Social Impact Businesses

Live site: changeplease-6hw.pages.dev

A static site that displays a map of social impact businesses — places that train and employ people in recovery, reentry, and other under-served communities. Initial pilot covers the Denver area.

Goals

• Map view of social impact businesses, pinned by type. The type catalog is sheet-driven (a Types tab) with labels, colors, and icon slugs — new types appear without a code change. Featured locations get a gold star without jumping the distance-sorted list.
• Per-location page at a stable URL, with social-share preview tags baked into the HTML at build time.
• Metadata beyond what a Google Business listing provides: populations served, hiring model, mission.
• Public submissions through an embedded Google Form; admin approves before publishing. (The /suggest route is temporarily hidden in the UI while the form flow is rebuilt — route still exists in src/pages/suggest.astro.)
• Admin manages everything inside a single Google Sheet — no custom admin UI. Location types are sheet-driven (a Types tab) so new categories can be added without a code change.
• Near-zero maintenance: no server to patch, no churning dependency tree, no monthly upgrade ritual.
• Free end-to-end at the project's expected scale.
• Geocoded coordinates stored once and reused (license-clean via MapTiler).

Non-goals

• User accounts, login, favorites, or reviews.
• Native mobile apps.
• Real-time data (hours, wait times, live availability) — link out to the business's own site or Google for that.
• Brand-level pages for multi-location operators.
• Analytics beyond Cloudflare's built-in cookieless metrics.
• An embeddable map widget.
• Approval thank-you emails.

Stack

Layer	Choice
CMS / admin	Google Sheet (two tabs: Locations + Types)
Location taxonomy	Sheet-driven Types tab (key / label / color / icon slug); icon catalog in src/lib/location-type-icons.ts
Automation	Google Apps Script bound to the sheet
Public submission	Google Form (appends to the sheet)
Site generator	Astro (static output)
Map tiles	MapLibre GL JS + OpenFreeMap (free, no API key)
Geocoding	MapTiler (license permits storing the returned coordinates)
Hosting	Cloudflare Pages
Rebuild trigger	Apps Script onEdit / onFormSubmit → Cloudflare deploy hook

Running locally

Two modes. Pick based on whether you want real data or speed.

Against the live Google Sheet (needs .env with SHEET_ID):

npm install
npm run dev

Against committed JSON fixtures (fast, offline, no secrets):

npm run dev:fast

Both serve on http://localhost:4321. build and build:fast follow the same pattern. Cloudflare production always uses the live sheet; :fast is local-only.

For setup of the data backend, see docs/SETUP.md. For ongoing operations (watching the pipeline, debugging failures, admin workflow), see docs/MAINTENANCE.md.

Quality pass before pushing

Single command:

npm run verify

Type-check + fixture-backed build + WCAG a11y on the built HTML. No network calls, no secrets. ~30 seconds.

Also useful:

• npm run doctor — infra health check: sheet sharing, MapTiler key, Cloudflare project, deploy hook, PUBLIC_SITE_URL drift. Needs .env.
• npm run build — same as verify's build step but against the live Google Sheet. Catches "renamed a column header" bugs that fixtures can't.

Repo layout

README.md              goals + non-goals (this file)
docs/SETUP.md          one-time stand-up: Sheet, MapTiler, Cloudflare, Apps Script
docs/MAINTENANCE.md    day-to-day: watching the pipeline, failures, admin workflow
docs/brainstorms/      the WHAT and WHY
docs/plans/            the HOW
src/                   the Astro site
scripts/               Apps Script source, setup + doctor CLIs
public/fixtures/       sample data so the site builds without secrets

License

MIT.