The Vital Inclusive Organization

Through the hacesfalta.org platform, I contacted an organization in Tanzania called The Vital Inclusive Organization, which is dedicated to improving the lives of people with disabilities in Tanzania.

They needed to update their website and connect it to a CMS to dynamically manage their content. Based on the designs they already had, I developed a new website using Astro and connected it to Payload CMS as the content management system.

The decision to use Astro as the framework for building the frontend was mainly because it allowed me to host it on Vercel's free tier and because it helped me to strengthen my knowledge of this technology by using it in a real project.

When working on projects for non-profit organizations, it is especially important to minimize infrastructure costs as much as possible. Payload CMS is a completely free and open-source content management system. In its early versions, it could only connect to a MongoDB database, which had and still has a fairly generous free tier on its Atlas platform in a shared cluster, so Payload CMS perfectly fit the requirements.

As a result of this project and with the intention of being able to take advantage of Supabase's free storage tier, I submitted a Pull Request, adding a new Supabase provider to Payload CMS. This would have allowed storing up to 1GB of photos without any expense in a Supabase's bucket. However, this Pull Request was never merged, and ultimately, I connected the CMS to AWS S3 bucket service through its corresponding provider.