Super Portistas
The largest FC Porto fan community, now as its own platform: RSS aggregation, AI-written articles, SportMonks data, gamification and push on WordPress.
This has been my baby project for over 12 years. My partner Pedro Andrade and I bought the Facebook fan page when the market wasn't yet saturated; he grew it to this day, to over 400,000 followers — the largest community of FC Porto fans. Over the years we tested, got things right and wrong across several versions of the site. This version's challenge is the most ambitious: turning a giant social audience into our own platform and community, and running a high-tempo sports outlet almost on autopilot, without losing editorial quality.
The base decision was modular: a thin theme for presentation and four custom plugins for the domain, so each piece could evolve without breaking the others.
- super-portistas-wordpress-theme — presentation (HTMX + Alpine.js frontend, contextual sidebars, user dashboard, theme options). Depends on Core.
- super-portistas-core — domain: sp/v1 REST API, gamification + leaderboard, predictions, polls, auth and push via Firebase, Brevo integration (double opt-in, digests, alerts, achievements).
- rss-manager — automatic ingestion (WP Cron) of RSS, YouTube, X/Twitter and newspaper front pages into the ai_news_article CPT, with hash dedup, filters, logs and SSRF protection.
- ai-news — the AI editorial layer (Gemini): pre/post-match articles from match data, a “daily summary”, curated content and a “Source Studio” (articles from a URL/text).
- api-sportmonks — the data bridge: syncs matches into the aps_jogo CPT, maps teams/leagues, live minutes, and helpers consumed by the theme and AI News.
An end-to-end automated pipeline: api-sportmonks feeds factual data → ai-news turns it into articles with Gemini → rss-manager aggregates news/videos/socials/front-pages → super-portistas-core handles the community (gamification, predictions, push, newsletter) → the theme serves it all with a light HTMX + Alpine.js frontend. The plugins talk through hooks/filters and a helper API, keeping low coupling.
It's not a new project — it's an audience proven over a decade. Over 400,000 Facebook followers and, on GA4 (2016–2026), more than 515,000 users, 1.2 million page views and 854,000 organic-social sessions. This version is the mature bet: converting that audience into an owned community. The registration, gamification and push layer is in beta — first 10 sign-ups and promising signals — on a mature, documented technical base (theme + 4 plugins) with changelogs, PHPUnit tests and security.