Payload Directory
A community catalogue of Payload CMS plugins and templates. Search, filter and compare
plugins, find a starter project for your next site, and let your AI agent do the same through MCP.
Live site: payloaddirectory.dev
What's in it
- Plugins. Every repository with the
payload-plugin GitHub topic, plus the official plugins from the
payloadcms/payload monorepo. Each has a page with stats, a 0–100 health score, compatible Payload versions, an AI
summary and the rendered README.
- Templates. Complete starter projects: Payload's official templates (discovered automatically from
payloadcms/payload/templates) and community templates added by submission. Template pages have a screenshot
gallery, a live demo link, an optional video, a "Get started" command and the README.
- Search across plugins and templates (
/search), plus filters, sorting and categories on the home page.
- Categories and tags for plugins (
/categories) and templates (/templates/categories), assigned by AI and
curated by the admin.
- Trending (
/trending): fastest-growing plugins by stars and downloads, new plugins and recent updates.
- Stats (
/stats): the ecosystem at a glance (totals, health tiers, licenses, version adoption).
- Compare up to 3 plugins side by side.
- For authors: sign in with GitHub to submit a plugin or template (
/submit), claim a listing you own, and manage
it on /me (tagline, logo, links, and for templates the demo URL, video, stack and up to 8 screenshots).
- For AI agents: a public, read-only MCP server at
/api/mcp.
- README badges (
/badge/<slug>.svg, /badge/templates/<slug>.svg), an RSS feed of the 50 newest plugins
(/feed.xml), a sitemap, and light/dark themes.
How it works
The diagram above is generated from docs/diagram/how-it-works.html (open it in a
browser to watch it animate; a static version is how-it-works.png).
One Docker image runs as two processes that share a Postgres database (and a volume for uploaded images):
- web — Next.js 16 with Payload 4: the public site, the admin panel, the REST API and the MCP endpoint. It never
calls GitHub or npm while serving a page. Pages are cached and refreshed by tag when their data changes.
- worker —
payload worker --cron "* * * * *": every minute it queues the jobs that are due and runs the queue.
The flow, step by step:
- Discover (every 6 hours).
discover searches GitHub for the payload-plugin topic and reads the official
plugins in the monorepo; discover-templates reads the official templates/ folders, lists repositories with the
payload-template topic and suggests other Payload starters for review. Each queues one sync job per repository.
- Sync.
sync-repository and sync-template refresh repository metadata and, when the repo changed, re-read
package.json (Payload version, npm package, stack) and the README. render-readmes turns READMEs into sanitized
HTML.
- Daily jobs.
npm-stats (01:00 UTC) refreshes downloads, versions and sizes and recomputes the health score;
snapshot (00:30 UTC) records the daily numbers behind Trending and Stats.
- AI enrichment (hourly, at minute 20).
enrich-all asks Claude for a tagline, summary, features, use cases,
category and tags for every new or changed listing.
- Revalidate. After each change the worker tells the web process which cached pages to refresh.
- Read. Visitors browse through Cloudflare; agents query the same data through
/api/mcp.
- People. Authors submit and claim listings with GitHub sign-in; the admin approves them on the dashboard, which
queues the sync.
Get listed
Plugins: add the payload-plugin topic to your GitHub repository (Settings → Topics). The next discovery run (at
most 6 hours) picks it up. Plugins without the topic can be submitted at /submit.
Templates: add the payload-template topic to your repository and the next discovery run (at most 6 hours) lists it.
Or submit the repository (or a folder of a monorepo) at /submit and choose Template: an admin reviews it, and once
approved it is synced within a minute and summarised by the next hourly AI run.
Own a listing? Open its page and click Claim. The claim is approved instantly when GitHub confirms the repository
is yours: it lives under your own account, or under an organisation where your membership is public. Otherwise an admin
reviews it. Official listings are always reviewed.
Once approved, you manage the listing on /me.
For best results your repo should have a clear GitHub description, a package.json that depends on payload (for
version detection) and, for plugins, a package published to npm.
Use it from your AI agent (MCP)
The directory is a free, read-only MCP server. No sign-up or API key.
claude mcp add --transport http payload-directory https://payloaddirectory.dev/api/mcp
Setup for Claude Desktop / claude.ai, Cursor, VS Code and stdio-only clients is on
payloaddirectory.dev/mcp. Tools: searchPlugins (plugins, templates or both),
getPlugin, getTemplate, listCategories and comparePlugins.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
