Joe's Deli
Restaurant & CRM

A. The Storefront (User Experience)

• • SEO-Optimized Server Components: The core pages (Menu, Catering, About, Gift Cards) are rendered on the server using Next.js 15, ensuring instant page-load times, superior performance, and perfect SEO indexing to boost local discoverability.
• • Immersive GSAP Animations: Utilizing @gsap/react to orchestrate complex, buttery-smooth scroll animations and interactive visual reveals that bring the premium brand aesthetic to life directly in the browser.
• • Robust Form Handling: Multi-faceted forms across the site—spanning complex Job Applications with file uploads to Catering Inquiries and standard Contact Forms—are strictly validated. Submissions are fortified with Google reCAPTCHA v3 verification to eliminate bot spam before routing to the database.

B. The Custom CRM (Admin Dashboard)

Instead of relying on rigid, bloated platforms like WordPress, a completely custom CRM was engineered at the /crm/dashboard route. This bespoke admin panel is heavily protected by Next.js edge Middleware, validating cryptographic JSON Web Tokens (JWT) using the jose library to ensure only authorized administrators gain entry.

• • Menu & Catering Management: Full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) capabilities hooked into a MongoDB backend. Admins can instantaneously update standard daily menu items, seasonal offerings (like the St. Patrick's Menu), and dynamically adjust comprehensive catering packages.
• • Dynamic Hero Slider & Testimonials: A seamless interface allowing business owners to continuously refresh the storefront's first impression by updating homepage hero slider assets and selectively publishing glowing customer testimonials.
• • Centralized Inbox Control: A unified dashboard interface dedicated to parsing and organizing incoming job applications and user contact messages, moving away from cluttered generic inboxes to a focused internal tool.
• • Gift Card Configuration: Custom tooling to update digital and physical gift card purchase options, ensuring pricing and availability are always up to date.

C. Security & Integrations

• • Middleware Protection: Next.js middleware specifically intercepts all /crm/* routes. By verifying the user's encrypted session token secret, it instantly blocks unauthorized access and redirects unverified traffic back to the secure /crm/login portal.
• • File Upload Security: Integrated UploadThing configured with secure, authenticated API endpoints (/api/uploadthing), ensuring that only validated administrators can upload menu imagery or modify media assets, keeping the infrastructure protected from malicious uploads.
• • Automated Notification System: Engineered fully automated SMTP endpoints (/api/contact-messages, /api/job-applications) utilizing Nodemailer. Whenever users submit inquiries or apply for employment, the system dispatches instant, formatted high-priority alerts straight to the management team.