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ParishCRM

Help & What's New

Two small, low-friction in-app reference pages: a static Help page explaining the basics, and a What’s New release-notes history. Neither has a database-backed workflow — both are plain content pages. See Feedback-Widget for how staff report a problem instead of asking for help, and Membership-Applications for the membership-specific items the Help page points at.

Using it

Section titled “Using it”

Help

Section titled “Help”
  1. Open Help in the sidebar (/help) — available to every authenticated role.
  2. The page adapts to what the signed-in user can actually do:
    • Everyone sees Login & password (how the one-time email code works, “remember this device” for 14 days, “Forgot password”, and where to manage trusted devices/sign-outs) and Feedback & bug reports (how to use the Feedback button and where to check status).
    • Anyone with edit access (ADMIN/PASTOR/OFFICE_ADMIN) additionally sees People & Families (adding a family/members, editing, sending a self-update link) and the “create events” line under Events.
    • Anyone who can view accounting (ADMIN/PASTOR/AUDITOR/OFFICE_ADMIN) additionally sees an Accounting section pointing at the Accounting area.
    • VIEWER and EVENT_ORGANISER see only the always-visible sections.
  3. There are no interactive controls on this page — it’s pure reference text with no forms or actions.

What’s New

Section titled “What’s New”
  1. Open What’s New in the sidebar (/whats-new), or click the “See all updates” link at the bottom of a home-page footer widget that already shows the current release’s highlights inline.
  2. The page lists every released version, newest first, each with its release date and a short bullet list of plain-English, user-facing highlights (what changed for staff, not internal engineering detail).
  3. Available to every authenticated role — no role gating, since it’s product news with nothing sensitive in it.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”
  • Help page: src/app/(dashboard)/help/page.tsx — a server component that reads the session role once and conditionally renders sections using the same role helpers used throughout the app (canEdit, canViewAccounting from src/lib/roleGuard.ts). No database reads, no client interactivity.
  • What’s New data: src/lib/whatsNew.ts exports a single hand-maintained array (WHATS_NEW) of { version, date, highlights[] } entries, newest first — this is the one source of truth for both the /whats-new page and the home-page footer widget. A helper (findEntry) looks up the entry matching the currently-running build’s version (from the NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_VERSION build-time env var) so the footer widget can show just that release’s highlights; it degrades gracefully to a link-only footer if the running version has no matching entry (e.g. a build between tagged releases). A unit test fails on the release PR until the top entry matches the new package.json version, so every release ships with an entry.
  • Content discipline: entries are meant to describe user-facing behavior changes only — internal refactors, dependency bumps, and security-fix specifics are deliberately left out of this list (they belong in the project’s engineering changelog instead), so the page stays readable as a plain product-history log for non-technical staff.

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”

Neither page has runtime configuration. The version shown by the footer widget and used to select the matching WHATS_NEW entry comes from the NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_VERSION build-time variable, set automatically by the CI/CD pipeline from the release git tag — it is not something an admin edits at runtime.