school_compare/nextjs-app/docs/PUBLISHING.md

Publishing to the blog

The blog is Payload CMS, running inside the Next.js app. There is no separate service and no second deploy. Writing a post is done in the browser and takes effect on the live site within seconds.

Signing in

https://www.schoolcompare.co.uk/admin, one account, no registration. If you need the account seeded on a fresh environment, run against the container:

npx payload create-first-user

Staging has its own admin panel, its own database and its own credentials at https://stx.schoolcompare.co.uk/admin. Never reuse production's secret or password there.

Writing a post

Posts → Create New. The fields:

Field	Notes
Title	The <h1> and the browser tab.
Slug	The URL segment, in the sidebar. Never change it after publishing. It is the canonical URL, and changing it breaks every existing link and discards the page's accumulated search signal.
Published at	The date shown on the post and in the feed.
Excerpt	Max 200 characters. Shown on the index and used as the meta description, so write it as a standalone sentence rather than a teaser.
Hero image	Optional. Becomes the social share image; without one, the site's generated card is used.
Content	Rich text. / inserts a block.

Save as draft while you're working; drafts are not public. Publish when it's ready.

The callout block

One custom block, Callout, with two tones:

• Caveat: what a number does not show. This is the one that matters. It is how a post states a limitation in context rather than burying it in a closing paragraph.
• Note: a useful aside.

Images

Every image requires alt text; the editor will not let you save without it. Uploads go to a Docker volume on the host, which is backed up separately from Postgres. An image is not reproducible from the pipeline the way school data is.

How publishing reaches the live site

• /blog, /blog/rss.xml and /content-sitemap.xml are rendered per request, so a new post appears immediately.
• /blog/[slug] is cached after its first request. Publishing or editing fires a revalidatePath from the collection's afterChange hook, which drops that cached copy, so edits appear immediately too.

If a change doesn't show, it is far more likely the post is still a draft than that the cache is stale.

House style

These rules are why the blog exists. A post that ignores them makes the site read more machine-generated, not less.

• First person singular. "I built", "I found", never "we provide".
• Concrete over general. "When we were looking at schools in Wandsworth" beats any amount of stated warmth.
• State limits before someone else finds them. Every post that presents a metric says what it does not show. This is the single strongest signal that a human wrote it: generated content does not volunteer its own weaknesses.
• No mission statements, no "passionate about", no invented team. There is one person here.
• No em dashes. They are one of the clearest tells of machine-written prose, which is the whole problem this blog exists to fix. A full stop, a colon, a semicolon or a pair of commas does the job and reads as though a person chose it.
• Short sentences.
• Never publish a surname, an employer, or a child's name. The site's author is "Tudor". See /about.
• Never invent a figure, even illustratively. On a site whose whole proposition is official data, a made-up number attached to a real school is the one thing it cannot do, and no illustrative intent survives being screenshotted.