Joomla and private school
A school on Joomla, where access levels have already decided the scope
Joomla gives every article, category and module a viewing access level, and schools use that feature more than almost anyone. Parent letters sit under Registered. Governor papers sit under Special. The policies a parent asks about are split between the two without anybody having planned it, because each was filed by whoever uploaded it. That filing decision, made years ago by a series of different people, is what determines the scope of a school assistant on this platform, and it is worth auditing before anything else.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Joomla install guide covers the tag, and the private school guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Viewing access levels decide what a crawl can read. Anything filed under Registered or Special is invisible to a signed out visitor and therefore to the crawl, which means a school's policy library is usually half readable and half not, along a line nobody drew deliberately.
- Module assignment in Joomla is per menu item, which turns the safeguarding question into a list of checkboxes. Deciding that the launcher appears on the admissions menu and not on the pupil area is done on the module's assignment screen rather than in code, and it can be reviewed by somebody who does not write any.
- Schools on Joomla usually run a downloads component for policies, newsletters and letters, which produces a category tree of files rather than pages. That is where the answers are, and it is a shape a link following crawl handles badly.
- The audience split is unusually clean here compared to other platforms, because the menu structure already separates parents, prospective parents and pupils. That structure is worth using rather than duplicating in settings.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Joomla guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a private school site specifically.
Audit access levels before you crawl
Sign out and open the policy library as a member of the public sees it. Compare that against what is actually filed. The gap is your material problem, and it is usually larger than the school expects, because documents get filed under Registered as a default rather than as a decision.
Some of what is hidden should be published: an admissions policy, a complaints procedure, a uniform list. Some should stay hidden and be uploaded as a source instead, which lets the assistant answer from it without putting it on the public site. Some should stay hidden and stay out entirely, governor papers and staff documents in particular.
Do the sort first. It takes an afternoon and it decides the whole scope of what the assistant can do, and it is a genuinely useful piece of housekeeping regardless of the widget.
Use module assignment as the safeguarding control
If you chose to print the tag from a Custom module rather than from the template, that module's assignment screen lets you choose which menu items it appears on. That is the natural place to express a decision like: on admissions, on the visiting and open morning pages, on the contact page, and nowhere in the pupil area.
The advantage over a code condition is that the safeguarding lead can read it. A list of menu items with ticks against them is reviewable by the person whose decision it actually is, which is not true of a template edit.
The cost is that it only covers menu items. A page reached by a link rather than by a menu entry inherits whatever the default is, so check the assignment against the pages people actually reach rather than against the menu tree alone.
Get the downloads component into the material
The policies, newsletters and letters in a downloads component are files in a category tree, presented behind a listing that a crawl may or may not follow to the end. Do not rely on it finding them.
Upload the documents you want answered from, directly, choosing them rather than sweeping the folder. A school's downloads area accumulates years of dated letters, and a newsletter from three years ago is material that will produce an answer about an event that has been and gone.
Where the answerable material lives
| The public half of the policy library | Whatever is filed at public access already: admissions policy, complaints procedure, behaviour policy, the documents a school is expected to publish. These are readable as they stand and are the first thing to crawl. |
|---|---|
| The Registered half, uploaded rather than published | Parent letters and the practical documents filed behind a login because that was the default. Uploading a document as a source lets it answer without publishing it, which is often exactly what the school wants and rarely what it realised was possible. |
| Term dates and the joining pack | Term and holiday dates, uniform requirements, equipment lists, wraparound care times. These live in the downloads component on most Joomla school sites and they are the highest volume questions the office answers. |
| Admissions and fees, kept out of the downloads tree | The timeline per entry point and the full fee schedule including compulsory extras. Worth publishing as pages rather than files even where the school's habit is to upload everything, because these are the two things prospective parents search for before they know the school's document conventions. |
The first thing to get right
Sign out, open the site as a stranger, and list every policy document that is invisible from there.
That list is simultaneously the material audit, the housekeeping the school has been meaning to do, and the scope decision. Until it exists, nobody knows what the assistant would be able to answer, and every other setup choice is being made blind.
The failure that belongs to this combination
An answer built from a letter dated two years ago
A downloads component keeps everything, because deleting a school letter feels like destroying a record. So a category holds a run of newsletters, admissions letters and dated arrangements going back years, all readable, all correct on the day they were written.
Sweep that folder into the material and the assistant will answer a question about the school day using arrangements that were temporary and ended. The citation is a real document on the school's own site, which makes it very hard for a parent to doubt and very awkward to explain.
Choose documents individually rather than by folder, and prefer the standing document over the dated one wherever both exist. A term dates page beats a letter announcing term dates. A uniform list beats the letter that announced the uniform change.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a private school visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can it answer from documents we keep behind the parent login?
- It can, if you upload them as sources. That is different from publishing them: the document does not appear on the site, and the answer comes back with a citation to it. Whether it should is a school decision rather than a technical one, and it is worth taking deliberately rather than by uploading a folder.
- How do we keep it off the pupil pages?
- If the tag is printed from a Custom module, use that module's menu assignment and untick the pupil area. The advantage is that the resulting list is readable by your safeguarding lead. Check it against the pages pupils actually reach, not only the menu tree, because a page reached by a link takes the default.
- Should we index the whole downloads section?
- No. It holds years of dated letters that were correct when written, and an assistant answering from a two year old arrangement letter is confidently wrong with a genuine citation. Pick the standing documents individually and leave the correspondence out.
Keep reading
- Installing on JoomlaPut the tag in a copy of your template's index.php, or in a Custom module with the editor set to none, then clear the Joomla cache.
- Everything for a private schoolAdmissions timelines, fees, bursaries and uniform lists are safe ground for a school assistant. Anything about a named pupil or applicant is not.
- A school site on WordPress, and the documents it deliberately withholdsThe fee schedule and prospectus are gated files, the parent portal is a separate origin, and safeguarding decides where the launcher may appear.
- Open mornings, member areas, and an install you cannot subtract fromPast open mornings stay published, the member area shows a launcher to parents while hiding its pages from a crawl, and injection can add but not subtract.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.