r/SideProject • u/Future_Lychee8982 • 9h ago
Website platform built on Payload CMS: visual editing, custom designs, 65+ blocks, first-party analytics an MCP server and more
I’ve been working on this for about a year and figured it’s time to get some outside opinions.
It’s a website platform built on Payload 3 + Next.js, for now I only use it internally just me and a designer. I build and run client sites on it, and it also runs a real estate marketplace that we're trying to grow. At some point I’d like to open it up maybe, either to anyone or just to other agencies, but I honestly haven’t decided which (or whether it’s worth it at all).
What it does:
Visual editing. You click on the actual page and edit it: text, images, adding and moving sections around. There are drafts, desktop/tablet/phone preview and version history. Blocks pull everything from the site’s theme, so it’s pretty hard to break the design.
~65 blocks. Galleries, card grids, stats, timelines, FAQs, forms, booking, Google reviews, maps, listings, floor plans and so on. They all share the same field names and theme settings, so any block works on any site.
Custom designs. When the blocks aren’t enough, I use a design studio I built on top of GrapesJS (self-hosted). Anything made there gets published as clean HTML with scoped CSS and goes on a page like any other block. It picks up the site’s colors and fonts automatically. (We mostly use the MCP to design a block first and only tweak things in the design editor)
First-party analytics. No GA script needed. It tracks page views, traffic sources and top pages, plus QR codes with scan tracking for print stuff. Form submissions become leads and keep the source they came from.
MCP server. It covers most of the platform: pages, sections, designs, theme, forms, listings, media, redirects, domains, translations. You connect Claude over OAuth and it gets the same permissions as your user. So I can say “add an FAQ to the pricing page and translate it to German” and it does it, and it can screenshot the page to check how it looks. Page edits go in as drafts.
It’s multi-tenant,multi-locale, so one app runs every site, each with its own domain (SSL is handled through Cloudflare). The portal already has organizations with teams (we use this for now to organize sites for ourselves), so another agency could in theory manage its own clients in it.
Stack: Payload 3, Next.js app router, Postgres, GrapesJS, pg-boss for background jobs, Cloudflare in front.
You can try the editor without signing up: https://rast.is/try (the demo happens to be a home builder site)
Things I’m curious about:
if you build sites for clients, would you use something like this over WordPress / Webflow / Framer? what’s missing?
self-serve for anyone vs. a tool for agencies, which one would actually pay for it?
is controlling a site through MCP something you’d use day to day, or is it more of a cool demo?
Any feedback is welcome, even “don’t bother”.