Set up an Intranet/Private department theme

In SchoolStatus, currently, private departments (intranets) rely on a dedicated Outer template to be managed independently from the main site theme. Who normally sets up these departments and configures the theme?

Designer

During onboarding, a designer will stage theme concepts to show a new customer how their site theme is going to look. The designer provides concepts for Home, Secondary and Style Guide. At the same time, the designer will create an Intranet private department that uses its own outer layout. An additional outer layout is required since the links in the header will be hard-coded to any public-side links. The template should be able to be changed without affecting the live/public site.

Support Agent (or a Project Manager during the onboarding process)

Very often, a support request may come through from a customer asking SchoolStatus to set up a private department for a select set of users to gain access to. Common reasons include sharing parent-only documents, contact lists, or other private or sensitive information that should not be public, but made accessible to anyone with a login. Older sites may not yet have a Private Intranet set up.

For sites that do not yet have an Intranet department set up, here is the process:

Steps:

1. Go to Theme & Layouts and create a new Outer temple. Name it Intranet Outer and then save.
2. Now, clone in the Outer layout of the main site so that look and feel is consistent by clicking the clone icon and selecting the proper template.
3. You can now edit the theme independently from the main Default Outer template setup for the public site.
4. Click "Intranets" in the left navigation. Click on View Departments under the Intranet site, then click the menu up at the top. Edit Theme and set it to the Default template to use.
5. Click the menu at the top again, and click Edit Department, flip to the Theme tab, and select the Intranet Outer theme as the default.
6. All links to the public site must be absolute. That means, to link to the home page, you have to use the full (absolute) link to the logo file. Ex; http://www.domain.org/files/theme/images/logo.png - Be sure to also update the mobile logo by enlarging the browser zoom to kick the theme into the mobile view. Then, also update that logo version to the absolute URL.
7. Update all the primary navigation links to use full/absolute paths too. So, the About link might link to http://www.domain.org/about
8. We disable any menus by default. We'll show the customer how to add and manage these later when it is time.

Intranets use the SchoolStatus SSL so that customers do not have to purchase their own. As a result, the domain is different from your public site domain. Because of this, managing a Private Intranet site is just like managing another website. So, links out to your site must be treated just like a link to another website... using the full/absolute URL.

Contact support if you have any questions or need assistance setting up a Private intranet for your organization.