A parent choosing a primary and a secondary school at once hit the old
cap of five total. The basket now holds up to five primary and five
secondary schools (ten in all), matching the compare page's phase tabs.
Schools that could land in either tab (all-through, special schools with
phase "Not applicable", unknown phase) count against both groups, so no
tab ever exceeds the five-slot chart palette and point styles.
- lib/compareLogic: compareGroups, fullGroupFor, fitToGroupLimits
- search modal disables only the full group and says which one
- rankings rows carry the phase of the tab they are ranked under
- shared ?urns= links are trimmed per group
- copy: compare metadata, homepage value prop, How it works card now
name primary and secondary schools (also better for search intent)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Staging health polling asked only whether something answered HTTP 200 at
the base URL. It could not tell the new deployment from the old one, so
journeys could pass against the previous release, and concurrent merges
could move the staging tags underneath a run in flight.
Each staging run now mints a build ID and stamps all three images with
the commit and that ID, as labels and — for frontend and backend — as a
build-time JSON file that environment overrides cannot rewrite.
/release.json reports both identities uncached, and scripts/ci/release.py
polls for the expected pair before and after the journeys. Only then are
the captured build digests tagged verified-<sha>.
Promotion resolves those verified tags to immutable digests, revalidates
their labels, and refuses a mixed or incomplete set before any :prod tag
moves. The whole staging workflow shares one concurrency group with
cancellation disabled, so releases serialise.
The scripts are stdlib-only and unit-tested against mocked registry and
HTTP behaviour; PR checks now run the pipeline and CI suites too. The
runbook records what this cannot prove locally, and that the first
rollout needs a commit built by this workflow.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The home page caught every fetch failure and rendered its empty state,
so a backend outage looked like a site with no schools in it. School
pages turned any error into notFound(), which told visitors — and
crawlers — that a real school had ceased to exist. Place fetches did the
same by returning [] and null. Failures now reach a retryable error
boundary; only a genuine 404 still calls notFound().
"Load more" and the map fetch resolved against whatever state existed
when they returned, so results from an abandoned search appended
themselves to the new ones. Each fetch now carries an AbortController
and checks that its search scope is still current before touching state.
The map only records its cache key on success, so a failed load retries
instead of pinning the stale marker set.
Jest ignored .next/, whose build output otherwise shadowed real suites.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The staging E2E gate's one failure. Every link to the site pasted into
a chat has been rendering bare.
Staging serves og:title, og:description, og:url, og:site_name, og:type
and twitter:card, and no og:image at all. So metadata from the layout
reaches the page; only the file convention does not.
app/opengraph-image.tsx does work — _not-found, which lives in the app
root segment, carries an og:image from it in the build output. It does
not reach the site's pages, which live in the (frontend) route group
whose own layout.tsx is the root layout. The icon conventions are not
affected: /icon.png and /apple-icon.png are both linked correctly on
the same page, verified against staging. The asymmetry is the whole
bug, and it arrived with the route-group split that Payload required.
The file stays at the app root. Moving metadata files into a route
group is what drops /robots.txt and hashes /icon.png, which CLAUDE.md
records and which this must not undo — the build still emits all four
of /robots.txt, /icon.png, /apple-icon.png and /opengraph-image. The
root layout points at the route instead, and metadataBase makes it
absolute, which the journey needs since it calls new URL() on the value.
twitter.images is set for the same reason: the card is declared
summary_large_image, and claiming a large-image card while supplying no
image is worse than claiming a summary card.
Checked before fixing that og:image was the only broken assertion in
that journey: the test aborts at line 911, so its apple-touch-icon and
maskable-icon assertions had never run. All four of those assets return
200 image/png from staging, so this does not simply move the failure
further down the test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DXnXQKnPpZBBP61fBQiFkq
Both features ship dark. Neither is reachable in an environment where
its flag is off, and every flag in this system starts off, so a deploy
of this commit makes both disappear until someone turns them on
deliberately.
Two independent flags rather than one, which makes blog-on-about-off a
reachable state. That state is the whole reason the change is larger
than four notFound() calls: the blog leans on the About page for its
author identity. The Person entity is anchored at /about#tudor, and
that URL 404s while about_page is dark, so a post published in that
state would claim an author resolving to nothing. Worse than having no
named author. Both bylines fall back to unlinked text and the
BlogPosting attributes to the publisher instead, so every combination
of the two flags renders something correct.
Gated: /about, /blog, /blog/[slug], the RSS feed, both footer links,
and the matching content-sitemap entries. A sitemap must never
advertise a URL that 404s. With both dark it emits a valid empty
urlset rather than a 404, because robots.txt names it unconditionally.
Not gated: /admin. Posts have to be writable before the blog is worth
switching on, so flagging the panel would make the flag unflippable.
getFlags takes a revalidate rather than always using the 300s
constant. Reading a flag pins the calling route to the lowest
revalidate among its fetches, and the footer links live in the root
layout, so a naive gate there would have dropped every school and
place page from a weekly cache to a 5-minute one. The layout passes
604800, the floor those routes already declare, and the build confirms
all four SSG route families still prerender. The cost is one-way
latency: pages follow a flip in minutes, footer links within a week.
The e2e journeys follow the existing paired shape from the
admission_distance flag: a lit journey and a dark one for each flag,
reading state from whether /about and /blog respond rather than from
/api/flags, which another journey asserts is not publicly reachable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DXnXQKnPpZBBP61fBQiFkq
The rendering split is dictated by CI building with no database.
/blog, /blog/rss.xml and /content-sitemap.xml have no dynamic params, so
Next prerenders them at build time and the build fails on a missing
Payload secret — caught here, not on staging. They are force-dynamic
instead: one indexed query against Postgres on the same Docker network,
and a newly published post appears immediately rather than waiting on a
revalidation. /blog/[slug] keeps ISR, because with no
generateStaticParams there is nothing to prerender; it is generated on
first request and cached, which is exactly what the collection's
afterChange hook exists to invalidate.
RichText takes `converters`, not `blocks`, in Payload 3.88, and the
default converters must be spread or every paragraph and heading loses
its renderer and the body comes out empty.
BlogPosting references the Person and Organization by @id rather than
repeating them, so every post and the About page resolve to one author
entity instead of declaring several people with the same name.
/sitemap.xml is proxied from FastAPI, which knows nothing about Payload,
so the Next-owned URLs get their own sitemap and robots.txt lists both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
The site had no author, no statement of why it exists and nobody
accountable for its numbers, which is most of why it reads as machine
generated.
The page states plainly that its author is not an education expert. The
credibility claim is lived experience — a parent going through primary
admissions — plus stated provenance for every figure, which is true and
cannot be undermined by someone noticing there is no teaching
qualification behind it. First name only: the Person JSON-LD carries no
familyName, worksFor or affiliation, and a test asserts it stays that
way.
The footer gains a fourth column, with a tablet breakpoint so four
columns pair up rather than crushing before the 768px collapse. The nav
is deliberately untouched — its mobile tab bar already carries four
items.
public/brand/tudor.jpg is NOT in this commit. The page references it and
will show a broken image until the photograph is supplied; a stock
portrait would defeat the entire point of the work.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
X-Robots-Tag rather than the robots.txt Disallow alone, for the same
reason the staging rule uses one: a Disallow blocks crawling, not
indexing, so a URL found from an external link can be indexed without
ever being fetched — and blocking the crawl means the noindex is never
seen. Both mechanisms are applied to /admin and /cms-api.
The existing CSP is frame-ancestors only, which restricts who may embed
the site rather than what a page may load, so it cannot break the panel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
Payload's admin panel ships its own root layout rendering html/body.
Next allows multiple root layouts only when no app/layout.tsx exists, so
the site's routes move into their own group. Route groups are invisible
to routing: every public URL is unchanged, verified against the build's
route table.
The metadata file conventions deliberately stay at the app/ root. Moving
them into the group renamed /icon.png to /icon-4usi79.png (likewise
apple-icon and opengraph-image) and dropped /robots.txt altogether,
which would have broken the /icon.png cache-control rule, the
outputFileTracingIncludes entry for the share card, and robots.txt.
darkThemeSafety reads app/globals.css off disk rather than importing it,
so it needed its own path fix — a grep for import specifiers misses it,
and it fails as an unrunnable suite rather than a failed assertion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
withPayload() is ESM-only, so next.config.js has to become .mjs. That
file also carries the rule that keeps staging out of Google's index, so
the conversion goes in on its own, behind a test that asserts the rule
survived — along with the standalone output, the opengraph-image font
tracing and the analytics frame-ancestors CSP.
Jest resolves the .mjs config without extra configuration, so
jest.config.js is untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017YmbBhr8s7GusjDE12hrZM
Every place page shipped as 'Schools in Brentwood - Compare 27 Schools |
schoolcompare | schoolcompare'. The root layout's title template appends
'| schoolcompare' to any plain-string title, and all four place routes already
carried the brand. W8 opted the other routes out with an absolute title; the
place routes were written afterwards and did not inherit the lesson.
~2,600 titles affected, and the repetition pushed them past Google's
truncation point, so the doubled brand displaced real words in the result.
An e2e journey now asserts no title repeats the brand, across the static
routes and a place page, so this cannot come back on a route added later.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Every generateStaticParams is gated behind PRERENDER_PLACES and wrapped in the
same try/catch the school route uses. The plan claimed authority pages were
'few enough to always prebuild' — but few enough still means the API must be
reachable at build time, and in CI it is not: the build failed with
ECONNREFUSED rather than degrading to ISR.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
The baseline says these pages already rank and are not clicked. 'compare
school performance' sits at position 6.1 with 0.43% CTR; 'compare schools' at
7.2 with 0.87%. The brand query 'school compare' draws 9.16% from the same
neighbourhood of the same results page, which rules out a ranking explanation
— when the snippet gives a reason to click, it gets clicked.
These SERPs are owned by the DfE's own 'Compare school performance' service.
The old title put a lowercase brand nobody searches for in the most valuable
pixels, then a near-paraphrase of that service's name. Beside the government's
own result it read as a lookalike.
Intent in the title, differentiator in the description. Titles now match what
people type, and the descriptions carry the one fact gov.uk does not publish:
how close you had to live to get a place.
/compare deliberately takes the tool phrasing rather than the homepage's, so
the two pages stop competing for one phrase. The root layout's default and
Open Graph copy were saying something different again; they now agree.
No hard school counts in any of it. The corpus moves with every data refresh
and this repo has already shipped one copy bug of that kind.
Tests guard the mechanics — SERP length, intent keyword, the differentiator,
no brand-first title — and leave the wording free to iterate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
25,193 schools make ~317 million pairs. The bare page stays indexable as the
landing page for the head term; the parameter space goes noindex, follow so
its outbound links still count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
The homepage read eleven search params and declared no canonical, so every
filter combination was a crawlable near-duplicate of the page we most want to
rank. Rankings and admissions declared none either.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
