I know that a lot of web frameworks already have admin panels available either released by the main development team or by a 3rd party. What is the advantage of using Payload over those?
Prior to building Payload I was a consulting full-stack engineer. I have built large web apps using Laravel and have rolled my own admin UI a dozen times and I've worked within the official 'Nova' package too. Laravel had a few open source options which I didn't try as it seemed like support was better with Nova. The project I built went okay, but it was a ton of work over what you can do with Payload.
To add a field you have to: 1) create a migration to add a column to the DB 2) add your field to the model 3) define the field again in the nova "resource"
In Payload you do all of this in one place. Every field you define will have the proper DB schema, API and admin UI in a streamlined way without having to touch your app in a bunch of places.
Two other things that made me scratch my head while using Nova specifically. The first, I had to cobble together plugins for building blocks for component based field defintions and image uploads, but these didn't play well together at all. How could image uploads and blocks not be built-in core features? The other pain point with Nova is that it isn't refined at all, and they say it shouldn't be used for customer facing UIs.
Do you have a favorite framework/package you would suggest for mananging admin UIs and APIs that do a great job?
For instance:
- Field-based access control - This allows a developer to use code to write complex functions in order to regular access to a field. This can also reference the currently logged in user's permissions/fields etc.
- Conditional logic - Functions can be written to show/hide certain fields in the admin UI
- Dynamic field types - Complex layouts can be built with the Block and Array field types. This allows the ability to build out more of a "page builder" type input vs. simple CRUD.
I hope that answers your question. Here are some links to the docs on each of those:
- https://payloadcms.com/docs/access-control/overview
- https://payloadcms.com/docs/fields/overview#conditional-logi...