Client project

Daily Mirror of Bangladesh

A complete rebuild of a Bangla-language daily newspaper's website and editorial management system, replacing its legacy WordPress platform with a custom-built solution. The project focused on creating a faster, more secure, and flexible publishing platform while preserving more than 27,000 published articles. It introduced a custom content management system with role-based access, improved editorial workflows, and better control over website content.

Web

The Mirror of Bangladesh is a Bangla-language digital newspaper built to deliver daily news and journalism through a modern, reliable publishing platform.

The project involved a complete rebuild of the newspaper's website and editorial management system, replacing its outdated platform with a custom solution designed around the daily needs of a newsroom.

The new platform gives the editorial team greater control over content creation, article management, publishing, and homepage presentation. It also includes tools for managing breaking news, organising articles across multiple categories, improving search engine visibility, and handling website advertisements.

Key Features

Custom Content Management System: A dedicated editorial dashboard for creating, editing, organising, and publishing news articles.
Role-Based Access: Flexible permissions that allow editors, journalists, and other staff members to access the tools relevant to their responsibilities.
Advanced Article Management: Support for multiple categories, tags, authors, and organised news content.
Breaking News Management: Tools for highlighting urgent news and managing featured content across the homepage.
Homepage Content Control: Flexible management of featured stories and the overall presentation of news.
Search Engine Optimisation: Built-in SEO tools and structured content information to improve how articles appear in search engines.
Advertisement Management: A dedicated advertising system with click tracking to help manage and monitor promotional content.
Complete Archive Migration: Successfully transferred more than 27,000 articles, including their categories, tags, authors, and images, from the previous website while preserving editorial history and existing public URLs.

Built for Modern News Publishing

The platform was designed around the practical requirements of a working newsroom, combining content publishing, editorial coordination, website management, and advertising tools in one place.

The result is a more flexible and maintainable digital publishing platform that gives The Mirror of Bangladesh greater independence and control over its online newspaper operations.

The challenge

Rebuilding a newspaper website involves much more than creating a new design. The platform needed to support the demanding daily operations of a newsroom while preserving years of published content, maintaining existing article links, and delivering a fast and reliable experience to readers.

The project also involved several challenges related to Bangla-language content, editorial workflows, website security, and performance at scale.

Key Challenges

Handling Bangla URLs Correctly: Standard URL generation tools did not properly support Bangla characters. This caused Bengali article titles to turn into unreadable or incorrect web addresses, making proper URL handling a critical requirement.
Migrating a Large Article Archive: Transferring more than 27,000 articles from the previous website required preserving their original publication dates, categories, tags, authors, images, and search-engine-related information without duplicating content or losing historical records.
Flexible Editorial Permissions: Different newsroom members needed different levels of access. The system also had to allow administrators to create and manage new roles and permissions without relying on a fixed set of user types.
Maintaining Performance at Scale: The website needed to remain responsive with nearly 28,000 published articles. Some operations that performed well during development became significantly slower when working with the full production database.
Protecting Website Security: Content submitted through the editorial system had to be handled safely before appearing publicly, particularly when multiple staff members with different permission levels could publish or edit rich-text content.
Resolving Production-Only Issues: Some features, including the media library, behaved correctly during development but encountered unexpected errors on the live server.
Ensuring Reliable Advertisements: Advertisement banners were not displaying consistently for a significant number of visitors, despite the absence of obvious server-side errors.

The Goal

The objective was to build more than a replacement for the old website. It was to create a dependable digital publishing platform capable of handling a large historical archive, supporting real newsroom workflows, protecting editorial content, and delivering a fast experience to readers.

The approach

The solution was a complete, custom-built publishing platform designed around the needs of a modern newsroom. Each major challenge was addressed with a dedicated improvement, from preserving Bangla content and historical articles to strengthening security, improving performance, and making the website more search-engine friendly.

Key Solutions

Native Bangla URL Support: Developed a custom URL system that correctly handles Bangla characters, ensuring article titles, categories, and tags have clean, readable Bengali web addresses.
Safe and Reliable Content Migration: Built a migration process that transferred more than 27,000 articles from the previous website while preserving their original information. It also supports repeated imports without creating duplicate articles, making it possible to refine the migration safely. Approximately 99.6% of original article thumbnail images were successfully recovered and matched.
Flexible Role and Permission Management: Created a custom permission system that allows administrators to define roles based on newsroom responsibilities. Editors can assign specific capabilities, such as publishing articles, managing categories, moderating comments, and handling advertisements, without requiring changes to the application.
Significant Performance Optimisation: Identified and resolved database bottlenecks affecting the live website. Improved data retrieval and reduced unnecessary processing, bringing homepage loading time down from approximately 690 ms to 124 ms. A particularly slow dashboard page was improved from 29 seconds to under one second.
Enhanced Content Security: Added protection to editorial content before it is published, preventing potentially harmful code from being embedded in articles while preserving legitimate formatting, images, and other rich-text elements.
Production Stability Improvements: Investigated an issue that occurred only on the live server and traced it to corrupted historical date information. Fixed the underlying problem and added a maintenance tool to identify and repair similar records.
Reliable Advertisement Display: Identified why some visitors could not see advertisement banners and adjusted the relevant website paths and styling to avoid common browser ad-blocking filters.
Complete Technical SEO: Introduced structured data, social media previews, XML sitemaps, Google News sitemap support, and custom SEO information for individual articles and categories. These improvements help search engines better understand and index the newspaper's content.
Optimised Media Library: Improved image handling and compression, reducing the total size of the recovered image collection from 3.59 GB to 1.99 GB while making media management more efficient.

The outcome

The rebuild delivered a faster, more secure, and fully customised digital publishing platform for The Mirror of Bangladesh, while preserving its existing content and editorial history.

Complete Archive Migration: Successfully migrated more than 27,000 articles with no data-integrity issues identified during the full-project audit. Original article URLs were preserved to maintain existing links and search visibility.
5.5× Faster Homepage: Reduced homepage load time from 690ms to 124ms under real production conditions, delivering a significantly faster experience for readers.
45% Smaller Media Library: Reduced the total image archive size from 3.59 GB to 1.99 GB through automated image optimisation, with no reported visual quality issues.
Improved Content Security: Identified and eliminated a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could be exploited by the system's lowest-privilege account, before it reached production traffic.
Flexible Editorial Management: Delivered a fully custom editorial dashboard with configurable, role-based permissions, allowing administrators to manage newsroom staff access without developer involvement.
SEO-Ready Publishing Platform: Implemented structured data, XML and Google News sitemaps, Open Graph metadata, Twitter Cards, and custom SEO settings to support search visibility and social sharing from launch.
Production Stability: Diagnosed and resolved a production-only dashboard crash and an ad-delivery issue that initially showed no obvious server-side errors, using systematic investigation and evidence-based debugging.

Overall Impact

The Mirror of Bangladesh now operates on a purpose-built publishing platform that combines a preserved historical archive, faster performance, stronger security, flexible newsroom workflows, and modern SEO infrastructure—providing a solid foundation for its ongoing digital growth.