Platform & Technology
What the site is built on, and why we chose it
Why a new platform
The legacy site runs on WordPress and has served MOWP well for years. This one is built on Payload CMS and Next.js, for a few reasons:
- Fewer moving parts. The legacy site leans on plugins for forms, sliders, popups, and stored submissions. Here those are features of a single codebase we maintain directly.
- A better editing experience. Structured content, live preview, and no plugin stack. How the CMS Works covers this from the editor's side.
- Fast and hard to break. Pages are pre-rendered and served through a CDN. The public site exposes far less to attackers than a traditional CMS, where the admin and the site share one door.
- SEO in the foundation, not in plugins. Metadata, structured data, sitemaps, redirects, and the performance that drives Core Web Vitals are part of the framework itself.
- No lock-in. The stack is open source with no license fees, and content lives in a standard database that can be exported.
What else we looked at
The realistic alternatives for a site like this, and what ruled each one out.
| Option | Why not |
|---|---|
| Stay on WordPress | Viable, and cheapest in the short term. But it keeps the plugin stack, the constant updates, and the shared admin-and-site attack surface that make the legacy site harder to maintain than it should be. |
| Drupal | Common in the nonprofit world and very capable. It's a heavier build and a heavier ongoing maintenance load than a site this size needs. |
| Contentful or Sanity | Strong hosted editing experiences. Pricing is seat- and usage-based and grows over time, and the content lives in the vendor's cloud rather than a database MOWP controls. |
| Strapi | The closest open-source comparison to Payload. It runs as a separate backend service to deploy, update, and keep in sync with the front end, and its editor is less suited to building pages out of design-system blocks. |
| Craft CMS | One of the better editing experiences available. It carries a per-site license and a PHP stack, so the CMS and the front end wouldn't share a language or a deploy. |
| Squarespace or Wix | The cheapest and fastest way to get a site online, and a sensible answer for a brochure site. Page structure is template-bound, control over the underlying markup is limited, the giving forms and dining center locator become third-party widgets, and content export is limited enough that leaving later is a rebuild. |
| Webflow | The strongest of the visual builders, and good at marketing sites. It gives up the structured content model and the code-level control this project needs for integrations, accessibility work, and the block library. |
What Payload does that none of the others do at once: it runs inside the Next.js app rather than beside it, so there's one codebase and one deploy. It's open source with no license or per-seat fee, content sits in MOWP's own Postgres database, and its block-based editing maps directly onto the design system's components.
The tools
Payload is the only one you'll interact with. The rest are here for reference.
| Tool | What it does | Learn more |
|---|---|---|
| Payload CMS | The content management system where you'll edit pages and manage content | Docs |
| Next.js | The framework the site is built on. It handles routing, rendering, and performance | Docs |
| React | The UI library that powers the site's components and interactivity | Docs |
| Tailwind CSS | The styling system, a utility-first approach to CSS | Docs |
| TypeScript | The programming language. It adds type safety to JavaScript | Docs |
| PostgreSQL | The database where all content lives. The most established open-source database in the world, and the reason your content can always be exported | Docs |
| shadcn/ui | Pre-built accessible UI components (buttons, forms, dialogs, etc.) | Components |
React is maintained by Meta and is among the most widely used UI libraries on the web. Next.js, maintained by Vercel, is the most established framework built on it. Payload and the rest are open source with large, active communities. The skills to work on it are common in the industry.
For what keeps the site running behind the scenes (hosting, monitoring, backups), see Infrastructure & hosting.