Community-hub marketing site with a self-serve CMS and event check-in
A startup-community hub + digital loyalty-wallet platform
Overview
The public marketing site and content engine for a community hub serving startups, builders and curious minds in a Romanian coastal city. It pairs a fast, SEO-tuned public site with a self-serve admin CMS so the team can publish without a developer in the loop.
The Challenge
A community platform needs constantly fresh content, blog posts, events, member and startup directories, partners, a hall of fame, managed by non-technical staff, while still loading fast and ranking well. It also needs first-party email and on-site event check-in without bolting on heavyweight SaaS.
What We Built
A Next.js 16 App Router site rendered with React Server Components, backed by Supabase
for Postgres, Auth and Storage. The public surface covers blog, events, startups,
members, partners, resources, hall-of-fame and a “now” page, plus full SEO output
(sitemap, robots, RSS, JSON-LD, and an llms.txt). A protected admin area provides
CRUD over every content type behind magic-link sign-in with an assertAdmin() guard
and a dev bypass. Reads go through cached fetchers with per-table cache tags for
targeted revalidation. A newsletter subsystem has its own block schema, render pipeline
and unsubscribe tokens, delivering transactional mail and broadcasts via Resend in the
EU region. Uploaded images are resized server-side with Sharp, and QR scan / check-in
routes support in-person event flows.
Technologies & Approach
Next.js 16 with Server Actions and RSC keeps the public site static-fast while admin mutations stay server-side. Supabase replaces a separate auth/storage/db stack; SQL migrations are applied through the Supabase MCP. Tailwind CSS 4 with custom design tokens carries the brand styling.
Outcome / Impact
A live, content-ready hub the community team operates themselves, with first-party email, event check-in and strong SEO, and it cross-links to the platform’s loyalty wallet and events sub-systems.
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Headless CMS built on Next.js Server Components with tag-based cache invalidation
- Magic-link admin authentication with role guards
- First-party transactional email and newsletter broadcasting (region-pinned)
- QR-based on-site event check-in and scan flows
- Production SEO: sitemap, robots, RSS, JSON-LD, llms.txt