Ente Bergamaschi nel Mondo UK — Website & Telegram Publishing Bot

Ente Bergamaschi nel Mondo UK is a cultural association founded in 1967 that keeps the Bergamo community in the United Kingdom connected. It had an approved visual mock-up of a new website but nothing behind it: no content management, no Italian/English localisation, and no practical way for volunteers to keep events, news and photo archives up to date.

The association is run by people who do not want to learn a CMS. Every update — a dinner, a talk, a batch of photos from an event — had to be easy enough to publish from a phone in a couple of minutes, in both languages, without touching an admin panel.

We rebuilt the approved design as a Payload CMS + Next.js site where every page, section, menu, legal clause and interface string is editable. Pages are composed from a library of 23 reusable blocks (hero, events grid, photo archive, leadership, timeline, shop catalogue…), with Italian as the default language and English as a full second locale. Initial content was loaded through the Payload MCP server, so nothing is hardcoded in the frontend.

Publishing from Telegram

The real change for the volunteers is a private Telegram bot that runs inside Payload itself, with no extra service to maintain. A member links their phone number, an admin approves them, and from then on three guided conversations do the work: /newevent creates an event with dates, summary and image; /newpost publishes a news article with photos; /addgalleryimage adds pictures to the photo archive. The bot validates the input, derives SEO fields, prepares the English copy and publishes — with undo, listing and delete commands for corrections. Contact-form messages are relayed to the same chat.

The site runs on a self-hosted Docker stack (Next.js + MongoDB) with automatic deployments from the main branch and health checks, and ships with a suite of end-to-end tests covering the pages, the localisation and the bot flows.

The Impact

The association now has a bilingual website that its own volunteers keep alive from Telegram: an event or a news item goes from a chat message to a published page in minutes, without anyone opening the CMS. The design that had been approved on paper is live, every text is editable, and the platform is ready for the next steps — the online shop and the public launch — without further development.