Blog Template

The Blog template is a production-quality blog starter. It ships posts, categories, tags, three admin-editable site singles, a full set of public-facing pages under a (frontend) route group, RSS feeds, sitemap, OG images, RBAC access policies, and a one-click demo-content seeder. Use it when you want a working starter to read, run, and modify rather than building from scratch.

Scaffold

pnpm create nextly-app my-blog --template blog

npx create-nextly-app@latest my-blog --template blog

yarn create nextly-app my-blog --template blog

bun create nextly-app my-blog --template blog

To skip the schema-approach prompt, pass --approach:

pnpm create nextly-app my-blog --template blog --approach code-first
pnpm create nextly-app my-blog --template blog --approach visual

Schema approach

The Blog template supports two approaches:

• code-first (default) -- Collections and singles are defined in TypeScript files under src/collections/ and src/globals/. The CLI copies configs/codefirst.config.ts to the project root as nextly.config.ts. Best for version control and type safety.
• visual -- Collections and singles are created via the Visual Schema Builder in the admin. The CLI copies configs/visual.config.ts (an empty config) to the project root as nextly.config.ts. After scaffolding, define your schemas through the admin UI; demo data (if selected) seeds the schemas and content on first run.

What it ships

Collections

• Posts -- Title, slug, rich-text content, featured image, author (relation to users), categories, tags, excerpt, publish date, featured flag, SEO group (metaTitle, metaDescription, ogImage, canonical, noindex), and draft/published status. Auto-generates a slug from the title and computes reading time and word count on save.
• Categories -- Name, slug, description.
• Tags -- Name, slug, description.

The template uses the built-in users collection for authors. Posts relate to users via the author field, and users is extended with three scalar fields (bio, avatarUrl, slug) -- there is no separate authors collection.

Singles

• Site Settings -- Site name, tagline, description, logo, social handles. Drives the header, footer, and SEO metadata.
• Navigation -- Header link list, footer "Read" link list, theme-toggle and search-icon visibility flags.
• Homepage -- Hero title and subtitle, plus toggles for featured-post, latest-grid, category-strip, and newsletter-CTA sections, and the newsletter heading and subheading.

Frontend pages

Public-facing routes live under the src/app/(frontend)/ route group:

• / -- Homepage (hero, featured, latest grid, category strip, newsletter CTA).
• /blog -- All posts, paginated.
• /blog/[slug] -- Post detail with reading-progress bar, auto-generated table of contents, share bar, author card, and prev/next.
• /categories and /categories/[slug] -- Category index and per-category archive.
• /tags and /tags/[slug] -- Tag cloud and per-tag archive.
• /authors/[slug] -- Author profile page.
• /search -- Client-side search powered by Pagefind.

SEO routes live at the root of src/app/:

• /sitemap.xml, /robots.txt, /feed.xml (site-wide RSS).
• Per-category, per-tag, and per-author RSS at /{categories,tags,authors}/[slug]/feed.xml.
• Default OG image at /opengraph-image, plus per-page OG handlers under each (frontend) segment.

Components

A set of React components for the frontend lives under src/components/, including PostCard, PostGrid, FeaturedPost, Hero, Header, Footer, CategoryCardGrid, CategoryStrip, TagCloud, Pagination, NewsletterCta, RichTextRenderer, ThemeToggle, ReadingProgressBar, PostTOC, PostShareBar, PostPrevNext, AuthorCard, JsonLd, and a few smaller helpers.

Access control

RBAC policies under src/access/ gate each CRUD operation:

• anyone -- public read.
• authenticated -- any logged-in user.
• is-admin -- the admin role.
• is-author-or-editor -- admin, editor, or author.

Three roles (admin, editor, author) are seeded on first run alongside the demo content.

Demo data

Selecting "Seed demo content" populates 15 posts, 3 authors, 4 categories, and 8 tags. Seeding runs through the Seed Demo Content card on the admin dashboard (rendered by SeedDemoContentCard) -- click it to start the seed, watch progress, and confirm completion. The seed is idempotent and uses placeholder gradient SVGs that you can replace later.

Newsletter form

The homepage and footer newsletter forms submit through the form-builder plugin. The seed creates a form with slug newsletter; submissions are stored in the form-submissions collection and viewable at /admin/collections/form-submissions.

File tree

my-blog/
├── configs/
│   ├── codefirst.config.ts        # Code-first config (default)
│   └── visual.config.ts           # Empty config for the visual approach
├── scripts/
│   └── build-search-index.mjs     # Pagefind index builder
├── src/
│   ├── access/                    # RBAC access functions
│   ├── actions/                   # Server actions (newsletter)
│   ├── app/
│   │   ├── (frontend)/            # Public-facing pages and OG handlers
│   │   ├── admin/                 # Generated admin route + seed endpoints
│   │   ├── authors/[slug]/feed.xml/
│   │   ├── categories/[slug]/feed.xml/
│   │   ├── tags/[slug]/feed.xml/
│   │   ├── feed.xml/route.ts
│   │   ├── opengraph-image.tsx
│   │   ├── robots.ts
│   │   ├── sitemap.ts
│   │   ├── globals.css
│   │   └── layout.tsx
│   ├── collections/
│   │   ├── Categories.ts
│   │   ├── Posts/
│   │   └── Tags.ts
│   ├── components/                # Frontend React components
│   ├── endpoints/seed/            # Demo-content seed phases and media
│   ├── globals/
│   │   ├── Homepage/
│   │   ├── Navigation/
│   │   └── SiteSettings/
│   ├── hooks/                     # Shared collection hooks (auto-slug, etc.)
│   └── lib/                       # Cached query helpers, RSS builder, OG layout
├── .env.example
├── next.config.ts
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.json

Next steps

• Installation -- Pick your database, create the super-admin account, and run the dev server.
• Quick Start -- Walk through building a blog from scratch to compare against the template.
• Configuration -- Add fields, create new collections, or define your own singles.