Local First News & Digital Platform Development

Build a Scalable Local-First News & Digital Platform

Project Overview

We are looking for an experienced Full-Stack Developer or Development Team to build a scalable digital platform focused on Tamil Nadu / local-first news and information.

The platform will combine a modern news portal with several complementary services, creating a single destination where users can discover news, jobs, events, marketplace listings and personalized local information.

This is a production application, not a basic news website or template-based project.

Core Features

News Platform

- Modern responsive news website
- Tamil Nadu, Chennai and district-level news
- India, World, Politics, Business, Sports, Cinema, Technology, Education, Jobs and other categories
- Breaking news
- Live story updates
- Featured, latest, popular and trending news
- Article pages and author profiles
- Social sharing

Newsroom / CMS

- Advanced admin dashboard
- Article creation and editing
- Draft, review, approval and publishing workflow
- Scheduled publishing
- Reporter → Editor → Approval workflow
- Article revisions
- Media library
- Categories, tags and locations
- Role-based permissions

SEO & Content Infrastructure

- Technical SEO
- News SEO
- Structured data
- XML/news sitemaps
- Robots.txt
- RSS feeds
- Canonical URLs
- AI-search/AEO-oriented content structure
- SEO management inside the CMS

Personalized Homepage

The homepage will combine news with useful daily information such as:

- Personalized/local content
- Location-based information
- Daily briefing
- Weather
- Gold price
- Currency
- Market information
- Fuel prices
- Traffic/location information
- Jobs
- Events
- Marketplace
- Community/trending content

User System

- Registration/login
- User profiles
- Location preferences
- Notifications
- Saved/bookmarked content
- Saved jobs/events/products
- Enquiry history
- Newsletter preferences

Marketplace

- Seller/vendor registration
- Seller dashboard
- Product/listing management
- Product search and filtering
- Location-based discovery
- Seller profiles
- Product enquiries
- Admin moderation

The initial marketplace will be enquiry-based, not a full e-commerce checkout system.

Jobs & Events

- Job discovery
- Categories and location filters
- Featured jobs
- Job expiry
- Local events
- Event discovery and filtering
- Location-based events

AI & Third-Party Integrations

The platform will integrate selected external services including AI and information APIs.

AI will primarily assist editors with SEO/content metadata generation, with human review and approval required before publication.

External services must be designed so that failure of one provider does not bring down the core website.

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Technical Requirements

Preferred Stack

Frontend

- React
- Vite
- TypeScript

Backend

- Node.js
- NestJS preferred
- TypeScript
- REST API

Database

- PostgreSQL

Infrastructure

- AWS or comparable production cloud
- Docker
- Redis
- Background job/queue system
- CDN/object storage
- Cloudflare or equivalent

The developer may propose an alternative architecture if there is a strong technical reason.

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Scalability & Reliability

The system must be designed for significant traffic growth.

Important requirements:

- Caching
- Background processing
- Queue-based external API processing
- Database optimization
- Proper error handling
- API timeouts/retries
- Graceful failure of third-party services
- Automated backups
- Monitoring and logging
- Security best practices
- Scalable deployment architecture

The website should continue operating even when individual external services are temporarily unavailable.

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Ownership & Handover

Client must retain ownership/control of the following:

- Source code
- Git repository
- Database
- Cloud infrastructure
- Domain
- Third-party API accounts
- Deployment configuration
- Documentation

The application must not be designed in a way that creates dependency on a particular developer or company.

A future development team should be able to take over the project using the documentation, source code and infrastructure access.

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Required Deliverables

- Complete frontend
- Complete backend
- Database
- API documentation
- Deployment configuration
- Production deployment
- Staging environment
- Testing
- Security implementation
- Automated backups
- Monitoring/logging
- Technical documentation
- Admin documentation
- Third-party integration documentation
- Final source-code handover

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Proposal Requirements

Please do not send a generic proposal.

Answer the following:

1. Have you built a news/CMS platform before?
2. Have you built marketplace or vendor systems?
3. What architecture would you recommend for this project?
4. Why would you choose your proposed backend technology?
5. How would you handle 100,000+ monthly visitors?
6. How would you prevent third-party API failures from affecting the website?
7. How would you implement background jobs/RSS processing?
8. How would you structure authentication and role-based permissions?
9. What backup and disaster-recovery approach would you use?
10. How would you ensure another developer can take over the project?
11. What testing strategy would you use?
12. What timeline do you estimate?
13. What is your total development estimate?
14. What ongoing maintenance would be required?

Please include relevant live projects or portfolio examples.

Developers who have only built basic WordPress/news websites without experience in scalable web applications should not apply.

The detailed functional specification will be provided to shortlisted candidates.