Community Services Directory

A directory that social workers depend on has to solve two problems simultaneously: let a small editorial team maintain hundreds of records with confidence, and let the public find the right service quickly even with imprecise search terms, "food help" rather than "SNAP enrollment assistance."

Editors needed drafts, review steps, and a guarantee that half-finished edits never reach the public. Searchers needed typo-tolerant keyword matching, category browsing, and answers to the practical question of what is actually nearby, including services that are statewide hotlines rather than physical locations. And because the audience works in the field, the public app had to function as a phone app with sharing tools that fit real casework.

We adopted a two-schema publishing model: editorial data lives in one PostgreSQL schema, published data in a separate read-only schema that public clients query. Publishing is a privileged database function that snapshots a resource and everything it needs, organization, address, category links, images, into the public schema, so unfinished work cannot leak and editing published content automatically pulls it back to draft.

We built search inside the database rather than bolting on an external service. Relevance ranking is implemented in PostgreSQL itself: trigram and fuzzy word similarity weighted per field, an admin-managed synonym table baked into the search index, bonuses for category and demographic matches, and a distance signal that decays with a 10-mile half-life. Admin and public search share the same engine, and every result carries a score breakdown the admin UI can reveal for tuning.

Finally, one codebase serves four surfaces. A shared MUI component library documented in Storybook and a shared data-access package feed the admin app, the consumer website, and the Capacitor-wrapped iOS and Android apps, with the consumer app adapting between a mobile shell and a desktop layout.

Resources move through a defined lifecycle, draft, pending review, changes requested, approved, published, archived, with role-gated transitions. Editors maintain records and submit them for review; approvers and admins publish. Publication records who published, when, and which editorial version the public copy represents, and permanent deletion is a separate admin-only operation with referential safety checks.

The public app opens on a search screen combining free text, a location field, and category and demographic pickers backed by hierarchical taxonomies, with results as a ranked list or a Google Maps view. Search tolerates typos and vocabulary mismatches through trigram matching and directional synonyms, while coverage types keep statewide and nationwide services visible alongside physical locations without pretending they have a distance.

Every published resource can be shared as a QR code, an OS-level share, or a text-focused PDF handout generated on the device from the published snapshot, so a handout can never contain unreviewed edits. Admins manage taxonomies as editable trees, maintain the synonym dictionary that tunes search, run previewed mass-tag operations, and administer users through passwordless invitations with account blocking enforced at the database level.