Editorial & Publishing Platform

An industry association needed its own home for ideas, reporting and in-depth conversations, with several content formats, organised by topic and backed by reader accounts and a newsletter.

• Backend APIs in Node.js and Express
• The reader-facing frontend in Next.js
• A CMS and admin tooling for the editorial workflow
• Reader accounts and authentication
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Podcast and media content
• Topic categories, archive and search
• Infrastructure and deployment

• Worked across backend, frontend, CMS and infrastructure
• Multiple content formats: articles, interviews, podcasts, editorials and short snippets
• Topic-based categorisation and search across the archive
• Reader accounts and a weekly newsletter

1. 01

   Next.js for the reader site

   Server-rendered pages that search engines index well, fast loads for readers, and revalidation so new articles go live without a full rebuild. It also shares React skills with the admin side.

2. 02

   A custom-built CMS

   A custom admin and editorial workflow on Node.js and Express, built around how this publication actually works, rather than bending an off-the-shelf CMS to fit.

3. 03

   A relational content model in MySQL

   Articles, authors, categories and tags are naturally relational. Media like podcast audio and images is served from storage behind a CDN, the weekly newsletter runs through an email provider, and search indexing covers the archive.

• Designing the editorial workflow: drafts, review, scheduling and publishing
• Supporting many content formats (articles, podcasts, interviews, snippets) in one system
• Keeping pages fast and well indexed for search engines

1. Next.js reader site | CMS / admin
2. Node.js · Express APIs
3. MySQL

• Node.js
• Express.js
• Next.js
• MySQL