Trigenys Insights

Independent research and analysis on technology, cybersecurity, business and digital systems — built from Douala for Africa and beyond.

Live: https://trigenys-insight.vercel.app/

Trigenys Insights is both a public publication and an editorial platform. The public site serves articles and research, while the same application provides the newsroom with content management, source tracking, scheduled publishing and report workflows.

Stack

• Next.js 16 App Router and React 19
• Payload CMS 3
• PostgreSQL 17 on Neon (PostgreSQL 16 also supported locally)
• TypeScript and Tailwind CSS 4
• Vitest and Playwright
• Vercel Blob for media storage

Payload lives inside the Next.js application: the public publication is served at /, the editorial workspace at /admin, and the REST and GraphQL APIs under /api.

Editorial model

• posts: localized articles with drafts, scheduled publishing, SEO, reading time, featured state and traceable sources
• categories: localized editorial pillars and visual accents
• research-sources: private source registry used by the newsroom
• reports: free or premium research reports with methodology and source links
• newsletter-subscribers: consent records created only through the public subscription endpoint
• media, users, pages: assets, editorial accounts and evergreen pages

Business scoring and research computation do not live in browser components. When that layer becomes necessary, it should be implemented as a server-side research service and persist reproducible results for Payload to publish.

Local setup

Requirements: Node.js 20+, pnpm 9+ and PostgreSQL 16 (or Docker).

cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d
pnpm install
pnpm db:migrate
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000/admin, create the first administrator, then use the dashboard seed action on a new database.

Quality checks

pnpm lint
pnpm test:int
pnpm test:e2e
pnpm build

Production

Set DATABASE_URL (pooled), DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED (direct), PAYLOAD_SECRET, CRON_SECRET, PREVIEW_SECRET, NEXT_PUBLIC_SERVER_URL and BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN. The Blob token is injected automatically when a Vercel Blob store is connected to the project.

Migrations are committed in src/migrations. On Vercel they are applied automatically: the vercel-build script runs pnpm run db:migrate (direct connection) before next build, on the Neon branch of each environment. See docs/deployment.md. Outside Vercel, run the same steps:

pnpm db:migrate
pnpm build
pnpm start

Automatic schema push is disabled in every environment. For future schema changes, run pnpm db:migrate:create, review the generated migration, and test it on a development branch before production. Never run rollback or reset commands on production without a backup and an explicit recovery plan.

See the database model for the logical ER model and design decisions, and deployment notes for Neon environments and remaining launch setup.

Project status

Status: Production.

Current work focuses on editorial cadence, article discoverability and keeping the research/source workflow reproducible as the publication grows.

Origin

The visual language and initial editorial backlog were migrated from the original Figma Make React/Vite mockup stored in the Trigenys project archive. The public brand remains TRIGENYS INSIGHTS; the GitHub repository keeps the historical singular name Trigenys-Insight.