Review catch, and a bad one: the previous commit anchored its insertion on `padding: 0.5rem 0.75rem;` and closed .sectionNav there. Everything that followed in the rule — margin-bottom, box-shadow, display: flex, align-items, gap — was orphaned into .sectionNavSheetOpen, which is only applied while the mobile jump sheet is open. So the sticky nav lost its flex layout, spacing and shadow in the closed state, which is virtually every page view on every school detail page. A site-wide regression introduced by a fix for one mobile menu. Redone by anchoring on the complete rule, closing brace included, so nothing can be orphaned. .sectionNav is now byte-identical to main and the diff is purely additive; .sectionNavSheetOpen carries the z-index and nothing else. The staging experiment that validated this fix set nav.style.zIndex = '1100' with every other declaration intact, so it was always testing this version rather than the broken one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
SchoolCompare
SchoolCompare compares schools across England: primary (KS2), secondary (KS4), all-through and post-16 provision, with coverage depending on the source dataset. It provides school search, postcode maps, comparisons, rankings, place pages, Ofsted information, admissions and destination measures. Editorial content lives in a Payload CMS blog.
Start here
- Architecture and data flow
- Development and validation
- Deployment and promotion
- Legacy and unused-code inventory
- Frontend conventions
- CMS publishing
Repository map
| Path | Responsibility |
|---|---|
backend/ |
FastAPI routes, cached school data, read-only SQLAlchemy mappings, feature flags |
nextjs-app/ |
Next.js App Router, React UI, Payload CMS, frontend tests |
pipeline/plugins/extractors/ |
Custom Singer taps for GIAS, EES, Ofsted and other datasets |
pipeline/transform/ |
dbt staging/intermediate models, marts, seeds and data tests |
pipeline/dags/ |
Airflow extraction, transformation and publication workflows |
pipeline/scripts/ |
Search indexing, code generation and operational diagnostics |
e2e/ |
Playwright journeys against a running environment |
.gitea/workflows/ |
PR checks, staging deployment and manual production promotion |
scripts/ |
CI review tooling and historical data utilities; see the legacy inventory |
docs/superpowers/, mockups/ |
Design history and prototypes, not application entry points |
Runtime
The public site is Next.js, not the FastAPI root page. Browser /api/*
requests pass through a Next.js route handler to FastAPI. Server-rendered pages
call FastAPI directly using FASTAPI_URL, including its /api suffix.
PostgreSQL/PostGIS stores school data. Meltano/Singer extracts source data;
dbt builds marts.*; FastAPI reads those tables. Typesense serves text search
and autocomplete. Payload runs inside Next.js and owns a separate payload
database schema and uploaded media.
There is no automatic CSV import or sample dataset on startup. A working school-data environment needs populated marts from the pipeline or an approved database snapshot. See development before choosing a setup.
Validation
cd nextjs-app
npm ci
npm run typecheck
npm test -- --runInBand
Backend checks, pipeline validation, runtime versions and E2E requirements are
listed in DEVELOPMENT.md. No npm run lint script is
currently defined.
Deployment
Work on a feature branch and open a PR. Merging to main builds images and
deploys staging. Production promotion is a separate, human-triggered Gitea
workflow. Use DEPLOY.md and the Portainer compose files as the
operational references. The generic compose examples still reference :latest,
which the current release workflow does not publish.