MijuDrama
A modern platform for discovering, tracking, rating, and discussing Asian drama, donghua, and manhua.
The Problem
Fans of Chinese dramas, donghua, and manhua had no single platform to discover new titles, track their watchlists, rate and review shows, or join community discussions. Existing sites focused only on dramas or only on anime — nothing covered the full spectrum of Chinese entertainment in one place.
The Approach
Built a full-featured entertainment database and editorial blog with Next.js 15 and React 19. Designed sectioned catalog pages (Trending / Currently Airing / Top Rated / Upcoming) for dramas, movies, variety shows, donghua, and manhua. Implemented personal watchlists, 1–10 ratings with written reviews, custom public lists, a community forum with threaded comments, and a rich-text editorial blog powered by Lexical editor.
Key Challenges
Integrating data from multiple external APIs (TMDB, AniList, Wikidata) while keeping the catalog consistent and up-to-date was the biggest technical challenge. Built a data pipeline that merges sources without duplicates. Also implemented live next-episode countdowns for airing donghua, which required reliable scheduling and timezone handling. Performance at scale demanded ISR, Redis caching via Upstash, and careful Prisma query optimization against MongoDB Atlas.
Technical Decisions
Next.js 15
App Router with ISR for SEO-first rendering — every title page needs to be discoverable by search engines with structured data and sitemaps.
Prisma + MongoDB
Flexible document schema for diverse content types (dramas, donghua, manhua) with different field shapes, plus fast reads with Atlas indexing.
better-auth
Production-grade auth with email/password, Google OAuth, and 2FA — critical for a platform with user-generated reviews and forum posts.
Upstash Redis
Rate limiting and caching layer to handle API quotas from TMDB/AniList and reduce database load on high-traffic catalog pages.
The Result
Live at mijudrama.com — currently averaging 100–200 daily visitors and 2,000–5,000 total visitors over its first 3 months in production since launch in June. Features personal watchlists, ratings/reviews, custom public lists, and community discussions.
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