Wee Ones Welcome: The Rewrite

Why We Built It

The idea for Wee Ones Welcome was born just after our son, in summer 2024. Breastfeeding was a real challenge for us in those early days, so we needed somewhere quiet and private. One day we found ourselves needing to travel to a shop across the city, but couldn’t find any information on feeding spaces nearby. As time went on and our circumstances evolved, we came to appreciate the additional challenges that formula feeding and changing on the go can present. We also saw the huge variation in facilities provided by different venues, from amazingly well equipped family rooms to coffee shops which don’t even have a fold out changing table.

The Rewrite

The first version was a custom Next.js app (T3 stack) with Clerk auth, Drizzle, and tRPC. It worked, but content management and editorial workflow lived too close to the application code. In 2026 we rebuilt the site from the ground up on Payload CMS v3, starting from Payload’s website template and shaping it around the domain: Locations, Rooms, Categories, and Public Submissions.

That rewrite is what runs in production today.

The Tech Stack

• App framework: Next.js (App Router) with TypeScript
• CMS / admin: Payload CMS with locations, rooms, pages, posts, media, and users all live in the admin UI
• Database: PostgreSQL with PostGIS for map geometry and nearby search
• Maps: MapLibre for interactive map views and clustering
• Styling: Tailwind CSS with accessible UI primitives
• Storage: S3-compatible object storage (e.g. Cloudflare R2) for media
• Email: Resend for transactional mail
• Deploy: Vercel

Payload owns schema, access control, drafts, and the Local API. The public Next.js front end reads from that same data model instead of maintaining a parallel CRUD layer.

Key Features

Location directory

Venue pages with feeding and changing detail with rooms for distinct spaces (counts, floor, cleanliness/maintenance, descriptions). These are separated into Categories and keywords for browsing and filtering. We now support both Listings and Full Reviews so stubs can ship before a write-up is ready.

Interactive maps

PostGIS-backed coordinates on every location using MapLibre for visualisation with clustering for denser areas.

Editorial workflow

SEO, redirects, and search plugins wired through Payload. Media and rich text managed in one admin dashboard

Public submission

Visitors can propose a new place as a draft stub (name + space counts by kind). We can then complete room detail and upgrade stubs to full reviews in the admin dashboard.

Looking Forward

We’re still aiming for Wee Ones Welcome to be the go-to resource for parents in Scotland.

1. Expanding location coverage across the country
2. Growing community submissions while keeping editorial quality high
3. Sharpening search, categories, and map discovery
4. More polished review write-ups as stubs mature into full listings

As just 2 people, populating the site takes time, our hope is that the community-driven reviews will help us grow the site. Submissions already land as drafts that need review before they go public allowing us to perform quality control and prevent potentially problematic reviews being released.