Template Newspaper

Overview

Template Newspaper is a complete news publishing platform that covers every layer of a modern media website. It ships with everything you need out of the box:

• A beautifully designed public news portal with Classic and Modern homepage layouts, category pages, breaking news, and social sharing.
• A feature-rich Admin Dashboard for managing articles, categories, authors, contacts, newsletter subscribers, and all site settings.
• An Author Dashboard with a review-gated content workflow — authors submit, admins approve.
• A robust REST API with JWT-based authentication, Zod validation, and a consistent response format.
• Cloudinary integration for all image and media management, configured entirely from the admin panel.
• MongoDB as the database with Mongoose ODM, soft-deletion, and compound indexing.

Features

Public Portal

Admin Dashboard

Author Dashboard

Technology Stack

Requirements

Installation & Setup

unzip template-newspaper.zip -d template-newspaper
cd template-newspaper

npm install

cp .env.example .env
# Then edit .env with your actual values

See the Environment Variables section for all required values.

Insert an admin user document directly into MongoDB (via MongoDB Compass or Atlas UI). Set role to "admin" and use a bcrypt-hashed password.

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser. The admin dashboard is at http://localhost:3000/admin/dashboard. The interactive documentation is at http://localhost:3000/documentation.

Environment Variables

Create a .env file in the project root with the following variables:

# ─── Database ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────
# MongoDB connection string (Atlas or local instance)
MONGODB_URI=mongodb+srv://<user>:<password>@cluster.mongodb.net/<db>

# ─── Authentication ────────────────────────────────────────────────
# Long random string for signing JWTs. Generate: openssl rand -base64 32
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=your-secret-key-here

# ─── Internal API URL ──────────────────────────────────────────────
# Use http://localhost:3000 for local dev; production domain in prod
NEXT_API_URL=http://localhost:3000

# ─── Cloudinary ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
# Can also be configured via Admin → Settings → Cloudinary
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=your-cloud-name
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=your-api-key
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=your-api-secret

Running the Application

Pages & Routes

Public Pages

Admin Dashboard Pages (Protected)

All admin routes are under /admin/ and require a valid admin authentication session.

Author Dashboard Pages (Protected)

All author routes are under /author/ and require a valid author session.

Roles & Permissions

Route protection is enforced at middleware level — unauthenticated requests to dashboard routes are redirected to /login.

Authentication

Authentication is powered by NextAuth v5 with the Credentials provider and JWT sessions (30-day expiry).

Login Flow

1. User submits email and password on /login.
2. The credentials provider calls the backend login endpoint for the appropriate role.
3. Backend verifies the password with bcrypt and issues a signed JWT.
4. NextAuth stores the token in a secure, HTTP-only session cookie.
5. API requests include the token as Authorization: Bearer <token>.
6. The authenticate() middleware verifies the token and attaches the user to the request context.

Key Files

API Reference — Categories

// Create Category — Request Body
{
  "name": "Politics",
  "slug": "politics",
  "status": true,
  "featured": true,
  "subCategories": [
    { "name": "National", "slug": "national", "status": true }
  ]
}

API Reference — Authors

// Create Author — Request Body
{
  "name": "Jane Reporter",
  "email": "jane@newsroom.com",
  "password": "initial_password"
}

API Reference — News (Admin)

// News article status values
"draft"      // saved but not submitted
"review"     // submitted by author, awaiting admin action
"published"  // live on the public portal
"rejected"   // rejected by admin with a reason

// Reject endpoint — Request Body
{ "rejectReason": "Content needs more sources." }

API Reference — News (Author)

API Reference — Contact & Newsletter

API Reference — Settings

API Reference — Dashboard

Data Models — User

Data Models — News

Data Models — Category

Data Models — Settings

Data Models — Contact & Newsletter

Configuration

Homepage Layout

Switch between Classic and Modern homepage layouts from Admin → Settings → General → Home View. The change takes effect immediately without a rebuild.

Cloudinary

Configure from Admin → Settings → Cloudinary. Required fields:

• Cloud Name — from your Cloudinary dashboard
• API Key — from your Cloudinary dashboard
• API Secret — from your Cloudinary dashboard
• Upload Folder — destination folder in your Cloudinary library (e.g. newspaper)
• Secure URL Base — e.g. https://res.cloudinary.com

SEO & Metadata

Go to Admin → Settings → Metadata to set the page title template, default description, keywords, and Open Graph / Twitter Card image.

Legal Pages

The About Us, Privacy Policy, and Terms & Conditions page content is fully editable from Admin → Settings using the rich text editor. No code changes required.

Deployment

Vercel (Recommended)

1. Push the project to a GitHub or GitLab repository.
2. Import the repository at vercel.com.
3. Add all environment variables in the Vercel project settings.
4. Click Deploy — Vercel auto-detects Next.js and configures the build.

Self-Hosted (Node.js)

# Build the production bundle
npm run build

# Start the production server
npm run start

Docker

Create a Dockerfile based on the official Next.js Docker example and pass environment variables at runtime via --env-file .env.

Production Checklist

• Set a strong, unique NEXTAUTH_SECRET (use openssl rand -base64 32)
• Use a MongoDB Atlas cluster with a dedicated user and IP allowlist
• Enable HTTPS (Vercel handles this automatically)
• Set NEXT_API_URL to your production domain (e.g. https://yourdomain.com)
• Update Cloudinary credentials from Admin → Settings → Cloudinary after first login
• Change the default admin password immediately after first login
• Configure Open Graph image and site metadata from Admin → Settings → Metadata

Support

If you have questions, issues, or feature requests, please open a support ticket through your purchase platform's messaging system.

When reporting a bug, please include:

• Your Node.js version (node -v)
• The full error message and stack trace
• Step-by-step instructions to reproduce the issue

Documentation last updated: April 2026