Republic Tripura

A regional news site is judged on speed and relevance. A reader in Dharmanagar or Sonamura wants the stories from their own district without scrolling through the whole state; Bengali readers expect Bengali headlines and even Bengali page addresses, while English readers need the same coverage in English. Breaking items have to reach the top of the homepage the moment an editor decides they matter.

The newsroom has commercial and discovery needs too. Advertisers need defined banner positions and a record of clicks, and fresh stories have to be picked up quickly by Google News and search engines in both languages. All of it has to be run by editors rather than developers, with clear permissions, because several people publish to the same site.

The website Meta Mint built is a bilingual news platform: the Bengali edition sits at the root of the domain, and the English edition under /en.

• Editorial control of the homepage. Editors can pin any story into the hero, the breaking-news ticker or Editor’s Pick for a chosen time window, and mark stories as breaking or lead.
• District and regional pages. Each Tripura district and North Eastern state has its own page of latest stories, and the district menu builds itself from the database.
• Most read. Every article view is counted, and the most-read lists on the homepage and story pages are drawn from those counts.
• Richer stories. Articles can carry a photo mosaic with a full-screen viewer, a video after the story body, topic tags and category links.
• Advertising slots. Four managed banner positions (top of every page, mid-homepage, sidebar, and inside the story after the second paragraph), each with its stated size, an optional run window and click counting; empty slots stay hidden.
• Translation assistance. In the news editor, a story can be machine-translated between Bengali and English into the other language’s tab, flagged as machine translated until an editor checks it.

Editors manage news, categories, districts, galleries, menus, pages and contact messages in the CMS, under roles with module-level permissions and a read-only audit log of every edit. Media can be stored on Amazon S3. For search, the site generates a Google News sitemap, monthly news sitemaps, hreflang links between the two editions, NewsArticle structured data and an llms.txt summary. Images load lazily while the article’s lead image loads first, and the footer credits Meta Mint for design and hosting.