Coming From WordPress
The WordPress habits that won't carry over to the new CMS, and what replaces them
The site runs on a CMS called Payload. Most of your WordPress fluency transfers: content lives in lists, pages have fields, drafts exist.
Blocks and ACF
This part mostly transfers. The legacy site builds its pages from ACF layouts — you add a Carousel Section or a Testimonial Section, fill in its fields and drag it into order. Blocks work the same way, with a longer menu and different names.
Two things are new.
Layout settings can live on a wrapper. Blocks can sit inside a wrapper called Grouped Blocks, which has no ACF equivalent. When one does, background, padding, rounded corners and container width belong to the wrapper. If you're looking for one of those settings on a block and not finding it, select the Grouped Blocks around it.
Rich Text is one block among many. It isn't the body of the page, so you add it wherever the text belongs rather than typing into a single editor box.
Adding a new kind of block is development work, the same as adding an ACF layout was.
Plugins
There's no plugins screen and nothing can be installed. Everything the legacy site did with a plugin is built in, so there are no updates to run and new behavior goes through the developer.
| On the legacy site | On the site |
|---|---|
| Redirection | The Redirects list in the CMS |
| WP Store Locator | The Dining Centers list, with addresses geocoded automatically on save |
| Contact Form 7 and CFDB7 | A Form block on the page, with entries in the Form Submissions list |
| Constant Contact Forms | A Newsletter block, wired up by the developer |
| GTranslate, ReciteMe, Google Tag Manager, Double the Donation | Built in, switched on by the developer |
Roles
Three roles instead of five, and the names don't map onto the WordPress ones.
- Editor is closer to a WordPress Contributor than a WordPress Editor. Editors write and save drafts; they don't publish and they don't delete.
- Publisher publishes, and owns the Redirects and Form Submissions lists.
- Admin is the only role that touches Site Settings and user accounts.
The other difference is what you see. WordPress grays out what you can't use; here a collection you don't have access to doesn't appear in the sidebar at all. If a list a colleague mentions is missing from your screen, that's your role, not a bug.
The media library
One shared library for the whole site, organized in folders. There's no attaching an upload to a particular post and no featured image on every content type. Where a page needs an image, it has a field for one, drawing from the same pool.
- Alt text is required on images. The upload won't save without it, unless you tick Decorative — nothing to describe. Documents are never asked for it.
- The file types are an allowlist. Images, PDFs, Office documents, plain text and CSV, MP4 and WebM video, MP3 and OGG audio. Anything else is rejected, and SVGs are screened for active content before they're accepted.
- Deleting takes a Publisher. Editors upload; removing media is held to publisher permissions.
Addresses
On the legacy site, a permalink was a box you could type anything into. Here a page's address is derived: its slug, joined onto its parent's address. Move a page under a different parent and its address changes with it.
Addresses also have to be unique. A save can be rejected outright when the resulting address collides with something that already exists, and the fix is a different slug rather than a workaround.
Navigation
The site has a single Navigation setting rather than WordPress Menus, and the links in it are typed-in addresses rather than references to pages. On the legacy site, renaming a page updated every menu entry pointing at it. Here it doesn't: change a page's slug and the menu keeps the old address, which now leads to a "page not found". Nothing warns you.
Open Navigation and update any link that used the old address, then add a redirect so bookmarks, emails and search results keep working. See Redirects.
Saving and publishing
- A save is live. Saving clears the cache immediately. There's no flush-cache step and no waiting.
- No scheduled publishing. A page publishes when someone clicks publish.
- No autosave. Nothing is kept until you save, and every save keeps a version you can compare against or roll back to.
- Two switches, not one. Draft/Published controls whether the public can see the page. Readiness is internal — it records how finished the content is, and changes nothing about the site. A page marked rough can still be published, and a polished one can sit in draft. WordPress folds both jobs into one status.
Redirects covers forwarding an old address to a new one, from campaign short links to the addresses a renamed page leaves behind.