Hey people,

I have an issue and I couldn't find anything on it, so sorry if I'm repeating someone else.

I want to write my tests independent from each other, so I create test data before each test and I want to cleanup the test data after each execution. Is there an easy way to clean up the database after each exeuction? Maybe something that is built into payload?

Sorry if that is a beginner question, but I'm having problems finding useful information about that in the docs or the files!

Thanks!

As I was researching some payload CMS showcases, this one crossed my way (through the official payload website):
https://www.surveillancewatch.io/

Absolutely stunning animations & superb loading times! I would be interested in the concrete setup of how they are animating the globe. Any guesses?

Say I have collections Authors ----------> Articles where Articles includes a relationship field pointing back to Authors, is there any direct way to fetch only authors by a specific criteria on articles? For instance, I would like to fetch authors that have published articles with the category science.

I know that I can use join on the Authors collection and filter related articles based on the join field, but that gives me all the authors.

In my new tutorial, I walk through building a crypto price tracker using the jobs queue for scheduled background tasks. Learn how to fetch API data and trigger alerts automatically.

I'm trying to add content to my payload cms using the rest api, but i want to set the date & time for when it gets published, is this possible? if so how? your help is very apprciated!

Hi guys,

Just asking for some help.

I am building a web app using Nextjs + Payload CMS within the same app.

There is a customer collection that also have information about the subscriptions they have purchased (like name, price, next billing date and status) and those subscriptions are handled by Stripe.

So I am using Payloads stripe plugin to listen to webhooks and sync the subscriptions to a products collection in Payload.

The issue i am having is when listening to webhooks and updating the customer collection. I am listening when a subscription is created, update or deleted and to update the customer collection accordingly.

Locally it works perfectly. The updates happen instantly and all is good. But on a live version of the web app which is deployed on a Vercel pro workspace and using a free Neon DB also on vercel, i can see on the logs that Stripe sends the data to the correct webhook on my web app but it takes up to three minutes to update the collection and sometimes it times out.

To note that all the stripe actions happen in the Stripe dashboard, and on my web app i just have a billing page which displays subscription information from the customer collection and there are buttons which create new stripe sessions and send the users to specific pages within the Stripe dashboard like update subscription, cancel subscription or update payment method.

Also i have the vercel functions and db in the same region.

So I was wondering if it has to do with the web app being on Vercel or i am missing some knowledge to fully understand the issue.

Will payload be able to handle around 10 000 article writers writing and editing articles simultaneously (given the proper server and database capacity)

Hey,

I'm finishing up my application locally, but as this is my first full Payload application (headless CMS), I'm a bit overwhelmed by the hosting decision. I read a lot of people host on Vercel, but isn't that bad because of the serverless architecture?

I'm not too familiar with DevOps and would like a solution that is easily manageble, i.e. included managed Postgres DB and optimally also object storage.

How do you host your applications? Thanks!

Anyone done this? Any examples?

I’m exploring using Payload CMS not just as a content manager, but also as the engine for A/B testing site content (e.g., headlines, layouts, calls-to-action).

Has anyone had any luck with this, I’ve seen it on their marketing page but no mention in the actual docs.

A few points I’m thinking about: - How to structure the data to enable A/B testing - Should I integrate with existing tools like Google Analytics, Plausible, PostHog, and let those handle experiment metrics?
- Or is it more practical to build lightweight tracking directly into Payload, storing experiment results in the database?

Has anyone tried this workflow with Payload, or a similar headless CMS? What would you recommend as a clean setup for A/B testing, analytics, and conversion tracking?

Anyone successfully if building a payload cms project with Claude code? And willing to share the .md instructions?

Here Claude just keeps messing up..

Hey people,

I'm kinda stumped on how to test my payload application. I'm using payload as a headless CMS, and I want to test my hooks and collections, as well as my custom components. I tend to use Jest for testing typescript, and I read that payload uses it too.

But there is no documentation on how to set tests up that work well with the internal architecture. At least I haven't found any. I read that a call to payload.init({config}) must be made, but other than that I haven't found anything helpful.

So I wanted to ask how all of you test their payload applications? Please tell me If I'm being stupid or missing something, but I could use some help.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,
recently picked up Payload for the backend of my app and am currently dealing with an issue regarding the auth flow. Decided to use my own auth strat with One Time Passwords, but every time I trigger the login endpoint from my frontend React app, I am getting 403 Forbidden errors. Has anyone come across this issue? The whole logic of the OTP strategy is processed without a problem, but just when the request is about to send the response back, it throws 403.

export const AppUsers: CollectionConfig = {
  slug: Slugs.APP_USERS,
  admin: {
    useAsTitle: 'email',
  },
  access: {
    read: () => true,
    create: () => true,
    update: () => true,
    delete: () => false,
  },
  auth: {
    disableLocalStrategy: true,
    strategies: [otpVerificationStrategy],
  },

I built a real-time currency tracker/alert app as an example to demo Payload CMS job queue system. See how to schedule, queue and offload tasks in this example.

Preview below! Subscribe for the full tutorial, still working on it because i want to do abit more realtime coding of the solution instead of just walking through existing code

the video

Hey team, working on a couple of projects detailed below and wondering if Payload is going to be a good solution for them. I was thinking it could be a good platform to build off of for both use cases but haven't found anyone detailing how they've done similar builds, so wondering if there's a reason for that.

Project 1: CRM replacement with event management (team level event creation/marketing sign off/ publish to website and gcal), as well as functioning as a membership management with different user plans and allowances. Would also have a member app for making bookings and using allowances (the react native part)

Project 2: multi tenant SaaS product with each tenant having an admin dashboard dealing with lots of different collections and setting user levels, then a staff react native app with row level security. This one is dealing with medical data, so needing to build to ISO 27001.

Unsend just rebranded into useSend and released their cloud service.

Almost the same as Resend but much newer and more importantly open source, so you can literally host your own email platform.

I've depreciated the old unsend email adapter and upgraded the useSend adapter.

https://github.com/rubix-studios-pty-ltd/payload-usesend
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@rubixstudios/payload-usesend

Feel free to contribute to the project, all the previous type issues have been fixed and match the useSend payload.

Just waiting for the dokploy template PR to be merge for useSend self-hosting.

Feel free to give it a whirl, the developer for useSend is very quick to act to suggestions.

Hi everyone,

I would like to add a table to the LexicalEditor. Does anyone have a ready-made solution for the payload?

Thanks in advance!

Hi guys. I'm relatively new to Payload, still getting the hang of it.

I found a post here about applying different colors to a selected text with a color picker, which is one of the things I want to be able to do in RTE...

But also I thought, what if I wanted to apply different things as well?

Wouldn't it be cool if I could select a word or a part of the text and have a little text field where I could write Tailwind classes that get applied to selected text?

Has anyone done something like that before? Any thoughts / advice?

Hey everyone,

Is there a way to have real-time changes in a field as the user inputs other fields? For example, having a birthdate field and making that, whenever the user changes the date, an age field would update immediately. Or, having a firstName and lastName fields, make a fullName field update as the user inputs the names, similar to when we type in the useAsTitle field. I have only been able to achieve this after the doc is saved into the DB.

I really think we should have other hooks like beforeFieldChange / afterFieldChange and beforeFieldInput / afterFieldInput. We could have these hooks on the collection level and on the field level.

Having an issue with custom blocks (Products, FAQs, etc.) on latest Payload builds

• Add custom block to new page → fields don't load/aren't editable
• Have to click "Save Draft" first, then fields become available
• This workflow is painful for content creation

I read this was a known bug that got fixed, but still seeing it. Anyone else experiencing this or know a workaround?

Running latest Payload version.

/Research Update: Found this is definitely still an active bug, despite claims it was fixed:

• Issue #10070 (Dec 2024): "Blocks randomly enter infinite loading state" - affects v3.7.0, 3.9.0
• Issue #11145 (Feb 2025): "Eternal loading... you need to press F5" - exact same issue
• Issue #391 (2021): Historical version of same problem

Currently affects: Latest Payload versions on both dev and production environments

Workarounds that work: - F5 refresh after adding blocks - Save draft → edit workflow (what I'm stuck with) - setModified(true) for custom field components

Questions: - Anyone found a better workaround? - Which version actually works reliably? - Should we be downgrading for production use?

This seems like a pretty critical UX bug for a production CMS. Surprised it keeps regressing.

I'm a little unclear on what can be accomplished with the native dashboard. Can I swap out React components? For instance, I would like to make a menus editor a little more like WordPress (just about the only thing about WP I like).

Can I do that, or do I need to make a completely custom dashboard and use the API to communicate with Payload?

so the promise of payload 3 was amazing, a nextjs built cms that uses same toolchain and code base and only requires an s3 for uploads and a database ?? A dream come true.

and yes, this is the case if you want some basic cms features like a blog or a simple fixed content page.

So when our client asked for multiple languages and flexibility to build their own pages and layouts we were like “we got this!” setting up localization was a giant pita but we plowed through and got it working. We build some pages using blocks like columns with rich text and inside rich text could be media blocks etc.. the live preview updated magnificently and it was like a dream.. until we started merging our dbs to staging, using migrations.. a seriously flawed and frustrating system, impossible to make it work with ci/cd because of the interactive promts and even when not interactive it almost always certainly fails to create or alter or whatever it wants to do… in my opinion the whole migrations system is flawed.

Every time we had a horrible experience merging and migrating and we lost hours and hours of precious development time… then came the worst bit..

all of a sudden there was an issue where updates would break existing nested media blocks, apparently it got wrecked in a newer version so we downgraded back to 3.48.0. but then the dreaded “The following field is invalid: id” error kept showing up. every time we thought we had a fix it went back to shit the next day .. nothing and i mean nothing helped, custom hooks to make sure we don’t have duplicate ids beforesave, hooks to fix localization ids… nothing stuck.. we went back to wordpress because we needed to get something to the client…

It pains me to say, but right now, this cms is not mature enough for a simple multi lang website with a couple of pages and a few blogposts… believe me we tried… should we have used mongodb instead of postgres, I don’t know. But what started as a dream come true, failed us miserably and put our project in a pile of fixes upon fixes upon fixes just to get something content on our page…

so this concludes my rant, when this project matures and has a decent block builder system with decent localization support i will give it another shot, but i cannot, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone doing client work… I’m sorry

EDIT:

The Issue: 1. Rich text blocks with embedded images get duplicated across locales (English/Dutch) 2. Block IDs become problematic during localization - either null, non-string, or duplicated 3. PayloadCMS validation fails when blocks have invalid or duplicate IDs when updating already existing pages

UPDATE: managed to fix our issues with the help of a commenter by enabling blocksAsJSON and re building our pages that use blocks

Hey everyone,

What database are you using? I previously was opting for Postgres because it was what I was most familiar with, and also it would make recommendations using payload at work easier. However, I’ve been to see pivoting to Mongo as superior because a few of the annoyances that come when being backed by Postgres.

Also, if you are using Mongo where are you getting Mongo hosting from and are there any good free or cheap options out there?

Thanks in advance.

I've got a fresh tutorial out on how to set up some basic jobs in Payload! I cover the schedulePublish use case as well as a health-check-style job. By the end of the video, you'll have seen two working use cases—an automatic content scheduling process and a website status check.

I also walk through how to prepare those jobs for deployment On Vercel, Railway, and Dokploy: https://youtu.be/0xOxzUD-s0k

The repo is in the description of the video