Desh Barta – Newspaper PHP Script for District and Regional Bangla News

Desh Barta (দেশবার্তা) is a newspaper php script built with Laravel for Bangla papers that cover the whole country district by district. It suits a printed daily or weekly going online and a regional portal fed by correspondents in many districts. The design is clean and white with sky-blue accents, and the homepage is cut into eleven numbered sections plus six boxes at the bottom.

Two blocks make it different: "আমার এলাকার সংবাদ" (news from my area), where a reader picks a district and reads only local stories, and "আজকের পত্রিকা" (today's paper), a mini front page built from the day's top stories that opens all of that day's news.

You can try the full site with sample news on the live demo at deshbarta.demotheme.xyz.

Built for papers with district correspondents

Many Bangla papers live on their network: a desk in Dhaka and reporters in every district. Desh Barta is shaped around that work.

• Regional and divisional dailies in Chattogram, Rajshahi, Khulna, Sylhet, Barishal, Rangpur and Mymensingh.
• District weeklies that want daily updates between print editions.
• Print dailies moving their pages online without losing their paper identity.
• Press clubs and journalist groups that publish local news together.
• Upazila portals covering one area in depth.
• Developers who need clean news website source code to build on.

Every story carries a district and an upazila, so the same newsroom serves national readers and people who only want news from home.

The homepage, section by section

The page is long, calm and easy to scan. A blue square marks each section title and headlines use a light weight, so a busy page still feels open.

Sections 1 to 5

Section 1 is a lead with six headlines in one column. Section 2 is a big lead with six cards. Section 3 pairs a lead and six headlines with the my-area box, where readers choose a division, district and upazila. Section 4 repeats the big-lead pattern, and section 5 sets a lead and eight cards next to the today's paper box.

Sections 6 to 11 and the bottom boxes

Section 6 uses a two, big, two layout. Sections 7 and 9 have two big stories with three headlines; sections 8 and 10 show four cards. Section 11 holds four cards and five headlines with its own side box. Six small boxes at the bottom close the page, each with one category.

Latest and popular tabs, a poll box and the sidebar ads sit on the right. In Admin, Homepage you choose which category fills every numbered section, so national, sports or district news can move up or down without code.

District news in this newspaper php script

Local news is not an extra here; it is built into every story. The news form asks for a district and an upazila. Readers then reach local stories three ways: the my-area box on the homepage, the country page with a division and district picker, and the district name shown on each story.

For a correspondent network using this newspaper php script, it means one simple habit: every reporter tags the place. Your Sylhet readers see Sylhet news, while the homepage still shows the biggest national stories first.

Today's paper box

Print papers have readers who like to start from a front page. The today's paper box draws one automatically from the day's lead and top online stories, with the date in Bangla, and a click opens the archive of that day. It is not an e-paper or PDF upload; it simply gives those readers a familiar way in.

A newsroom from reporter to editor

Three roles keep the desk in order. A Reporter writes and sends stories to Waiting for an editor and cannot publish. An Editor publishes every story and manages categories, tags, the homepage and polls. The Admin also controls ads, pages, users, settings and the licence.

Each account has a designation such as District Correspondent or Staff Reporter, shown with the byline. The dashboard counts stories, lists those waiting for an editor and shows the week's most read news. The admin works on a phone too, so a correspondent can file from the upazila bazaar.

Writing a story

• Shoulder line, headline and summary, with length hints for each.
• Text editor with sub-headings, lists, quotes, links, pictures and YouTube; pasted text keeps simple formatting only.
• Main picture, caption, YouTube link and extra pictures for a photo story.
• Google and Facebook title and description, or the headline and summary by default.
• Type (News, Video, Photo story, Opinion), byline, district, upazila and tags.
• Lead news, Picture news and Breaking switches, and a publish time for scheduled stories.

Ads, polls and pages

Desh Barta has eight ad places: a wide banner under the ticker, wide banners after section 4 and after section 8, two sidebar boxes of 300 by 250, and three places in every story, under the headline, after the text and inside the text after every four paragraphs. The inline place repeats in long stories.

A regional paper sells most ads to local businesses, and a newspaper php script should make that sale easy. Each ad has a name for you, a banner with a link or an ad network code such as Google AdSense, start and end dates and a click count. Your sales person can show a local clinic how many people opened its banner this month.

Online polls ask a Yes, No or No comment question; results appear with percentages. Pages for About, Contact, Privacy and Terms are linked in the footer, and you can add more, such as a list of district correspondents or an advertising rate page.

Reader pages and search

Readers get category, tag, author, latest, popular, search and archive pages, a video page for YouTube reports and a photo gallery for photo stories. A story page shows the section path, headline, summary, byline and time, share buttons for Facebook, WhatsApp and X, copy link and print, then tags, related news and the next story.

Every story has fields for its Google title and description, plus structured data for news articles. A sitemap at /sitemap.xml and an RSS feed at /feed help search engines and news apps find new stories. Your Google Analytics ID goes into Settings.

Bangla throughout

The reader side is fully Bangla: Bangla digits, dates, the Bangla calendar and "x minutes ago" times, with the SolaimanLipi font served from your own server. A newspaper php script for Bangladesh should not show English months on a Bangla page, and this one does not.

Install the newspaper php script without a terminal

Most papers do not have a server engineer, so the newspaper php script installs like a normal website. The zip contains the complete Laravel app with its vendor folder and built files, so Composer, Node and SSH are not needed. On cPanel you create a database, upload and extract the zip, set the domain's document root to the public folder and open the site.

The web installer then checks the server, connects to MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite, asks for the site name in Bangla and English and your admin account, and takes the licence key. In the last step you install with or without demo content: sample news, photos, videos, a poll and house ads, or a clean paper with only the categories and standard pages.

After that the installer locks itself. Settings let you change the logo, favicon, Bangla and English names, tagline, editor and publisher lines, office address, phone, e-mail, footer note, ticker length and social links.

Licence and updates

One licence key works on one domain. Activate it in the installer or in Admin, License, and move it by removing the key from the old domain first. Local test addresses run without a key. New versions are announced on the License page.

Because you get the full news website source code, a developer can add a new block, connect an app or change the design while the newsroom rules stay the same. Updates keep your .env, storage and uploads.

Desh Barta is built on Laravel, the open-source PHP framework. See all our Laravel projects for other news portals and business sites.

What is in the package

• The full Desh Barta source code, ready to upload
• The white and sky-blue homepage with eleven numbered sections, my-area and today's paper boxes
• Story, category, district, video, photo, author, tag, search and archive pages
• Admin, Editor and Reporter roles, eight ad places, polls and pages
• The cPanel web installer with or without demo content
• Documentation in English and Bangla
• Updates with your licence key

A good newspaper php script should save a paper months of setup. Load your categories, add your correspondents, and the first district stories can go live the same week.