Building the Missing Pieces: How Production Gaps Led to New Payload CMS Plugins

Developers adopting Payload CMS v3 often discover that essential e-commerce features—like customer reviews and rich search snippets—are missing from the official ecosystem. This developer's experience running 23 production shops exposed critical gaps and real bugs in v3's access control and relationship field handling. By publishing these plugins as open-source solutions, the author demonstrates how community contributions bridge ecosystem gaps and help solve problems other developers inevitably face.