collections vs globals

oloflarssonlast year

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  notchrlast year

  I always use a global for my pages

  
  

  
  

  Because I typically need separate field structures per-page that I would otherwise need to make blocks for

  
  

  
  

  I only use collections for repeating content

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  oloflarssonlast year

  Thats what i was thinking. I couldnt see if i had missed something obvious in how payload was supposed to be used in terms of best practice. But i guess i havent then

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  taun2160last year

  Hey @notchr , hope you're having a good weekend.

  
  
  

  So does Payload team typically use blocks for most/all content to provide the option of re-using that block structure, if the client wants to create a page that may be unrelated to previous pages - therefore the more block layout options the higher the chance of the content editor finding something suitable? It's just to provide more content layout options, as opposed to using a global that doesn't provide that advantage? Am I understanding correctly?

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  kvist__last year

  Globals is for pages that is unique (eg homepage), while Collections is for pages that can have multiple entries, like BlogPosts

  
  

  
  

  Globals can also be used for configuration, like for Navigation structure (menu)

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  notchr12 months ago

  @taun2160 Globals are good for non-repeating structured content (though, they can definitely have repeating fields). Collections are good for repeating structured content

  
  

  
  

  If you create a "Pages" collection, it's going to be arguably difficult to have customization per-page without some interesting conditional block logic

  
  

  
  

  Where in a global, it can be specific to a page

  
  

  
  

  I think in a normal scenario, a site will have a reasonable amount of pages that need to be custom tailored

  
  

  
  

  While sites with 100's of content items generally keep them structurally consistent

  
  

  
  

  Blocks are great for repeating content that require the same block structures

  
  

  
  

  But when you start creating custom blocks for specific pages that are built using a Collection, things quickly become tedious

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  taun216012 months ago

  Thanks Chris. So if the admin creates a new page (generated by slug), they select a layout block and that is rendered using the renderBlocks component. So that's for cases where their page desires extends beyond the global pages, such as adding new products that render it's own page per product slug? It's for scalability and customizability right? That way the client doesn't have to return to the dev and request changes.

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  jarrod_not_jared

  12 months ago

  I feel like it would be rather simple to have a select field such as “layout” that conditionally renders different group fields that have specific fields for a “layout”. Using the collection approach.