How This Site Is Built

The public website brings together the music catalog, album pages, licensing information, news, FAQ, and account areas for patrons.

Playback, playlists, voting, and support tickets are part of the same experience, with access rules applied when a feature is patron-only.

The project is split into two cooperating applications: the public site and a content system used to manage tracks, albums, posts, licenses, and site settings.

• Public site: Next.js and React with TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS and the shared typography used across the site.
• Content system: Payload CMS on Next.js, with PostgreSQL for data storage and structured migrations when the schema evolves.
• Media and documents: uploaded files, license PDF generation, and email delivery are handled through dedicated services inside the CMS layer.

Tracks, albums, news posts, FAQ entries, legal pages, and home-page modules are edited in the CMS and published to the live site through the project's integration layer.

Major product areas such as The Lab, custom work requests, license verification, and album story experiences build on the same content model rather than separate mini-sites.

Some features rely on trusted third-party platforms. Account sign-in and patron permissions use Patreon OAuth. Streaming links point to services such as YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music where configured per release.

Music on the public catalog is offered under Creative Commons terms; licensing upgrades and PDF certificates are handled on-site for eligible patrons.

The stack builds on widely used open-source projects. The list below names the core layers rather than every dependency in the repository.

• Application frameworks: Next.js and React.
• Content layer: Payload CMS with Lexical rich text.
• Database: PostgreSQL.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS with project-wide design tokens in global CSS.
• Quality checks: Vitest, Testing Library, Playwright, ESLint, and Prettier in the CMS workspace.

Version numbers here describe the public web application, not individual songs or albums. Detailed delivery history is tracked internally as numbered milestones while the platform evolves.

• 0.1.x — Core catalog, licensing, patron login, support tickets, The Lab foundations, public license verification, cookie consent, and ongoing home-page editorial modules.
• Next — Staging and production hardening, broader manual QA, and remaining roadmap items documented in the project backlog.