Guides and Scouts | Site and signups

Context

Trabajo Comunal Universitario (TCU), the compulsory community-service term the degree requires. The team approached Group 35 of the Guides and Scouts, put the proposal to them, and ran the project under the TCU guidelines.

The scope was to open up the local group’s digital presence: its public site and its social channels. The site carries the group’s information and a membership form, in Spanish and English. That was my part.

Problem

The national Guides and Scouts association has a site of its own; Group 35 did not. Locally there was nowhere to publish their information or receive a membership request, so being found depended on direct contact.

The community-service term ends on a fixed date. From then on the site is in the hands of the group’s communications team, who do not code.

Any text change that required editing a component would have frozen the site the day the university team left.

Technical decisions

No visible text lives inside a component. All of it sits in per-language message catalogues, with structural data (routes, identifiers, section colours) in a separate file.

There are no loose colours inside components either: all of them come from CSS custom properties.

Architecture

Both routes always carry a language prefix, and the root redirects to the default language. The switcher takes the path without its prefix and rebuilds it under the other language, so changing language leaves the visitor on the same page.

Submitting the form writes the request and queues a notification. An edge function claims it and sends the confirmation.

Result

The site is live in Spanish and English, carrying the group’s information and the membership form. The communications team changes any text by editing its catalogue, without opening a component.

The edge function claims each notification atomically, so two simultaneous runs do not send the same confirmation twice. Tables holding personal data have row-level security and are not exposed to public roles.

What I learned

The admin panel was left out of scope deliberately. It would have added authentication, roles and an interface to maintain, for a group with nobody to repair it.

Documentation and a training session on the message catalogues were delivered instead. That decision has a real cost: any change beyond text still needs a deployment.