SMKIT Ushuluddin — Website
Building a website that staff can manage on their own.
Context & Concrete Constraints
Key Engineering & Design Decisions
Content had to live outside the codebase entirely
Directus CMS handles everything editable: news, staff profiles, career postings, the academic calendar. The Next.js layer only renders it. When a deadline changes or a new teacher joins, that's a CMS edit, not a deploy.
Published content shows up without anyone remembering to trigger it
Pages use incremental static regeneration tied to a Directus webhook, so a page pulls fresh content the moment it's published, and a sitemap rebuilds itself from live news and career posts. Nobody has to remember to update anything by hand for it to reach Google.
A school website is a public target, so input got treated as untrusted by default
Career applications, news content, and other CMS-driven fields run through XSS sanitization and SSRF mitigation, and Microsoft Clarity is configured to mask sensitive fields rather than record them. None of this is visible to a visitor. It's there so a public-facing, publicly editable site doesn't become the easy way in.
SEO wasn't an afterthought bolted on at the end
Every page ships with Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data, and a canonical URL from day one, not retrofitted after launch. For a school competing for enrollment against other schools' listings, showing up correctly in search results isn't optional polish.
Architecture & Portal Highlights
Operational Impact
Four weeks after starting, the site went live as the school's first website. Since launch, staff have published 7 articles through the CMS on their own, no developer involved, and the SPMB page has taken in 19 new student registrations directly through the site.
Honest Retrospective & Next Bottleneck
Nineteen registrations and 7 articles is a real number for a school that had no web presence at all four weeks earlier, and staff have picked up the CMS without needing me to walk them through it each time. What I don't have yet is a full admission cycle behind this. This pilot season will tell me whether the SPMB flow holds up under the actual crunch, not just the calm weeks before a deadline.
