CMS & News Portal

March 2026 - Present

A custom-built multi-tenant headless CMS and high-performance news portal (no Sanity, no Strapi), in production with several newspapers. Drag-and-drop page editor, real-time analytics and a heavy SEO focus.

The problem

Off-the-shelf CMSs charge per site and don't bend to how a newsroom actually works; scaling to several newspapers on one of them was expensive and rigid.

Features

Article lifecycle: draft, scheduled, published, archived and restored, with full version history and audit trail
Drag-and-drop layout editor for home, article and category, with 15+ widget types
Rich text with EditorJS and an S3 media library with cropping, focal point and metadata
Real-time analytics (24h / 7d / 30d), audience segments, staff leaderboards and trending content
SEO suite: 8 dynamic sitemaps, JSON-LD (Article, NewsArticle, Breadcrumb), canonicals with slug history, robots, RSS with WebSub and SEO scoring
Banner and advertising system
Automatic publishing to Twitter/X, idempotent and schedulable
Category and tag hierarchy with per-category layouts
Author and staff profiles, with per-newspaper theming
AI content assistance with Gemini
Concurrent-editor presence: who is editing what, live
Multi-tenant with per-newspaper isolation, RBAC and full audit logging
A React component library published to npm and shared by the admin and the portal

My responsibility

Full-stack on a team, across all four repos: API, admin panel, public portal and the shared component library I published to npm.

Stack

Frontend: Next.js 15 (App Router, SSR/ISR, dynamic sitemaps), React 19 + Vite + MUI (admin), EditorJS, in-house component library published to npm
Backend: Node 18 (ESM), Express 4, Sequelize 6, PostgreSQL, JWT + RBAC, AWS S3 + CloudFront, Sharp, FFmpeg, SendGrid, Google Gemini

Next.jsReactNode.jsPostgreSQLSEOAWS