Administering the system
Settings, and branding the site
Every setting group, and why one colour is all the branding this site asks for.
On this page
Settings is nine groups. Everything here takes effect immediately and none of it needs a release.
| Group | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Site and branding | The council's name, the site name, the colour, and whether search engines may index the catalogue. |
| Support | The hours you commit to, the response targets, and how schools reach you. |
| Help chat | Whether the bubble is offered, how long you give yourself to answer, and what it says before anybody has written. |
| The relay that sends invitations, confirmations and renewal notices. | |
| Trading year | The academic year, the annual uplift, and the renewal notice period. |
| Finance | Reference formats, the default VAT rate and the transaction type. |
| Security | Session length, lockout, how long invitations last, and which roles must use a second factor. |
| Maps | Where tiles come from, where address search goes, and whether either is used at all. |
| Retention | How long personal data and the audit trail are kept. |
Branding is one colour
You set your brand colour and the rest is derived from it. The site rotates that one hue to produce the second, third and fourth it needs for cards, gradients and banner grounds, so a re-brand is a form field rather than a project.
Decoration is the only thing those derived colours are used for. Status and outcome always come from a fixed set — good, warning, bad, information — with a word beside them, which is what makes it safe to cycle a colour across a row of cards.
Light and dark
Light is the default and, unless a reader asks for the other, the only one. The operating system's preference is deliberately not consulted: the light palette is the one that gets printed for a governors' meeting and screenshotted into a tender, so a school laptop set to dark by an IT policy still shows what you signed off.
Support hours and targets
These appear on the support page, in the footer, and inside this guide, so what a school is told is what you set here rather than something written into a page somewhere.
The trading year
Setting the academic year drives renewals, expiries and the compliance year. Get it in before the summer term: renewal invitations go out sixty days ahead of the year end and they use it.
Requiring a second factor
Under Security, name the roles that must enrol. It ships empty, so nothing is required until you say so, and turning it on is a form rather than a release. Anybody in a named role is sent to the enrolment page at their next sign-in and can reach nothing else until they finish it, except their security page and signing out.
Start with System Admin, and consider School Admin next: those are the accounts that can spend money and change permissions.
Retention
How long personal data is kept, and how long the audit trail is. Set them to what your own retention schedule says rather than to what feels safe.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.