Romain Retreat
We designed and engineered a member community for retreats and creative groups — a public site editors can run, private spaces people can actually use, and a GraphQL backend that scales as the community grows.
Groups
Public and private spaces with covers, about pages, and roles
Discussion
Posts, open questions, announcements, photos, comments, and likes
Events
Group calendars with location, start/end times, and descriptions
Invites
Email invites and membership for private groups, run by admins
Editorial CMS
Pages, posts, SEO, search, and forms with live preview
API & mobile
Federated GraphQL on AWS plus a React Native companion app
A community people can run themselves
- Public and private groups with covers, about pages, and roles
- Discussion feeds for posts, questions, announcements, and photos
- Share links, member rosters, and media galleries on each group
A calendar the group actually uses
- Group events with location, start and end times, and notes
- Seasonal gatherings, walks, and studio sessions in one list
- Admins and moderators add events without a deploy
CMS, API, and invites as one product
- Email invites for private groups, run by admins and moderators
- Payload CMS on Postgres so editors publish without a deploy
- Five GraphQL subgraphs composed behind Apollo Router on AWS
What we built it with
Next.js and Payload for the site and admin, a federated GraphQL API, and AWS for media, data, and routing — the same family of tools we use on other production platforms.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Payload CMS
- PostgreSQL
- GraphQL
- Apollo Federation
- Apollo Router
- Tailwind CSS
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon ECS
- Amazon S3
- Aurora
- React Native
Building a community or content platform?
Groups, events, editorial CMS, and a GraphQL API on AWS are a pattern we can reuse. Tell us what your members need to do.