Admin Wiki

@10x-media/admin-wiki turns the admin panel into its own documentation. Editors write guides in Payload, attach each one to the surfaces it explains, and the guide appears exactly there: under the field, inside the block, in the document sidebar, above the list table.

import { buildConfig } from 'payload'
import { adminWiki } from '@10x-media/admin-wiki'

export default buildConfig({
  plugins: [adminWiki({})],
})

That is the whole minimum config. The plugin registers two collections (guide pages and wiki media), walks the rest of your config, and attaches a help surface to every field, block, collection, and global it covers. Payload's own bookkeeping collections are left out by default, and exclude takes out anything else.

The pieces

A guide is a document in the wiki-pages collection with a title, a summary, rich text content, and lists naming the surfaces it is about: collection slugs, global slugs, field schema paths, block slugs, and any custom keys you declared. See Targeting.

Surfaces are injected during the plugin's config walk. Field help arrives as an admin.components.Description; block help and the document sidebar panel arrive as UI fields, so nothing reaches the database or your generated types. Every surface renders nothing when no guide targets it, so an undocumented admin looks exactly as it did before installing. See Surfaces.

Guide-existence is resolved from a targets map fetched once per admin session, so a document with two hundred fields makes no additional requests. Full guide content loads lazily when a drawer opens.

What you get

• Targeting: one guide attaches to any number of collections, globals, field schema paths, and block slugs. Collections, globals, and blocks are picked from what the plugin covers; targets are stored as plain strings, so a guide survives its surface being removed. An orphan banner lists targets that no longer resolve.
• Exclusions: exclude takes a collection, global, or block out of the wiki entirely, surfaces and target pickers alike.
• Surfaces: field help under the description, block help inside the block, a sidebar panel on documents and globals, a band on collection lists.
• An editor with headings, lists, links, callouts, guide-to-guide links, scoped uploads, optional YouTube and Vimeo embeds, and any blocks you add. It does not inherit the project's own rich text configuration.
• A reading view at /admin/wiki: featured guides as cards, search, filtering by surface, and a table of contents on longer guides.
• Write-in-place: a "write this guide" affordance opens a create drawer with the target already filled in.
• Seeding: seedWiki() writes guides from markdown, idempotently by slug, with media uploads and cross-guide links resolved.
• Localized guide content and typed translations with per-key overrides via @10x-media/admin-wiki/i18n. English and German ship built in.

Requirements

Payload ^3.83.0, React 19, Node 22.18 or newer. @payloadcms/next and next are optional peers, needed only for the wiki view.

Next

Start with the quick start, then targeting, which the rest of the plugin is built on.