Steward of Life

Client: Steward of Life
Industry: Nonprofit & ministry
Year: 2026

A bilingual site for an Ethiopian non-profit developing servant leaders, empowering youth and strengthening Christian marriages: donations, events, books and resources, a blog and a gallery, over a 58-table content and membership schema.

Tables behind content, members and giving

Languages served from the database

Programmes under one platform

What it covers

Donations
Events & registration
Books & resources library
Blog
Gallery
Member accounts
Bilingual content (EN/AM)
Admin dashboard

An organisation with more than one job

Steward of Life runs leadership development, youth work and marriage ministry, publishes books and resources, holds events and takes donations. Each of those is a different content type with a different audience, and lumping them into one "pages" table would have made the site unmaintainable within a year.

Bilingual as a data problem

The audience reads Amharic and English. Translation lives in the database next to the content it translates rather than in files that need a deploy, so the organisation can publish in both languages without a developer.

Giving is the point

Donation is not a footer link. It is a first-class flow with its own page, and the rest of the site exists to earn the click.

How it was built

Framework: SvelteKit

Server load functions, form actions and endpoints; SSR by default.
Svelte 5

Runes for reactivity ($state, $derived, $effect).
Language: TypeScript

Strict mode across app and server code.
Data: MySQL

Primary datastore.
Drizzle Kit

Committed SQL migrations rather than push-to-prod diffing.
Drizzle ORM

Typed schema and queries, with migrations generated from the schema.
Auth: Better Auth

Session-based auth with server-side verification.
Forms: Superforms

Progressive-enhancement forms with server-side validation.
Zod

One schema validating both client and server.
UI: Tipex

Rich-text editor for CMS content.
Lucide

Icon set.
TanStack Table

Sorting, filtering and pagination for admin tables.
Bits UI

Headless primitives behind the component library.
Chart.js

Reporting charts.
Embla

Carousels.
Dark mode

System-aware theme switching.
Tailwind CSS

Utility-first styling with a project design token layer.
Reporting: jsPDF

Server-side PDF generation for reports and receipts.
jsPDF AutoTable

Tabular report export.
Payments: Chapa

Ethiopian payment gateway.
AI: Google Gemini

Shopping assistant answering against the live catalogue.
i18n: Paraglide i18n

Compiled translations, English and Amharic.
Infrastructure: Client image compression

Uploads compressed in the browser before hitting the server.
Nodemailer

Transactional email over SMTP.

Inside the system

Steward of Life donations table — Donations carry currency, bank, receiving account, cause and recurrence, with the next charge date computed for recurring gifts.

Steward of Life home page — The organisation runs three programmes; the home page has to introduce all of them without becoming a list.

Steward of Life giving page — Giving is a first-class flow with its own page rather than a link in the footer.

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