How the CMS Works
What staff can edit, how sections work, and when to involve a developer
Your team edits the site day to day. The editor can only produce layouts the design system allows, so it's hard to break a page by accident.
Why Payload instead of WordPress
Content in Payload is structured. Pages are assembled from the same section types the design system defines, so what you edit maps one-to-one to what visitors see, with live preview as you work. The forms, sliders, and popups that are separate plugins on the legacy site are built-in features here.
The platform reasoning — performance, security, SEO, hosting — is covered under Platform & Technology, along with the other systems we considered.
What staff can do
Edit content
Headlines, body text, links, images, and media on any page
Manage sections
Add, remove, and reorder predefined sections within a page
Update CTAs
Change calls to action, button text, and button destinations
Create pages
Build new pages using existing layouts without developer help
This covers the vast majority of real-world content changes.
How sections work
Pages are built from a growing library of reusable section types. The most common ones:
- Text blocks
- Image + text combinations
- Call-to-action sections
- Statistics / impact metrics
- Embeds (donation forms, maps)
- Card grids (services, team, FAQs)
- Testimonials
The system keeps layouts consistent across pages and handles the structural accessibility work — semantic markup, keyboard support, contrast-checked components — so editors only mind content-level things like alt text and link wording.
What you don't have to decide
You choose what a section says; the system chooses how wide it is and how much room it gets.
- Width defaults to Auto, chosen from the section type. A card grid or a map goes wide, ordinary content sits narrower, a form or FAQ narrower still. Wide, Contained and Narrow are available under Advanced for the rare override.
- Spacing is automatic. Section types carry their own rhythm, and adjacent sections sharing a background tighten up against each other. One coarse override exists and nobody should need it.
- Composition is either stacked, with the heading above the content, or split, with the heading and intro in a left rail beside it. Split suits card grids, listings and rich text; forms, testimonials and donation embeds stay stacked.
- Alignment starts left. Center is a deliberate choice for a short section.
Sections adapt to the space they're in rather than to the browser window.
Publishing, preview, and who can do what
Every page has a Draft or Published status. Drafts are previewable but aren't public; published pages are live at their full path. Live preview shows edits rendered as the real page while you type.
Payload keeps a version each time a page is saved, with the author and timestamp, so any change can be compared against what came before and rolled back.
Three roles:
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Editor | Create and edit content, save drafts, preview |
| Publisher | Everything an editor can, plus publishing, unpublishing, deleting, redirects and form submissions |
| Admin | Everything, plus users, roles and site settings |
New accounts are editors by default, and only an admin can change someone's role. Roles and Permissions has the full breakdown.
When to involve a developer
For larger changes:
- New section types
- New page templates
- Structural changes to navigation
This is the same split you have today.
Content update expectations
| Aspect | Expectation |
|---|---|
| Update frequency | Occasional, not frequent |
| News & Events | Posts and events as the team has them, no required cadence |
| Landing pages | Staff can create as needed |
| Section reordering | Supported within pages |
| Content additions | Supported without developer help |
Keeping time-sensitive content trustworthy
Most of the site is evergreen, but some details cause real confusion when they go stale: eligibility, meal costs, service hours, dining-center schedules, leadership, annual reports, seasonal in-kind needs, funding caveats.
For those, record:
- An owner: the team or role responsible for the information
- A review trigger: a date, annual reporting cycle, program change, or staff change
- A visible source: where the editor verifies the update
- A safe fallback: what the page says when current information is unavailable
Making a page easy to edit only helps if the team knows when it needs attention.