TownPost is a noticeboard website for one town, district or community: buy and sell, jobs, land and property, shops, doctors, classes, services, announcements, lost and found, and marriage proposals. It does what a community Facebook group cannot. Every ad stays findable, sits in the right category and village, has proper details such as price, year or salary, and shows up on Google. The group remains the place people share things; TownPost is where they can be searched.

Posting from a phone
- Category, one line of text, photos, a phone number and a code by SMS. No registration form and no password: the phone number is the poster's identity
- Photos are shrunk on the phone before upload, so they go up fast on mobile data and hosting space lasts
- Each category asks for its own details (vehicle year, land size, salary, class subject…) only after it is chosen
- Returning posters skip the number and code

My account for posters and shops
- Live ads, ads waiting for review, views, and how many people asked for their number
- Renew for free, move to the top, feature, mark as sold
- Their payments, saved-search alerts and profile in one place

Finding things
- Search that copes with how people type: ඉඩම්, idam and land find the same ads. You keep the list of spellings, in any script
- Filters by area, price and each category's own details
- A page for every category, every area and every category-in-an-area, with the structured data Google reads for products, jobs and businesses; sitemap included
- "Text me new ads like these": a daily SMS or WhatsApp alert for a saved search

Safety for a small town
- Phone numbers are never written on a page: visitors tap "Show phone number", limited per hour, and every reveal is counted
- New posts wait for a moderator until the number is trusted; a review queue with one-tap "approve all unflagged", flags for banned words, near-duplicates and prices far below the usual
- Report button on every ad, takedown requests with a named contact, block a number and everything it posted in one action, and an audit log that cannot be edited
- Marriage proposals with their own privacy rules: contact by request only, photos and private details for approved contacts only, nothing on Google, withdrawal deletes everything

Money (all optional)
- Paid business listings for shops, clinics and classes; featured ads; paid moves to the top after the free ones. Individuals never pay to post
- Bank transfer (with slip upload) and cash, confirmed by your staff
- Banner ads you sell to local businesses: placement, category, start and end dates, views and taps counted

Messages and languages
- SMS through SMSLenz (Sri Lanka); notices by SMS or WhatsApp (Meta Cloud API) with SMS as the fall-back. Every text is editable per language
- Sinhala, Tamil and English on the public site and in messages; add more languages from the admin. The admin screens are in English

Running it
- Staff roles: owner, admin, moderator. A dashboard showing what is waiting and what needs attention
- Your own logo and browser icon, uploaded in Site settings
- Ads expire on their own, hidden but never deleted (the link still answers), with a one-tap "still available?" renew text before
- Categories, their fields, areas and villages are all set up from the admin — no programming, any town

Built for shared hosting
- Upload the zip, open your domain, follow the web installer — no SSH, Composer, Node, build step or queue worker
- Updates from the admin: upload the new version and press Update; your settings, photos and data are never overwritten

Requirements
- PHP 8.2+ with pdo_mysql, mbstring, intl, openssl, fileinfo, curl, zip and GD; MySQL 5.7.8+ or MariaDB 10.2.7+; one cron job; an SMS gateway account for sign-in codes

What's included
- The full PHP source, the web installer, sample data for a fictional town, the user guide, the installation and update guides

1. Create an empty MySQL database and a user for it in your hosting panel.
2. Upload the TownPost zip into your domain's folder and extract it there.
3. Open your domain. The installer starts: server check, database, then your site, your owner sign-in and your licence key (from your CodeCrate account).
4. Sign in at /admin with the owner sign-in.
5. Add the one cron job the dashboard shows (every minute).
6. Set the takedown contact, your areas and categories, and your SMS gateway.

Updates: download the new zip from your CodeCrate account and apply it from Settings → System update (owner sign-in). Your data, photos and settings are never overwritten.

Set up in this order: site settings, logo and the takedown contact → areas and villages → categories and their details → search spellings → banned words → SMS gateway (send yourself a test) → payments and banner ads if you charge → your moderators. Then every day: the review queue, reports, payments to confirm. The full guide, USER-GUIDE.md, is in the download.