Introduction

This admin runs on Payload, a headless CMS that lives inside the same Next.js application as the public site. There is no separate system to sync with and no plugin marketplace to manage. The content you edit here is the single source of truth, and the site reads it directly.

Everything on the public site is prerendered. Pages are built ahead of time and served as static HTML, which is why the site feels instant for visitors. The tradeoff is that your changes are not live the millisecond you hit save, they appear after the page revalidates, usually within a minute.

The mental model

Three concepts cover almost everything you will touch:

• Collections are lists of things: Products, Articles, Stores, Retailers, Images. Each entry is a document with its own edit screen.
• Globals are one-off pages that exist exactly once, like the Home Page or the Careers page.
• Blocks are the sections you stack to build a page: a hero, a wall of media, an offer carousel. Most page-level editing is picking blocks and filling them in.

If you know which of the three you are looking at, you know how it behaves. A product is a document you can list, filter and search. The home page is one screen you edit in place. Both are assembled from blocks.

Navigating efficiently

The left navigation groups everything by module, the same way this wiki does. A few habits make the admin much faster to move around:

• The dashboard shows recently edited documents. If you are returning to yesterday's work, start there instead of digging through lists.
• List views have search, filters and sortable columns. Filtering Products by category beats scrolling every time.
• Relationship fields open the linked document in a drawer on top of your current screen. You can fix a typo in a retailer without losing your place in the product you were editing.
• Upload fields show their expected resolution, aspect ratio and format right below the input. Following those keeps images from cropping badly on the site.

Where it hurts

Honesty helps here. Some screens are long. A product with attributes, pricing, media and content blocks is a serious form, and a page built from ten blocks means ten collapsed sections to walk through. Large richtext fields can feel heavy, and the site serves twelve locales, so localized fields multiply the work when a change touches every language.

None of this is accidental. The forms are long because the content is structured, every field ends up in a specific place in the design instead of one big text blob someone has to reformat later.

Why it is worth it

Structured content is the whole point. Because the CMS knows what a product attribute or a hero slide is, the site can render it pixel-perfect, translate it, index it for search and reuse it anywhere. There is no theme fighting you, no shortcode soup, no plugin conflicts after an update. The result is a site that stays fast and consistent no matter how much content goes in, which is what pushes this setup past the usual bloated CMS experience.

The rest of this wiki walks through each module. Start with Logging in, then skim the module that matches what you are about to edit.