Manor Gardens Community
A neighbourhood hub for a Durban suburb, built so a community with no technical staff could run it themselves.
The situation
A suburb's useful information tends to be scattered across half a dozen Facebook groups and a WhatsApp thread nobody can search. Manor Gardens needed one place for it: what is on this week, emergency numbers when they are needed in a hurry, trades neighbours actually vouch for, classifieds, lost pets, environment and tree guides, and a way to report a civic problem and follow what happens to it.
The hard constraint was that a volunteer community organisation would be running it. Anything requiring ongoing developer time would quietly die.
What we did
The design decision that shaped everything else: no passwords. Every listing is confirmed by email, and businesses edit their own entry from a private link. Nobody has an account to forget, nobody has to reset anything, and the committee is not fielding login problems.
Classifieds renew themselves rather than expiring quietly, so the listings stay current without anyone auditing them. The service directory, events, lost pets and civic reporting each work the same way: self-serve, verified by email.
It runs serverless on Astro with Cloudflare D1 for data and R2 for uploads, which keeps running costs near nothing for an organisation that does not have a budget line for hosting.
Where it landed
Live at manorgardens.co.za, run by the community rather than by us. It is the project we point at when someone asks whether a small organisation can have something genuinely useful without an ongoing technical dependency.