# 📝 Content Pipeline

> [!WARNING]
> Still under active development — this covers the current shape, not a finished architecture. Included deliberately: a portfolio that only shows finished, polished systems doesn't show how something gets built, only how it ends up. This one's mid-build.

## The intended shape

```mermaid
flowchart LR
    Idea["Idea"] --> Draft["Drafting"]
    Draft --> Review["Review"]
    Review --> Approved["Approved"]
    Approved --> Published["Published"]

    Approved -.glue via n8n.-> Storage["Nextcloud<br/>draft/asset staging"]
    Approved -.glue via n8n.-> Blog["Ghost<br/>published blog"]
    Approved -.planned, not yet wired.-> Social["Social platforms<br/>via Postiz"]
```

A NocoDB table tracks content ideas through a status pipeline, with n8n gluing the stages together — the same n8n instance mentioned in [`docs/orchestration.md`](orchestration.md)'s ecosystem, here doing content workflow instead of infrastructure maintenance. Approved content flows through to Nextcloud (draft/asset staging) and out to Ghost, a self-hosted blog. A separate, still-incomplete leg is meant to fan approved posts out to social platforms automatically via Postiz.

## A deliberate constraint, not a limitation stumbled into

> [!TIP]
> Postiz is **single-origin by design** — its frontend/backend URLs are baked to one specific public hostname at configuration time, so it deliberately has no presence in either internal DNS zone described in [`docs/dns-naming.md`](dns-naming.md); any other hostname hitting it fails CORS. This mirrors the exact reasoning in [`docs/dns-naming.md`](dns-naming.md) for why genuinely public apps skip the internal zone model entirely: a social-publishing tool has no legitimate internal-only caller, so giving it internal DNS presence would just be attack surface with no corresponding benefit. This was a conscious choice, verified against Postiz's own architecture, not a workaround discovered after something broke.

## A real surprise in scale

> [!IMPORTANT]
> Postiz's real deployment footprint is 8 containers, not the app+database+cache most people would guess from its marketing page — it bundles its own Temporal workflow engine (mandatory as of Postiz v2.12.0 for all background jobs, including scheduled posting itself, not an optional add-on) plus that engine's own Postgres database and Elasticsearch-based visibility store. Provisioning this stack meant sizing for 8 containers' worth of resource overhead, not the 3 the app's own documentation implies at a glance — a useful reminder, worth stating plainly, that a tool's advertised simplicity and its actual operational footprint on the host running [`docs/iac-pipeline.md`](iac-pipeline.md)'s hardened images can be very different things, and that finding out matters before capacity planning, not after.

## What's actually built vs. what's still wiring up

| Piece | Status |
|---|---|
| NocoDB → n8n → Nextcloud/Ghost | Most built-out, working end to end |
| AI-assisted drafting step | Still being wired up |
| Social-publishing fan-out via Postiz | Still being wired up — see the notification-routing gap in [`docs/notifications.md`](notifications.md), which also hasn't caught up to this app yet |

---
Related: [`docs/dns-naming.md`](dns-naming.md), [`docs/orchestration.md`](orchestration.md), [`docs/notifications.md`](notifications.md) · Stacks: [`stacks/productivity/postiz/`](../stacks/productivity/postiz/), [`stacks/productivity/nocodb-content/`](../stacks/productivity/nocodb-content/), [`stacks/productivity/ghost/`](../stacks/productivity/ghost/)