Building and Deploying a Role-Based Django PWA: From Starter Template to Production

I recently built a full volunteer-opportunity board on top of a Django starter template — complete with role-based accounts, image uploads, a Progressive Web App layer, and a real production deployment. This post walks through what I built, the decisions behind it, and — more usefully — the deployment problems I actually hit and how I solved them, since that's the part tutorials usually skip. Live app: https://volunteer-board-nccd.onrender.com Source code: https://github.com/13getid/django-starter Demo accounts if you want to poke around without signing up: Organization: [email protected] / DemoPass123! Volunteer: [email protected] / DemoPass123! The starting point Rather than building a Django project from a blank startproject, I started from a SaaS Pegasus-derived starter template that already had a lot of the tedious groundwork done: django-allauth for authentication, a custom user model with an avatar field, Tailwind v4 + DaisyUI wired up through