Minbar

Minbar started with a simple observation: khutbah Jumaat are often published across different religious departments, mosque websites, and local archives, but there isn’t a single focused place to browse them.

So I built one.

A focused place for khutbah

Minbar brings khutbah from different sources into one reading experience.

Each khutbah keeps its original source, location, date, and language context. Localized editions and concise summaries make it easier to understand what a khutbah is about before reading the full text.

The current khutbah can be featured each week, while previous sermons remain available as an archive.

The goal is simple: make the khutbah itself the focus.

The feed updates itself

The interesting part of Minbar happens behind the reader.

A Friday cron pipeline runs hourly during the publishing window and checks configured religious sources for new khutbah. New content is collected, processed, and added to the feed without needing to update each sermon manually.

The pipeline runs in the Hermes environment.

DeepSeek handles translation and summarisation, producing localized content and concise summaries in Malay, English, and Indonesian where the source allows it. The resulting feed is then published for the site to consume.

So instead of:

find khutbah → copy → translate → format → publish

it’s closer to:

collect → translate and summarise → verify → publish → read

From khutbah to shareable poster

The same pipeline also generates a poster for each khutbah.

Satori takes a structured poster template and generates the SVG, while Resvg renders it into a downloadable PNG.

Each poster contains the khutbah title, source, date, location, and key points in a 4:5 format suitable for sharing.

Readers can download the poster directly from Minbar instead of having to create one themselves.

Still evolving

Minbar is still an ongoing project alongside goSolat.

The feed, language handling, source attribution, and reading experience continue to evolve as more khutbah and sources are added.

For me, the interesting part isn’t just building another place to read khutbah. It’s building the little system around it so that the content can keep arriving, getting processed, and becoming useful without everything having to be done manually.