Public Website

SeminaryERP ships a complete public, unregistered-visitor website — your marketing site — generated from the same data you already manage in Desk. Visitors browse your programs, meet your faculty, read what you believe, and apply, all without logging in.

Overview

The website is not a separate site you build and keep in sync. Its pages are generated from your existing records (Programs, Academic Units, the Doctrinal Statement) plus a handful of staff-editable pages. Change a program in Desk and its public page updates automatically.

It is built on Frappe's native website, so every page is server-rendered (fast and search-engine friendly), lives under your own domain, and shares one navigation bar, footer, and color scheme.

The authenticated student/faculty portal and the Desk are completely separate — nothing here affects them.

The pages

Page	URL	Content comes from
Home	/	The Home Page Hero on Website Branding
Our Programs	/programs	Published Programs, grouped by Program Level
Program detail	/<program-slug>	The Program record (blurb, description, image, apply CTA)
Who We Are / Our Team	/our-team	Published Academic Units and their faculty rosters
Unit detail	/team/<unit-slug>	A single Academic Unit's roster
What We Believe	/what-we-believe	The Doctrinal Statement marked for the website
Our History / Privacy / Contact	/our-history, /privacy, /contact	Editable Web Page documents
Apply	the application form	The Student Applicant web form (reached from a program's Apply button)
Application received	/applicant-payment	Post-application thank-you + fee payment

All of these share your branded navigation bar and footer — including the application form and the thank-you page.

Branding

Open Website Branding (search for it in Desk) to control how the whole public site looks. Changes take effect on the next page load — no developer or deploy needed.

• Colour Scheme — Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Accent, plus a Background and Text colour. Primary drives the navigation bar, links, and headings; Secondary/Tertiary/Accent are used for buttons and call-to-action highlights.
• Typography — choose a Heading Font and Body Font from the bundled set. Fonts are self-hosted, so pages load fast and no data is sent to external font services.
• Website Logo and Favicon — the logo shown in the navigation bar (use a transparent PNG/SVG, ~40px tall) and the browser-tab icon.
• Social Links — add a row per account (Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Telegram, WhatsApp, or Email). They appear as icons in the footer.
• Home Page Hero — the headline, subtext, background image, and button (label + link) shown at the top of the Home page.
• Display Options — an optional override for the programs menu label, and a toggle to show salutations (Dr, Prof, Rev…) on the team roster.

Note: a dark logo on a dark Primary colour can be hard to see in the navigation bar. Pick a logo that reads well on your chosen Primary colour.

Navigation and footer

The menu and footer are configured in Website Settings (the same place Frappe keeps site-wide website options):

• Top Bar Items — the navigation links. For a simple link, fill in the Label and URL. To group footer links into a titled column, add a parent row (Label only) and child rows whose Parent Label matches it.
• Footer Items — footer links, grouped or flat the same way.
• Address and Copyright — shown at the bottom of every page.
• Home Page — set to home so that / shows your marketing Home page.

The navigation bar and footer templates are pre-selected for you (Seminary Navbar / Seminary Footer); you normally don't need to touch them.

Publishing content

Nothing is public until you publish it. Each kind of content has its own switch:

To publish…	Set…	On…
A program (and its detail page)	Published	the Program
An academic unit on Our Team	Publish on Web	the Academic Unit
Your doctrinal statement	Use in the website	the Doctrinal Statement (then submit it)
A prose page	Published	the Web Page

There is no single global on/off switch: to take the whole site down you would unpublish the content and point the Home Page elsewhere.

Our Programs

Published programs are shown as cards, grouped by Program Level (for example Master's, Bachelor's, Certificate). Control the order the level sections appear by setting Web Order on each Program Level (lowest first). Within a level, programs follow their existing Order in Programs and Degrees.

The page heading is automatic: with one published program it reads Our Program, with several it reads Our Programs. Override it with Programs Menu Label Override on Website Branding if you prefer different wording.

Each card links to the program's detail page, which shows the blurb, description, requirements, enrollment windows, and an Apply button. See Programs for how to configure those fields and the application flow.

Our Team

The Our Team page lists every Academic Unit marked Publish on Web. Each unit's Web Order decides how it appears:

• Web Order = 0 — the unit's roster is shown inline on the page. Inline units appear first (good for a leadership group).
• Web Order greater than 0 — the unit shows as a card that links to its own page, in the order you set.

Faculty cards

Each member is shown with a photo, name, role, and a short bio. The information is pulled from the person's records:

• Photo — the Instructor's profile image, or the Person's image.
• Role — the person's Position / Title if set (for example Board Member, President); otherwise it is derived automatically (Chair, then their capability, then Faculty or Member). Setting a Position is the way to label non-instructors such as board members.
• Short bio — the person's Public Mini-Bio; for instructors, the Instructor's shorter bio is used when that is blank.
• Salutation — shown before the name when Show Salutations on Team Roster is on.

Ordering members within a unit

To place people in a deliberate order (President, Vice-President, …), set Web Order on each Academic Unit Membership row (1 first, 2 next, and so on). Members left at 0 fall back to chair-first, then alphabetical, below the ordered ones.

Hiding someone

Tick Block from Public Website on a Person to keep them off public rosters (useful for staff in security-sensitive or restricted-access contexts). It does not affect their Desk or portal access.

See Academic Units & Faculty for how units and memberships are set up.

Note: faculty photos must be public images so visitors (who aren't logged in) can load them. A private attachment will not display on the public site.

What We Believe

This page renders the Doctrinal Statement that has Use in the website ticked and is submitted. If more than one qualifies, the active one is shown, then the most recently updated. Edit the statement in Desk and the page updates.

History, Privacy, and Contact

These are ordinary Web Page documents, seeded with starter text the first time the app runs. Edit them in Desk under Website → Web Page — no developer needed. Use them for your story, your privacy policy, and your contact details (add your address, phone, and a mailto: email link on the Contact page).

Search engines and sharing

Because the site is server-rendered, it is fully crawlable, and several SEO basics are handled for you:

• A sitemap is generated automatically at /sitemap.xml.
• robots.txt can be edited in Website Settings.
• Every page sets its title, a meta description, and Open Graph / Twitter card tags so links shared on social media show a proper title, description, and image (drawn from the page's hero or program image).

For page-specific tweaks without code, you can add a Website Route Meta record for any route to override its tags.