Payload CMS Development and Implementation
When the people with the knowledge are not on your team.
Payload puts the content model in your codebase and the admin UI on top of it, which makes it a good fit for the case most headless platforms handle badly — many outside contributors, each allowed to edit only their own corner.
Payload runs the LA28 venue hub for Visit California, where around 280 destination organizations across the state author and maintain their own venue listings.
Payload puts the schema, the permissions and the admin UI in your codebase. Most headless CMS decisions are made on the editing experience for a central marketing team, and that is not the hard case. The hard case is a hub whose knowledge lives outside the organization running it — franchisees, chapters, member institutions, regional offices — where the platform’s job is to let hundreds of people contribute without any of them being able to touch each other’s records, and without a central team retyping submissions from spreadsheets. That is an access-control and modelling problem before it is an editing one, and it is where a CMS whose schema and permissions are code rather than console configuration comes into its own.
Our Work with Payload CMS
How the Work Splits
A headless CMS whose collections, fields and access rules are defined in TypeScript alongside the application, with a generated admin UI, per-document and per-collection access control, drafts and preview, and a database you own rather than a hosted content API.
The modelling and access design that decides whether a distributed authoring model actually works — scoped permissions that hold, self-service onboarding that does not create an administrative burden, bulk import to seed a catalogue that would otherwise never reach critical mass, and the front end that renders it.
A statewide hub that maintains itself. On the LA28 venue hub, California’s destination marketing organizations sign up with domain-validated accounts and manage their own listings through draft, preview and publish, each scoped so it sees only its own — with the state’s official competition venues kept as a separate curated collection. Hundreds of venues were published within months of opening it to those organizations.
The work in practice
Payload is chosen most often for the reason it deserves to be — the content model lives in your codebase, in TypeScript, next to everything else, rather than in a console someone configured two years ago and no one has a record of. The consequence people underrate is what that makes possible for access control.
The case it is unusually good at
Contributors who do not work for you. A hub whose value is other people’s knowledge has a structural problem: the people who know the content are outside the organization publishing it. Every one of them needs to edit their own records and none of them may touch anyone else’s. When access rules are code, that scoping is a reviewable, testable part of the application rather than a matrix in an admin screen that drifts.
Onboarding without an administrator in the loop. If every new contributor needs an account created by hand, contribution stops at whatever a central team can process. Domain-validated self-service moves that ceiling, and it only works if the permission model is trustworthy enough to let strangers in.
A catalogue that has to exist before anyone will use it. A directory with forty entries does not attract contributors; one with several hundred does. Bulk import is the unglamorous bridge across that gap, seeding from the spreadsheets the data already lives in so the platform is worth logging into on day one.
Curated collections beside contributed ones. Not everything in a hub should be editable by its contributors. Authoritative records — the official list, the canonical set — belong in their own collection with their own rules, sitting alongside the open one without being subject to it.
The LA28 venue hub
Ahead of the 2028 Games, national delegations need pre-Games bases in California — pools, tracks, high-performance facilities, meeting space. The venues belong to cities and regions, and the people who know them are the state’s roughly 280 destination marketing organizations. Visit California needed a statewide answer that those organizations would keep current themselves.
Payload holds the structured venue content. Destination organizations sign up with domain-validated accounts and manage their own listings through draft, preview and publish, scoped so each sees only its own. A bulk uploader seeded meeting venues from spreadsheets. California’s official competition venues live as a separate curated collection, so the authoritative list is never subject to contributor edits. A Next.js front end renders it, with Algolia faceted search and a Mapbox map over the top.
The platform reached a working MVP in seven weeks and hundreds of venues were published within months of opening to the DMOs — which is the number that shows the contribution model works, because none of that typing was done centrally. The engagement is written up as Where the World Trains Before the Games.
If you are weighing it
Payload is a strong fit when your content model is part of your application and access control is a first-class requirement rather than a checkbox. When what an organization wants is a hosted content API with a marketing team behind it, we match the engagement to Contentful — the platform built for exactly that.
Practice leadership
Jack Hartman
Jack Hartman’s specialty is editorial operations. He has led platforms where the people with the knowledge are curators and researchers rather than staff writers.