: locale scoped semantic search will help you visitors get more accurate results and make sure they find what they are looking for.
• SSO: for enterprise clients this is common requirements and could save you a lot of time. We support different identity providers, and you can leave the one you want.

We are actively working on two more game changing (in our opinion) plugins: “Releases” and "Visual Editing".

• Releases will help scheduling publishing of multiple resources in Payload CMS, allowing for complex launches with no surprises.
• Visual Editing is a UI overlay over your content in preview mode, to navigate to to the content field you want to change faster.

Every plugin works independently in any Payload project. For new projects we recommend start off the repository, that combines all those plugins and basic setup you will need - Ideal CMS on GitHub.

Excited to share more updates in the future! For now would love to hear your thoughts on what you think brings the most value to your and your clients' Payload CMS projects.

Lets grow the ecosystem together!

https://preview.redd.it/pge2nhvwvi0h1.png?width=1908&format=png&auto=webp&s=50629cca93b2bb3e91ef7094c05f9fe9d853bd11

Hi, I was wondering how the figma acquisition is going. I see the team is still releasing new features but I haven’t heard anything from Figma on what their intent is with Payload CMS. Anyone from the team want to update us on what’s happening? What figmas intention is with payload CMS?