LopezCars

The challenge

The client was paying for a platform they didn't control: they couldn't touch the design, export their data or add anything the CRM didn't offer. The brief was to migrate without losing content or rankings, matching what already worked, and finally hand them the keys to their own site.

Implementation

• Migration off a third-party CRM

  I inventoried assets, copy and structure from the old site before writing any code, so pages, URLs and tone stayed on parity and the SEO already earned survived the switch.

• Back office built on Server Actions

  A bespoke admin covering vehicles and galleries, brands, collections, bookkeeping, leads, valuations, users and site settings. Every mutation is a Next Server Action validated with Zod — no intermediate REST layer.

• Passwordless login (Auth.js v5 + Resend)

  Admin access via magic link sent through Resend. Login rejects any email that isn't already in the users table, so onboarding someone is just inviting them, and there are no passwords to leak.

• Drizzle ORM over PostgreSQL

  Fully typed schema with Drizzle (vehicles, images, brands, transactions, collections, leads, valuations, settings, audit) with versioned migrations plus database snapshot and import utilities.

• Images on Cloudinary

  Vehicle photos upload to Cloudinary through a dedicated preset and are served optimised via next-cloudinary, so detail pages stay fast even with long galleries.

• End-to-end lead capture

  Contact and free-valuation forms use React Hook Form + Zod, are rate limited, notify the dealership by email and land as manageable records in the admin panel.

• Read-only deployment mode

  One environment variable (ADMIN_READONLY) freezes the admin: the public site and its forms keep working, but every mutation is ignored and flagged with a banner. Built so the site stays up if the client ever moves hosting.

• Traceability and SEO

  Audit events record admin actions, while the public side is server-rendered with code-generated metadata, sitemap and robots.