Payload CMS - The best TypeScript CMS developer experience there is

James Mikrut

Payload

Payload is a developer-first headless CMS and application framework built to finally give developers a better choice in the world of CMS. From documentation to design, Payload is changing the CMS status quo.

3yr ago

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James Mikrut

Payload

Maker

Hey hunters, It's been a wild few months for Payload, and today is the culmination of the craziness. In May, we were accepted into Y Combinator's S22 batch, and a few weeks later, we announced a move to a completely free and open-source model—adopting an MIT license. Since then, the Payload team has gone full-time, and we've seen an incredible amount of traction. Our GitHub stars have shot up from ~650 to almost 5,000 in a matter of 2 months. Today, we're launching 1.0, officially marking Payload's departure from public beta. With our first major version release, we've completely overhauled our testing infrastructure and shipped a massive set of new features, including new field types, extensible authentication strategies, admin UI polish, and dark mode! We're so excited to be able to continue to build Payload into the CMS with the absolute best developer experience there is and we can't wait to see how our community uses the new features we're releasing today. A little backstory: I have been an entrepreneur since 2015. I've operated a digital studio called TRBL, and over the years, we built an insane variety of digital apps and websites. We used application frameworks from Laravel to RedwoodJS, and a ton of the headless CMS options out there too. Our experience showed us that application frameworks are super handy for building a scalable and effective backend infrastructure, but they always lack admin UI—leaving us to build it ourselves, time and time again. We also saw that CMS were only ever good at delivering a black-boxed content management system, which is typically always a nightmare to build and extend upon. We wondered, why is there such a gap between CMS and application frameworks? How come there isn't an application framework that delivers a killer admin UI, so we can stop building CRUD interfaces over and over? That's when we decided to build Payload. It's our silver-bullet solution that is meant to close the gap between application frameworks and content management systems. We started building in 2018 and fully bootstrapped up until our public beta release in Jan '21, and then followed through to our acceptance into YC. Now that we've seen such incredible reception to what we've built, we're going full-time and doubling down on our efforts. -- We'd love to know what you think about Payload's developer experience and hope that it catapults your efficiency as an engineer. Over the next few months, we've got more big plans in the works and Payload is going to get better and better. Thank you!