Payload is the Future

I discovered Payload https://payloadcms.com earlier this week when looking into starting to dip into freelance work building websites and apps for clients.

A Content Management System (CMS) was the first thing I implemented at my first dev job. At that point it was Salesforce Page Designer for our legacy site. I was responsible for building all the components and custom fields and working with the designers and merchandisers to get it just right. It was very very slow, especially in the sandboxes and iteration time was very long. It took me a while to get the fundamentals of how everything worked together but once I did I started having a lot of fun.

After the project finished I started taking on other kinds of work but I always had a soft spot for the CMS. It's very satisfying building something that gets applied to do real work and forms the building blocks of the website.

With our migration to PWA, we also switched to another CMS, Amplience. The process of learning that was much quicker now that I had some experience and it feels good to use a modern CMS, it's so much faster it's not funny. However, one thing all these products have in come is that they are a SaaS. Not Payload, open source all the way!

An open source CMS alone is very exciting and make building custom websites very easy. However, the more I dig in the more excited I get. It's a full .Next.js backend so that opens up a lot of possibilities. I'll be integrating Payload into my side projects and it makes setting up ecommerce sites for clients that much easier. I build this portfolio website all today just starting with the template. Now I have a full db and backend with full editing and content management. I extended the template to add Projects and the relevant pages and it's all already online.

So yes! Very exciting stuff, this is going to allow me to have a really sleek reference architecture so I can help clients hit the ground running. I have some more out there projects as well I'll be digging into using this stack. It's an exciting time to be a web developer.