How to build a content site with AI

These are the parts a content site needs before it is useful. Each one is something the plan covers.

• Posts, pages and collections: Store articles, static pages and ordered docs trees with authors, categories and tags.
• Editor and revisions: A reliable writing experience that never loses work and can roll back.
• Publish, schedule and revalidate: Move content to live safely at the right time and refresh only what changed.
• Slugs and redirects: Stable URLs: no 404s after renames, no duplicate content.
• SEO and structured data: Rank, unfurl and index correctly.
• Image pipeline: Fast, small, accessible images without per-request cost.
• Subscriptions and paywall: Free, member-only and paid tiers with a paywall that cannot be bypassed by view-source.
• Newsletter sending: Email issues to subscribers reliably, legally and with a hard cost cap.

• RSS / Atom / JSON feeds: Syndication for readers, aggregators and podcasts.
• Comments with spam control: Reader discussion without becoming a spam and abuse magnet.
• Site search: Find content by words and typos.
• Privacy-friendly reading analytics: Know what is read without cookies or tracking pixels.
• Roles and editorial workflow: Owner, editor, author and contributor permissions, review before publish.

Each table below becomes part of the Postgres database that belongs to your app.

• author_profiles: role: owner|editor|author|contributor; there is always at least one owner.
• collections: kind: category|series|docs_section; depth capped at 4; moving or renaming a collection writes redirects for every published child.
• posts: doc is the source of truth (versioned JSON schema); body_text is derived on save for search and word counts; rev is the optimistic-concurrency counter; status: draft|in_review|scheduled|published|archived; paid access never renders in cached HTML.
• post_revisions: kind: autosave|manual|publish|restore; append-only; restoring a revision creates a new one; autosaves pruned to the last 20 and 7 days, kept revisions retained.
• redirects: status_code 301 or 302; loops and chains longer than 1 hop are rejected or collapsed; hits is sampled, not written per request.
• tags: post_count updated by rollup, not on request.
• post_tags: composite primary key makes tagging idempotent.
• media_assets: status: pending|processing|ready|rejected; variants maps width and format to an immutable content-addressed key; publish blocked while an embedded image lacks alt text or is not ready.
• comments: status: pending|approved|spam|removed; depth <= 3; body is plain text, links rendered rel=ugc nofollow; email, if collected, is hashed or stored with consent.

• No raw-HTML or arbitrary script/iframe embeds in post content.
• No per-reader server rendering of anonymous pages.
• No unmetered or uncapped newsletter sending, ever.
• No real-time co-editing, live video or podcast hosting in phase 1.
• No ad network or programmatic ad serving in phase 1.
• Translations and versioned docs: plan for it, build it later.

Forge64 matches your description to one of 12 reference architectures, writes the plan and data model into the project, generates the app, and runs a quality gate over the code before you see it. Each app gets its own Postgres database and sign-in with no per-user fee. Hosting on Forge Cloud and Forge Payments are rolling out.

This is a reference design for the category, not a promise that every item is generated today. Built-ins such as email, background jobs, file uploads and search are coming soon, so anything here that needs them is something you add yourself for now.

What does a content site need first?

Posts, pages and collections, editor and revisions, publish, schedule and revalidate, slugs and redirects, seo and structured data and image pipeline. The plan for a content site covers all of these before it generates code.

What should I leave out of the first version of a content site?

No raw-HTML or arbitrary script/iframe embeds in post content. No per-reader server rendering of anonymous pages. No unmetered or uncapped newsletter sending, ever.

Which products define the content site category?

Well-known examples include Ghost, Substack, Medium, WordPress and Beehiiv. Use them to decide which features your users expect, then describe your own version.

• Content site architecture
• Example prompt for a content site
• Content site security checklist
• Content site scaling checklist
• Often combined: SaaS dashboard
• Often combined: online store
• All app types