Helge Haukeland

Overview

The Helge Haukeland website is a fully self-contained digital platform built around premium nature and documentary content. Every management task — whether it relates to media, films, users, subscriptions or analytics — is handled directly inside the website itself, so there is no need to switch to a separate tool to keep the site running.

The platform is bilingual (Norwegian and English), responsive, and runs on a modern stack chosen for performance, scalability and maintainability.

Documentary Film Rental System

At the heart of the platform is a film rental system that lets visitors rent premium documentary films for a fixed period (by default 48 hours) without needing a full subscription. The rental experience is fully self-managed:

• A "Rent Now" flow with immediate access once payment succeeds.
• Automated expiry: the countdown begins at successful payment and access is revoked when the rental period ends.
• A complete rental history, remaining-time countdown and downloadable invoices for each user.
• Support for casting rented films and audio to a TV (e.g. Chromecast), including automatic subtitle rendering.
• An administrator rental manager with filters (status, payment method, date range), search, duration editing, refund handling and revenue analytics.

Payments

Payments are handled through industry-standard providers with secure server-side verification. Users can pay with credit card via Stripe or with Vipps (for Norwegian mobile payments). Two currencies are supported — Norwegian Kroner (NOK) and Euro (EUR) — and delivery is protected against duplicate charges and duplicate rentals. Rentals and subscriptions produce automatic invoices and receipts.

Subscriptions & Access Control

The platform combines a flexible subscription system with granular, role-based access control that adapts to each visitor:

• Three roles: USER (standard registered access), FRIEND (elevated visitor) and ADMIN (full control).
• Subscription management with automatic status updates, period tracking, cancellation handling and failed-payment handling.
• Premium content is gated so that only authorized visitors can view it, and access rights are verified in real time.

Secure CDN & Media Delivery

Video and audio are stored on a dedicated, secure CDN and streamed safely to the browser:

• HTTP range-request streaming so playback can seek and stream large files efficiently.
• Automatic subtitle conversion (uploaded .srt files are converted to WebVTT for browser and TV playback).
• A dashboard file manager (grid and compact table views) with upload, rename, delete, search and in-browser streaming, plus storage statistics and quotas.
• Media is protected by short-lived, per-user signed delivery tokens, with invalid/expired requests rejected.

LIVE Stories Page

A dedicated LIVE page showcases real-time photo and video stories pulled automatically from the media library's live/ folder. Content is grouped into highlights and plays in a lightbox, and appears automatically as soon as it is uploaded — no manual administration required. Only administrators can add stories.

AI-Assisted Content & Localization

Content creation is accelerated with AI (Cohere / Google Cloud AI). Editors write in Norwegian and produce a high-quality English translation with a single click, with the option to review and edit before saving. The result is natural, context-aware translations plus SEO-friendly titles and descriptions.

Analytics & Administration

Administrators get a full analytics dashboard: active and new users, sessions, page views, a world map, visitor locations grouped by country (with per-city drilldown), devices, operating systems, traffic channels and referrers — each exportable as CSV. A messages inbox provides read/unread tracking and direct email replies, and site settings cover watermarking, SEO and backup management.

Tech Stack

• Next.js 16 with the App Router and Turbopack
• React 19 & TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS v4 with shadcn/ui components
• Prisma ORM on MySQL / MariaDB
• NextAuth.js (email/password credentials + Google OAuth)
• Stripe (credit card payments) and Vipps (Norwegian mobile payments)
• Cloudinary for image/media optimization and delivery
• Cohere AI / Google Cloud AI for content assistance and translation
• next-intl for multi-language support
• Custom signed-token secure streaming CDN for video and audio

Security & Reliability (High-Level)

Because the platform handles payments and premium content, security is a core design concern throughout the stack — while the exact mechanisms are kept out of public documentation by design. In short, the platform applies established, defense-in-depth practices across authentication, payments, media delivery and data handling, including role-based authorization, secure payment webhook verification, signed and expiring media tokens, controlled cross-origin access and automatic cleanup of expired access. GDPR-aligned data handling and backup/recovery measures round out the approach.