Guna Cinema
Digital flagship and booking platform for Guna Cinema, a luxury cinema in Nepal.
Overview.
Guna Cinema is a full-stack Next.js 16 and React 19 web app that serves as the digital flagship for a premium luxury cinema chain in Guna, Madhya Pradesh. The platform features real-time movie showtimes, an interactive seat-selection booking flow, PDF ticket generation, and a VIP loyalty program with tier enrollment. Behind the scenes, Payload CMS 3 (a next-native headless CMS) lets non-technical staff edit content pages like about, gallery, contact and team info without touching code, while movie data streams in from an external API. The whole system runs an obsidian, gold and silver theme built with Tailwind CSS 4, Framer Motion animations, and custom UI components.
Challenges.
The core problem was integrating Payload CMS 3 with Next.js 16, a very new release, while keeping a clean architectural split between CMS-driven and code-driven pages. That meant standing up SQLite as a lightweight database, configuring local-disk media uploads, and refactoring hardcoded components into async server components that fetch content through Payload's Local API. Along the way we resolved Next.js and Payload version-compatibility issues, set patterns for icon mapping (name strings to lucide components), and added live preview for editors, all while keeping movie data out of scope from the CMS. Deployment runs on a persistent Node server (Hostinger Cloud Panel) with the database and media files excluded from redeploys so data always persists.
