Content Management Platform

Summary

A CMS for publishing and serving structured content: articles, documentation, product pages, and localized variants: where read APIs serve 50–100x more traffic than editorial write APIs. PostgreSQL stores the content graph (articles, authors, categories, taxonomy) and workflow state (draft, in-review, scheduled, published). Redis caches published content objects for read APIs. Elasticsearch powers full-text content search with faceting and relevance ranking. Cache invalidation on publish must be fast and complete; N+1 query patterns on content relationship traversal are the dominant database performance risk during reads.

Problem Statement

Content management systems have a deceptively simple data model that hides several operational traps. A content item references authors, categories, tags, related articles, embedded media, and locale variants: and a single content API response may need all of them. Naive ORM usage produces N+1 queries that are invisible at small catalog sizes but become table scans at 100K+ article catalogs. Published content is immutable between editorial changes, making it an excellent Redis cache candidate: except that cache invalidation on publish must propagate before the first reader after publication, or stale content is served. Preview of draft content must bypass all caches without polluting them. Translation management adds a second correctness dimension: a published English article with an in-review French translation must serve the last approved French version, not the draft. Every read path decision (cached vs. live, primary vs. replica) must encode the correct freshness requirement for each content state.