Overview
Self-hosted Directus instance as the content backbone for four Arabic-first digital titles — enabling editorial teams to publish bilingual articles, photo galleries, and newsletters without touching code.
The challenge
Four editorial teams published content by filing GitHub pull requests against a JSON-driven Next.js site — a process that required a developer review for every article. Publishing a breaking story took an average of 4 hours from copy-ready to live. Writers were frustrated and the development team spent 30% of their sprint capacity on content tickets.
The solution
We deployed Directus as a self-hosted headless CMS on a Kuwait-region VPS, designed a bilingual content schema (Arabic primary, English secondary) with custom Directus extensions for RTL-aware rich-text editing, and connected it to the existing Next.js front-end via Directus's REST API. We adapted Directus's open-source Flows feature to trigger Cloudinary image optimisation on upload and send Slack publishing notifications automatically.
Outcomes
Publishing cycle from copy-ready to live: 4 hours to 18 minutes
Developer content-ticket load dropped to zero — editors publish fully autonomously
Bilingual SEO metadata editable per article without code changes
Directus Flows replaced 3 separate Zapier automations, saving KWD 180/month
Key metrics
Tech stack
Services
Client testimonial
“Before this, publishing a news story meant waiting for a developer. Now my team of writers publishes everything themselves in minutes. It changed how we operate completely.”
— Editor-in-Chief, Rawafid Media · Kuwait City
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