website/docs/production-readiness.md

Production Readiness Notes

This project is being tightened toward launch as a CMS-first Eversolo brand site. The operating rule is that real CMS content should win, while seed or fallback content is only allowed when a record is missing entirely or when a legacy migration is explicitly being reviewed.

Current Guardrails

• Media URL paste uploads allow legacy Eversolo image hosts through Payload's server-side paste URL allow list, avoiding browser-side CORS failures.
• Product, download, news, dealer, support, about, contact, and home pages use short revalidation windows, and the admin cache action revalidates primary list pages plus dynamic product/news/download detail route patterns.
• Homepage awards and media quotes are no longer silently backfilled from hard-coded recognition defaults. If the CMS data is empty, the section can remain empty.
• Dealer records are split into dealer and experienceStore types. The public dealer page renders dealer records as a regional network with a world-map overview and experience stores as image-led location cards.
• Product mega-menu links close the menu on click, including document-navigation product pages.

CMS Versus Seed Boundary

• CMS document exists: preserve empty strings and missing optional sections as editorial intent.
• CMS document missing: seed or legacy fallback can still render a temporary page so old URLs and early QA do not break.
• Seed scripts should avoid overwriting manually entered CMS content unless a script is explicitly named as a destructive re-import.
• Any new frontend fallback copy should be documented in the owning page/global and removed once the CMS field exists.

Launch Checklist Focus

• Keep Payload globals and collections broad enough for editors, but avoid showing implementation-only legacy fields in admin.
• Prefer compact admin groups, list-style arrays, and explicit per-locale documents for user-facing content.
• Re-run npm run generate:types, npm run build, and the smoke check after schema or cache changes.
• After restarting a local preview, check both /en and /zh for homepage, product detail, downloads, news, dealers, support, and admin access.

Deployment Discipline

• Production uses migrations only. PAYLOAD_DB_PUSH must be false.
• Production startup does not auto-run migrations by default. Run npm run payload:migrate as an explicit release step.
• The local release database must not contain Payload's dev migration marker (batch = -1) before it is exported.
• Local database exports must be paired with the same media/ and files/ directories.
• Backfill scripts are manual release tools. They should be run before export, verified, and then treated as data already present in the production dump.
• Production startup should fail fast if required secrets are missing instead of booting with development defaults.
• /api/health should return 200 before traffic is switched to the deployment.