# Brentwood client guides — test brief for a fresh session **Your job:** act as a Brentwood staff member trying to run this website using **only the built-in guides**, and report where the guides are wrong, missing, or unclear. You are testing the *documentation*, not the website. Bring **no prior knowledge of this project**. That is the point — if you have to work something out from the code or from the site's internals, the guide has failed and that is a finding. --- ## Where things are | What | Where | |---|---| | The site under test | `brentwooddev` (the WordPress staging site). **Never** `brentwood.ca` — that's the live Laravel site and is strictly read-only. | | The guides | In wp-admin, left-hand menu → **Guides**. Read them there, the way a client would. | | Guide source (for reference only) | `/srv/apps/brentwooddev/docs/guides-draft/` — `guides/`, plus `INVENTORY.md` (what's meant to be covered) and `KEYWORDS.md` (hidden search terms). | | Login | Ask rian. The site also sits behind a shared preview gate (password in `/srv/CLAUDE.md`). | --- ## Rules of engagement 1. **Search first, browse second.** Real people arrive by typing a question. For each task below, *first* search the Guides screen in your own words (e.g. "how do I put a video at the top of a page"). Record whether search got you to the right **section**. A search miss is a finding even if the guide covers the topic perfectly. 2. **Follow the guide literally.** Don't fill gaps with WordPress general knowledge. If a step says "click **Update**" and the button says something else, that's a finding. 3. **Don't read the theme/plugin code** to answer a question. (Reading it to *confirm* a suspected inaccuracy afterwards is fine.) 4. **Work safely — this is a staging site with real content:** - Create new things rather than editing existing ones. Prefix anything you make with `TEST — `. - Leave test content as **Draft** where possible, and **delete it when you're done**. - **Do not** delete or trash real staff, posts, pages, users, forms or menus. - **Do not submit the Admissions or Contact forms** — rian is configuring live email notifications, and a test submission may email a real person. - **Do not** change Settings, plugins, or the theme. - You may create one test user; delete it afterwards. 5. **Note anything that surprises you**, even if the guide is technically correct. "Correct but I didn't believe it" is useful. --- ## What to produce A findings file at `/srv/apps/brentwood/notes/guide-test-findings.md`, newest-first, one row per finding: | Field | Notes | |---|---| | **Task** | which task below you were doing | | **Guide / section** | the guide title and the H2 heading (or "none — no guide covers this") | | **Type** | `inaccuracy` (guide says X, screen says Y) · `gap` (task not covered at all) · `unclear` (couldn't act on it confidently) · `search-miss` (couldn't find it by searching) · `stale-shot` (screenshot doesn't match the screen) | | **Severity** | `blocker` (couldn't complete the task) · `major` (completed it, but only by guessing) · `minor` (cosmetic/wording) | | **What happened** | the actual words on screen vs the words in the guide | | **Suggested fix** | a concrete rewrite where you can | Finish with a short summary: which guides are in good shape, which need work, and the **top 10 fixes** in priority order. --- ## The tasks Grouped by the person who'd do them. Work through as many as you can; **breadth beats depth** — a shallow pass over everything is more useful than an exhaustive pass over three guides. ### A. Marketing / Communications — the everyday core (highest value) 1. **Publish a blog post** with a title, body, featured image and category. 2. **Make the byline say someone else's name** (a student's), while your account publishes it. *(This is the single most confusable feature on the site — does the guide make it click?)* 3. **Backdate a post** to last week. 4. **Add a photo gallery hero** to a post. 5. **Feature blog posts on a page**, filtered to one category. 6. **Unpublish** a post without deleting it. 7. **Add a new staff member** with photo, position, credentials and department. 8. **Fix a staff member sorting under the wrong name** (e.g. a two-part surname). 9. **Hide a staff member who's on leave**, then bring them back. 10. **Show a department's staff on a page**, and confirm a newly added person appears automatically. 11. **Add a job posting**, with an "Open until filled" line and an email apply link. Then close it. 12. **Add a livestream** with date, time, length; mark one *unlisted*; show a list on a page. 13. **Put a form on a page**, and **change who gets emailed** when it's submitted. 14. **Read and export form entries** to a spreadsheet. 15. **Set a page's SEO title, description and social image.** ### B. Page building — the hero/blocks surface (where most confusion lives) 16. **Put a single photo hero on a page**, then **fix the crop** so a face isn't cut off. 17. **Make a hero shorter**, then **turn the hero off** entirely. 18. **Use a YouTube video as a hero.** *(Start from search — this is the exact journey rian found confusing: landing mid-guide without knowing Hero type must be set first.)* 19. **Add a footer image** to a page, and notice what happens when there isn't one. 20. **Change the big H1 title** without renaming the page. 21. **Build a page section** using at least six different **Brentwood** blocks — e.g. Images, Image Gallery, Video Text, FAQ Accordion, Testimonial, Table Link, Sub Page Link, Curve Divider. For each: could you tell *from the guide alone* what it's for and how to configure it? 22. **Add a Brentwood block you've never heard of** by name only (e.g. "Interlinking") — does the guide tell you what it does before you insert it? 23. **Create a landing page**, build content on it, and find its web address to share. ### C. Structure & maintenance (less frequent, higher anxiety) 24. **Edit the Timetable**: change a category panel's heading and text, swap its background photos, and edit the academic block rotation (days/periods/letters) and a block colour. 25. **Change a link in a mega menu**, and **add a new link** to one. 26. **Change the sub-navigation strip** on a section page. 27. **Add a redirect** for a page you renamed, and **find broken links** people are hitting. 28. **Add a course** with AP/Elective flags and a credit, put it in a subject and grade, and show a filtered course table on a page. 29. **Add a Brentwood 100 item** as each of the three tile styles, with extra gallery photos. ### D. People & access 30. **Add a new user** and choose the right role — *decide from the guide alone* which role a new Marketing hire should get vs a department content owner vs a teacher. 31. **Promote someone** from Author to Editor. 32. **Try to create an Administrator** as a non-admin. *(You should be blocked — does the guide explain why, so it reads as deliberate rather than broken?)* 33. **Remove someone's access** without deleting their content. 34. **Link a teacher to their staff profile**, then (as that teacher, if you can) **edit that profile from `/my-profile`** and sign out. 35. **Sign in with Google**, and see what happens with a non-Brentwood account. ### E. Deliberate gap-hunting — things a school does that we may not have documented Don't assume these are covered. If there's no guide, that's a **gap** finding, and that's valuable. 36. **Schedule** a post or page to publish later. 37. **Undo a mistake** — restore an earlier version of a page (revisions). 38. **Duplicate** an existing page to start a new one. 39. **Upload a PDF** (a newsletter, a policy) and link to it from a page. 40. **Add alt text** to an image for accessibility. 41. **Replace a photo everywhere it's used** (media library behaviour). 42. **Seasonal jobs:** refresh the faculty list after summer hiring; update the timetable for a new school year; swap the homepage hero for a new campaign. 43. **Add a whole new section page** with sub-nav and get it into the main menu. 44. **Embed a YouTube video inside a blog post** (not as a hero). 45. **Find out what a block does after someone else used it** on a page you inherited. 46. **What do I do if I break something?** — is there any guidance on safety nets (drafts, preview, revisions) anywhere a worried person would find it? --- ## Specific things worth probing hard These are known-subtle. Test whether the guides actually land them: - **Byline vs account** (task 2) — two different "authors" on a blog post. - **Hero type must be chosen before its settings appear** (task 18) — the fields are hidden until then, which reads as "the guide is wrong" if you land mid-page. - **Careers postings have no page of their own** — they only appear via the Careers block. - **Brentwood 100 tiles shuffle on every visit**, and the badge number is *not* an ordering control. - **Timetable rotation** — each period row needs exactly as many block letters as there are day columns. - **Landing pages** live outside the normal Pages tree and their hero defaults to *off*. - **Staff ordering** comes from the *Last Name* field, not the post title. - **Editors can manage users but cannot create Administrators** — deliberate, not a bug. - **Screenshots**: do they match what's actually on screen? Flag any that are stale, cropped confusingly, or show a panel that isn't where the guide says it is. --- ## Also worth reporting - **Guides that don't exist but should** — from your gap-hunting in section E. - **Guides that are too long or too short** for what they cover. - **Wording that assumes prior knowledge** (jargon, WordPress terms used without explanation). - **Anywhere a guide tells you to ask someone else** for something you could reasonably do yourself — the guides are meant to make staff self-sufficient. - **Anything a school would want that this site can't do at all** — worth knowing before launch.