Community Connect

Overview

Community Connect is a volunteer-coordinator platform that matches people who want to help with organisations that need them. It is a full operations loop — identity, projects, membership, approvals, and reporting — not a social feed. Three roles share the same system: admin, organisation, and volunteer.

The implementation is deliberately vanilla: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with no third-party JS or PHP frameworks. That constraint was part of the brief — prove the product on a stack a campus or NGO can host cheaply.

Source: github.com/induwarauthsara/community-connect.

Problem

Volunteer programmes stall when sign-ups live in a form, assignments live in a chat, and approvals live in someone’s inbox. Organisations cannot see who is available; volunteers cannot see what they are allowed to join; admins cannot report on either. Community Connect puts those workflows in one MVC-style PHP application.

What I built

• Role-based access for admins, organisations, and volunteers
• Project creation, assignment, and membership
• Approval workflows so organisations and admins can gate participation
• Profiles for people and organisations
• Admin dashboard and reporting
• MySQL persistence with an MVC-style PHP structure

Impact

• A complete volunteer-ops product that can run on shared PHP hosting
• Clear separation of duties between the three roles instead of a single “user” table with flags
• A pattern reusable for campus clubs, NGOs, and community chapters that cannot adopt a SaaS volunteer tool

Key features

• Sign-in and profiles per role
• Project listing, join requests, and assignment
• Membership and approval status
• Admin reporting on projects and people
• Lightweight UI that works without a modern SPA toolchain

Technologies

PHP and MySQL on the server. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the client. No React, no Laravel — by design.

My role

Solo full-stack build: data model, role matrix, approval flow, UI, and the public repository.